When Love Doesn't Bring Certainty: Saying Goodbye to Pipes

As a therapist, I spend a lot of time with people who are trying to make decisions and wishing for absolute certainty. We often imagine there will be one moment when the answer becomes obvious: that we'll know when it's time to leave a relationship, end a caregiving role, or say goodbye to someone we love. In my experience, that's not how it happens.

This week I had to make that kind of decision for one of my goats.

Today we had to let Pipes go.

Pipes was my second goat. I got him as a weanling the same day my now 12-year-old doe, Elsa, arrived. Pipes was a cheap, cute Nubian wether who had been a child’s 4-H show goat. I didn’t know much of anything about goats when I picked him up, especially how deeply attached they are to their families. Pipes screamed and bawled the whole way home, so much so that I made several wrong turns. It took an hour to get to him and an hour and forty five minutes to get home.

He settled almost immediately when he saw Elsa. At first, I kept them in separate pens, but it quickly became apparent they were perfectly happy together. Funnily enough, Elsa had been looking for a new home because she had trouble getting along with other goats.

That was the thing about Pipes. He got along. He loved his goat family and a few select people. He especially loved peppermints and Fig Newtons.

His final seven months were not my favorite.

After a harsh winter, he developed meningeal worm and a thiamine deficiency, temporarily losing the use of his hind legs and his eyesight. We moved him into a stall in our old barn so we could protect him from the weather and keep a closer eye on him. I first paired him with another one of our goats, Monkey Bread, who is incredibly gentle, but Pipes didn’t do well until I brought Elsa in. He perked right up, started eating better, and returned to his chatty self.

Unfortunately, the meningeal worm left him with lingering neuropathic pain in his belly, and he began biting at the spot until it became a wound that wouldn't heal.

In early May, I called the vet for the third (or maybe fourth) time about the wound and asked her to come out for a quality-of-life exam. We decided to keep trying because he didn’t seem ready to go. Pipes loved the daily Fig Newtons that hid his nine pills. His belly was still fragile, but it was healing.

Then, two weeks ago, something changed. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was tapering his medications. I'll never know for sure. The progress we'd worked so hard for started to unravel, and the weeks that followed became a constant, exhausting effort to keep him from declining further.

I made the decision last Thursday that it was time for him to rest.

Pipes was still eating, drinking, engaging with his herd. But he would often have moments of great discomfort. It is hard when there is this liminal space of suffering. They can still have moments of joy while living with a body that is in pain. Because of the holiday weekend, I was able to give him a few extra days filled with treats, gentle care, and time with his family. I think, no matter what, we often feel like there must be some secret answer or one more thing we could do. Sometimes there isn't.

What I do know is this: Pipes spent his final days in a big field with his family. He took his last breaths surrounded by his herd, with Andrew and me beside him. He didn't suffer.

And he had as many Fig Newtons as he wanted.

One of the hardest lessons grief teaches is that love doesn't always produce certainty. Sometimes we make the most compassionate decision we can with the information we have, and afterward we still wonder if there was something more we could have done. Grief is not something we can fix. I wish grief would resolve into an answer, a solution, but it never will.