When the Life You Built No Longer Fits: Pets, Grief, and Moving Forward

Podcast: The Pet Parent Hotline
Host: Amy Castro
Episode Type: Solo / Personal Reflection
Format: Raw episode with regular intro and outro
Episode Focus: Pets, grief, rescue, capacity, and moving forward when the life you built no longer fits

Episode Summary

In this raw, personal episode, Amy reflects on leaving the seven-acre Texas property she bought with her husband less than two years before he died of COVID. What once felt like a dream built around rescue, animals, space, and a future together eventually became more than she could continue carrying on her own.

This is not a pet travel checklist. It is a reflection on grief, responsibility, rescue, identity, and the hard decisions that come when a life that once made sense no longer fits. Amy also talks about bringing her own pets through this transition, why “less hard” is sometimes a better goal than perfect, and why responsible pet parenting includes being honest about the human at the center of the care plan.

Chapters

00:00 A Raw Episode During Moving Week
02:10 One Day From Closing and Leaving Texas
05:00 The Property, the Rescue, and the Life That Changed
10:30 When Purpose Becomes Pressure
15:40 Pets Come Through Our Life Changes With Us
19:45 Less Hard, Not Perfect
23:45 Capacity, Boundaries, and Moving Forward

Transcript

A Raw Episode During Moving Week

Amy Castro:
I'm going to warn you right up front that this episode is going to be a little bit different. I'm going to add my regular intro and outro music, but other than that, I'm planning to leave this one pretty raw. Not because I suddenly decided I'm too good to edit, but because I'm recording this on the floor of my bedroom with my microphone perched on top of my little green clean machine. Because of course there were last-minute pet stains to clean up before I roll out of here forever tomorrow.

So if this sounds a little less polished than usual, then that's intentional. Partly because I don't have time or the emotional bandwidth to overproduce it, and partly because I've been wondering whether maybe a little bit less polish on this show might actually be better sometimes. Maybe people don't always need the perfect edit, they just need the real thing. So we'll see.

You've reached the Pet Parent Hotline, your lifeline to practical solutions for your toughest pet parenting challenges. I'm your host, Amy Castro, and I'm here to help you cut through the noise and turn expert advice into step-by-step strategies so you can stop chasing your tail and start enjoying life with pets again.

One Day From Closing and Leaving Texas

By the time this episode comes out, I'll be one day away from closing on my house and leaving Texas in an RV with three dogs and three cats, which still sounds a little bit crazy every time I say it. I've said it to friends, I've said it to family, and I kind of can't believe it myself. And every time it comes out of my mouth, I have this little moment of who exactly thought this was a good idea? And then I remember it was me. I've got nobody to blame but myself. I'm the one who thought this was a good idea.

Or I guess I should say, I thought it was the best idea out of a bunch of complicated choices. So this is actually not even the episode I had planned for this week. I actually have two guest episodes recorded that I'm looking forward to sharing with you, and I have topics sitting there waiting for me. And if I was being strategic and organized, like I try to be, but don't always succeed in being, I'd probably be editing one of those and pretending this week is just a normal week. But for me, this week is not normal.

My house is mostly empty, my regular recording setup is packed up, and I'm surrounded by a laundry basket of last-minute items, a couple of extra shoes, and a suitcase of things that I haven't figured out where they're going to go and how I'm going to get them out of here. And really what I'm trying to do is figure out how to close one chapter of my life while also making sure that I know where all my pets' medicines and things are.

So instead of forcing a regular episode, I decided to sit down here on the floor and talk about what's actually happening. And this isn't going to be one of those polished, here are five things I learned from moving with pets kind of episodes, because I don't want this to be that. I've already done episodes on traveling with pets, and we did road tripping with cats, and we just did an episode on pets acting differently when things are changing. And I'll link all of those things in the show notes if that's what you might need right now.

But this episode is really more personal than that. It's about what happens when your life no longer fits and your pets are coming with you into whatever's happening next. I know I've mentioned it on the show a couple of times that I was having my place on the market, and we tried last year, had no luck whatsoever finding a buyer, but this year we got lucky, and tomorrow is closing day and move-out day.

The Property, the Rescue, and the Life That Changed

This move is not really just about selling a house. It's not even just about leaving Texas or driving over 1,900 miles. Those are kind of the logistical things, right? And logistics matter. I'm an organizer, I'm a planner, but they're not the heart of it.

The heart of it is that I'm leaving a seven-acre piece of property that my husband and I bought less than two years before he died of COVID. At that time, when we bought it, this place made a lot of sense. I had the rescue, we had animals, we had a lot of space, we had big plans. And this property felt like something that we were going to be building a life around. And for me, kind of a dream come true.

And then he died.

And I kept going with the help of my daughter. I don't know what else to say without making it sound either too overdramatic or too simple, because it was really both. He died, and the animals still needed care, and the rescue still had work to do, and the property still needed to be maintained, and there were bills to pay, and there's always something on a big piece of property like this that needs to be fixed or maintained.

Unfortunately, the day after a loss, the world doesn't suddenly politely stop and say, “Look, take all the time you need to figure out what your next steps are, or to even wrap your mind around what's just happened to you.” At least that didn't happen in my world. The dogs woke up in the morning and still needed to pee, and cats needed to be fed, and ringworm kittens needed to be medicated, and on and on and on.

Honestly, for a while, I think that kind of helped me a little bit. Maybe you felt this way too sometimes, where you're so busy taking care of the details that you don't have to deal with the other stuff. Having animals depending on you can be very grounding in a strange way. You might not know what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, but you know what you're going to be doing in the next 10 minutes when the dog needs to go for a walk. You might not be ready to make the big decisions that come with big life changes, but your litter boxes still need to be scooped.

I think that gives you a place to put your hands and your energy and your focus, and maybe keep your mind off some of the other details that are more scary, more uncertain, more depressing, possibly. Responsibility can keep you moving, and there are times when that can be a real gift.

When Purpose Becomes Pressure

There is another side of it too, because if you're not careful, the things that keep you moving can actually become the things that keep you stuck. Purpose can turn into pressure or unwanted responsibility. The commitments that you make, I know for me, kind of turned into my identity. And somewhere along the way, especially if you are an animal person, which I'm assuming you are, you can start believing that the amount you are willing to sacrifice is the measure of you as a person and a measure of how much you care.

I don't think if you'd asked me back at that time whether I would have admitted it, I probably would have argued with anybody who suggested it. As a matter of fact, I did. My doctor suggested, why don't you just shut down the rescue and stop doing this? But looking back, I can see that I kept carrying more than made sense because the work mattered. And it really did matter. Rescue matters, don't get me wrong, animals matter. But caring about something doesn't necessarily mean you can carry every piece of it forever. I think that's been a really hard lesson for me, and I don't think I'm the only animal person who struggles with it.

In rescue, there's always, always a reason to say yes. There's always an animal, there's always an emergency or a person that says they have no place else to turn. Then there's always this little voice that says, if I don't do it, what does that say about me? Or who's going to do it? If not me, who?

Sometimes that question saves an animal. I'm not dismissing that because I've lived it. But if you live inside that question for too long, it can become a trap. At some point, that “if I don't do it, who will?” needs to be balanced with, can I really keep doing this, or should I really keep doing this?

For me, these questions were really uncomfortable and I avoided them for a really long time. I may have told the story about how I came to the point of making the decision, but it was sitting at the edge of my pool in the middle of a hurricane where I just decided, I'm done. I've had enough. It's not that I didn't have these inklings before that hurricane came around. There were signs, and we did things to scale back. But in that moment, I kind of realized that the property itself and the rescue and the lifestyle that I had built was what no longer fit. It wasn't just, scale back the rescue and everything's still going to work.

Seven acres, when I bought it and when I first saw this place, sounded wonderful. And in a lot of ways it was. There have been a lot of beautiful things that have happened here. A lot of animals have been saved here. We've had everything from donkeys to ponies to horses to turtles to birds, and there are parts of this property that really hold some of the best memories of my rescue life. I don't want to imply that that doesn't matter, but a space like this is not just a space. Land, for anybody who's thinking about it, is not just pretty. You're not just going to be sitting on your porch with your glass of wine or your cup of coffee or whatever it might be and enjoying the scenery.

All of it has to be maintained and all of it has to be paid for. After my husband died, it became more than I wanted to be responsible for by myself. That sentence has taken a long time for me to say. It took me five years to finally admit that and come to that conclusion without feeling like I have to defend why I'm still doing it.

Because there's always that voice, whether it's in your own head or somebody else, that says, but look how lucky you are, look at all the good you've done, look at this beautiful space. And it's true, but there's another truth too, and it's this: I finally figured out that I don't want my whole life to be maintaining the place where my old life was supposed to be.

That's really what this move is about. It's finally allowing my life to change around the fact that my life really changed six years ago. I know that might sound obvious from the outside, but it wasn't obvious when I was living it. I think for those who have faced loss, whether it's pet loss or human loss or both or any other life change, you don't always immediately redesign everything. Oftentimes people advise you not to do that. Most of the time you just wake up the next day and do what needs to be done. Then you do it again and you do it again, and the next thing you know, six years have gone by, or five years have gone by.

That's kind of where I got. This property was built around a version of my life that no longer exists. I think I can still be grateful for it and still walk away from it. I can be proud of what happened here and still say, I'm done. I know I still love animals, but I don't necessarily need to be running a rescue. And I can miss my husband and still move forward. I don't think any of those things cancel each other out, even though they don't all kind of sit in a nice tidy little basket together.

Another thing I'd like to point out is the date. We close on this house and hit the road on June 22nd, which would have been my husband's birthday. I don't have a perfect meaning to attach to that. I know people sometimes like to turn dates into signs or meaningful messages or whatever it might be, and that might be what it is for somebody else. I'm just not a date person, and I don't know if I'm there yet. But it basically just feels a little more like another emotional sign or emotional tag, maybe, that a giant piece of my life is gone and over. It's sad and strange that it happened on that same date. But maybe it is a sign. Maybe it is a sign that the gift to me is to move forward with a new life, so I'm getting the birthday gift on his birthday.

So anyway, that's where I am. I'm sitting in a mostly empty house trying to process the fact that I'm leaving this place.

Pets Come Through Our Life Changes With Us

I think you might be wondering, maybe, why is this on a pet parenting podcast? But I think it belongs on a pet parenting podcast because even though it's not really a pet travel episode, although I do plan on recording while I'm on the road and hopefully putting something together, some lessons learned or some adventures from the road, the bottom line is our pets come through our life changes with us.

They don't know the finances or the grief or the closing date. They don't understand why the furniture's gone or why the house sounds and smells differently, or why their human is wandering around muttering to themselves or screaming about paperwork, or trying to find the scissors even though I have 5,000 pairs. That part has been hard, but not because I think pets need everything to stay the same forever. I don't. I think life changes, people move, families change, and whether it's a job change or money changes or health for you, there's no way to give pets a life where nothing ever shifts or changes.

But when you're the one creating the shift, even for good reasons, I understand how we all feel responsible for their confusion or their upset. I think I talked about this in the episode on change, where I noticed some of the changes that were occurring with my pets, from my poor blind cat running into things because things have been moved around, to animals having accidents that don't normally have accidents. But I try to remind myself, as I try to remind you in that episode, that they're not doing it to be difficult. They're responding to the same disruption that I am, and I'm the one that created it, but at least I understand it and they don't.

One lesson here, for me at least, is that when life is chaotic, I have to be careful not to turn my pet's reaction into one more thing to be mad about or upset about. That doesn't mean that I have to enjoy every moment. I'm not that good of a person. If somebody pukes in the RV, I'm not going to be whispering affirmations. I'm probably going to be cleaning it up and muttering under my breath things that I will not say on a recording. But I can still remember, and I do a pretty good job of this, of reminding myself that their stress is not directed toward me or an attack on me, and that they're not trying to make my life difficult. It's just their way of saying, this is a lot. And honestly, same.

Less Hard, Not Perfect

I said earlier, this is not going to be a travel checklist, and I mean that. If you want more practical travel information, I've got those previous episodes in the show notes. But there is a mindset shift that has been helping me a lot, and I think it applies far beyond this moving process. I'm trying to stop asking, how do I make this perfect? And just ask, how can I, or what would make this less hard? Because perfect's just not going to happen.

I'm not going to create the perfect move. My estimations of what would fit in the pod were already off, and I've had to leave some things behind because I refused to get a second pod, and it's too late. My pets are not going to behave perfectly. And yes, somebody is going to puke in the RV or pee or poop. One of the three Ps is going to happen, and I'm probably going to forget something. But I'm just focusing on less hard. That's what I'm aiming for.

So doing things like bringing their familiar beds, even if they're kind of gross and kind of stinky. I would love to dump those at the curb when I pull out and buy some new ones that don't smell like despair. I don't know how else to describe it. But I think for them, it might be comforting to have their own smells on their beds. So we will put up with it.

I have a boatload of medications that my vet gave me, and I sort of was feeling guilty about wanting to drug my pets. But I'm not going to pretend that they are going to be required to tough it out to show their mettle. If we need them, we're going to use them. I'm not going to feel guilty about that. But I think as pet parents, we need that permission more often. Not to be careless or irresponsible, or to ignore our pets' needs, of course, but to make decisions when we're tired where maybe good enough is good enough, or I'm going to use this aid or crutch or whatever somebody else might call it, because I need to get through this moment in time, this day in time, this week in time, whatever it might be.

I think what I'm trying to do right now is basically just make the best choice that I can, the most responsible choice, one step at a time. That's the way I'm planning this trip. I don't have the whole trip planned. I don't know where I'm stopping except the first night. But I'm going to judge each day's activities, how the pets respond, how I feel doing the drive, and then we will determine what tomorrow is going to look like.

Capacity, Boundaries, and Moving Forward

I think that brings me to my second lesson, which is really the one I probably needed to hear years ago, that your capacity matters. I know it sounds obvious, but animal people are terrible at living it like that is true. They'll agree with you, yes, it matters, but they won't do it themselves. We talk a lot about pet needs, what the pet needs, what the rescue needs, what stray animals need, et cetera. But the person doing the work matters too. And if the human falls apart, the animals are affected.

Whether it's rescue or whether it's you and your pet parenting household with your pet that might have special needs, or as a senior or whatever the case may be, if you are responsible for animals, it is important to look at your physical, emotional, and financial capacity as part of their care plan, whether you want to admit it or not.

I think that's where people get a little bit uncomfortable because we don't want to sound like we're being selfish. To be honest, I think some of us are a little proud of ourselves for the sacrifices that we make. Whether you're concerned about being judged or you want to feel good about yourself, it doesn't really matter. I think it's important to know that love is not the same thing as capacity. You can love deeply and still not have enough time or still not have enough money. Love matters, of course it does, but it doesn't make seven acres more manageable for one person or pay the bills or fix every fence.

I think that has been a huge part of the motivation in this move itself. I kind of had to stop living as if my value came from how much I was willing to carry and how much I was willing to power through. I don't say that lightly because in rescue, people will praise you for sacrificing yourself. I don't know how you do it. I could never do that. And sometimes that feels good to have that little pat on the back. But that praise can also become a trap that keeps you doing something for others so that you can continue to get that while you're hurting yourself.

I think that goes the same for pet parents. Sometimes you need to draw a line or create some boundaries around that. That's not failure, that's adjustment. And that is the whole purpose of this podcast, to create a life that works for you and your pets.

So basically that's what I'm doing. I've made a choice that I think is a good balance of what is going to create a better life for me. And I'm doing my best to create the better life for my pets along the way. I think I finally admitted that this chapter of my life did what it was supposed to do, and now it's done. I think it still hasn't really hit me that I'm leaving tomorrow. But I look around and I see where animals have recovered, and I also see my husband in this property and the version of me that believed that this was the dream that I was going to live out for the rest of my days.

It's not simple to leave things behind, even when it's the right thing to do. I think it's okay to grieve the things that you leave behind, even if you're the one that is choosing the change. And that's something I'm trying to let myself feel without turning it into a reason to question my decision. I think we need to realize that sad doesn't necessarily mean wrong. A decision can hurt, but still be the right thing.

If you're listening to this and you're in the middle of your own version of a life that no longer fits, maybe it's not a move or a rescue property or anything like my situation, I hope you hear this part. You're allowed to tell the truth. You're allowed to say, this mattered, and I need something different now. You're allowed to say, I love my pets and I need help. And you're allowed to say, I can't keep doing this the way I've been doing it.

So here's where I'm landing, at least today, while I sit here on my bedroom floor with my microphone balanced on the carpet cleaner. I can honor this place without staying here, and I can be grateful for my rescue work without continuing to do it or live the same life. And maybe that's the lesson, not how you move with your pets, five tips for doing it right, and not how to make the change easy, but how to recognize when the life that you're trying to maintain is no longer the life that you're meant to keep living.

Before I wrap up, I do want to say that if what you need right now is practical help with pet travel, cats in the car, or pets acting differently when something changes, go back and check out those earlier episodes that I'll link in the show notes. Responsible pet parenting is not about destroying yourself to prove that you care. Sometimes it's about making the hard changes so that you and your pets can have a life that actually works. I will talk to you on the other side.

Thanks for listening to the Pet Parent Hotline. If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself. Text a friend right now with a link and tell them, I've got a show that you need to hear. And ask them to let you know what they think. And remember, your pet's best life starts with you living yours. So be sure to take good care of yourself this week and your pets.