The Ones We Saved. The Ones We Still Carry.
I have counted them.
Eighty-four.
Eighty-four animals who came into our care and died, either while we were still fighting for them or after they had gone home to families who loved them.
I know the number because I keep the records. Anyone who knows me knows how much numbers matter to me. They help us understand our work, recognize patterns, ask better questions, and do better for the next animal who needs us.
But this number hurts to hold.
Because I remember the lives inside it.
I used to think the hardest part of rescue was the beginning. Saying yes to the fragile kitten. Taking in the animal whose chances were uncertain. Looking at a little life and knowing that getting it through the night would take everything we had.
And sometimes it did.
There were feedings every three hours, around the clock. There were animals hanging on by a thread, and all the work of trying to help them hold on. We watched them grow stronger. We learned their personalities. We got attached.
Then, if we were lucky, we got to do the thing we had been working toward all along: find their family.
There is something extraordinary about that moment. An animal we fought for meets someone who has been waiting for exactly that animal. Sometimes there are special needs. Sometimes there is a little quirk that makes the match even more meaningful. We get to see a family become more complete.
You would think that would be the part I carried home every night.
Lately, it isn't.
Because I have learned that the hardest part of rescue can happen long after we think we have reached the happy ending.
An adoption does not end our caring. We follow up. We welcome updates. We want to know how they are doing, who they have become, and what kind of life they are living.
We cared about their whole life from the moment we said yes.
And sometimes the update breaks our hearts.
An animal slips out the front door and is hit by a car. An illness appears suddenly. A family who thought they had years ahead of them loses someone they had only just begun to know.
The animal was safe. The animal was loved. Everything seemed to be going right.
Then the news comes.
And somewhere, a rescuer remembers the little life that once depended on their hands.
I know the stories of the animals who have come through our care. I know where they came from, what they survived, and the odds they beat. I remember the ones who returned to us after losing homes through no fault of their own. We found them another family. We tried again.
There is so much hope in this work.
That is part of what makes the losses so heavy.
Lately, they have been coming too close together.
I lost Chopper, my own best friend. I learned that a kitten I had raised and held close to my heart died suddenly at only five months old, after going to an adoptive home. We lost Penny before she ever had the chance to find her family.
And I think about another kitten, adopted a year or two ago, who became a little girl's precious Christmas gift—and then died suddenly.
I think about that child.
I think about the families who fell in love with these animals the way we did. Families who made room for them, built routines around them, and expected to grow old with them.
I may have had an animal for only a few weeks, and still their absence can leave me aching. What must it feel like for the family who had them for months? For a year? For two?
I know what it feels like to lose my own.
That is what makes those messages so hard to read.
They were supposed to have more time.
Time to grow up. Time to settle into all the little habits that make an animal part of a home. Time for their families to stop counting their age in weeks and months.
Time to become old.
And sometimes I sit with that sadness until it turns into questions I wish I did not have.
Should I have said yes?
Should I have tried so hard?
Was it worth all those feedings, all that worry, all that effort to keep a fragile life here, if we were going to lose them anyway?
Would there have been less heartbreak if no one had ever fallen in love with them?
These are painful questions to admit. But I suspect other people in rescue have asked them, too, alone and exhausted, after another loss.
I even catch myself wondering whether a mother who left a kitten behind somehow knew something we didn't. Whether we stepped into a story whose ending we could never change.
I don't know why those mothers were absent. Grief cannot give me that answer.
But it keeps looking for one.
Because if I could explain every loss, perhaps I could prevent the next one. Perhaps I could stop another family from receiving that devastating news. Perhaps I could stop adding to the number.
So I go back through what happened.
Was there something we could have recognized? Something we could have done differently? Something this animal's life can teach us that might help another?
I believe we owe them those questions. We owe them care that keeps improving.
But I struggle with the questions that have no answer. With the things that happened despite our efforts. With the knowledge that we can work so hard to give an animal a future and still have no power over how long that future lasts.
People see the rescue. They see the transformation. They see the adoption picture and the family smiling.
They may never see us receive the news months or years later.
They may never know that we grieve, too.
There are eighty-four lives in this part of my heart.
And I know there will be more.
That knowledge is a heavy thing to wake up with. Some days, it makes me feel terribly alone.
But there is another number I keep trying to let myself feel.
In that same span of time, 3,124 animals came through our doors, were saved, and are still living their lives.
Three thousand, one hundred twenty-four.
I know that matters. I know there are thousands of lives and families changed by the work we have done.
Still, knowing that does not make me stop missing the eighty-four.
Every one of them mattered. Every one of the 3,124 matters.
I cannot turn the animals we lost into a small percentage and ask my heart to accept it. I knew them. I cared for them. I wanted more for them.
And I can be grateful for every life still being lived while crying for the ones that ended too soon.
I am crying as I write this.
For the animals. For their families. For the little lives that passed through my hands and left something of themselves behind.
And for the people doing this work who might recognize themselves here.
If you are still grieving an animal everyone else thinks you should have moved on from, I want you to know that you are not alone.
If an adoption update has broken your heart, you are not alone.
If you have looked at the next fragile kitten and felt afraid to say yes because you remember the last one, I understand.
Somehow, we keep getting up. We keep trying. We keep making room for another life, even with the ones we have lost still so close.
I cannot promise myself that the next animal will get all the years I want for them.
But I keep returning to what those short lives did contain.
They were cared for. They were known. Some found families who adored them. Some were loved right here, by us, before they ever had that chance.
Their families' grief tells me how deeply they belonged.
My grief tells me they still belong somewhere in me.
I wish love had been enough to keep every one of them alive.
I wish I could give their families back the years they expected.
I wish eighty-four were the last number I would ever have to write.
It won't be.
And when I say yes again, I will know that.
I will remember the feedings, the fear, the families, the goodbyes. I will carry the hope and the hurt into the same room.
Then I will look at the little life in front of me.
And try.
❤️