How To Stop Believing You Failed Someone You Lost
The truth about guilt, grief, and believing you didn't do enough
What if I’d taken her to the vet earlier? Maybe she wouldn’t be so sick if I’d paid for the heart scan before her operation.
I’m a terrible carer.
She looks up at me with flat, tired eyes, like she’s run out of steam. Waiting for someone to fix it, to ease the discomfort. Yearning.
It kills me.
Poppy, my 16-year-old rescue cat, is curled up in her usual spot on my bed, but everything about her feels smaller.
She’s recovering from a brutal few weeks of being really sick. Congestive heart failure, dark prognosis, daily meds for life, repeat vet trips, the works.
She’s doing better now, which is sweet relief.
Her appetite’s still patchy, but her defiance and love of tuna is back, which is its own quiet medicine. She’s always been a sassy madam.
When she turns her head away at night during meds time, I know some part of her is still there.
But some nights I sat there googling, “When should I euthanise my cat?” because she was catatonic and anorexic.
That search history sits in my chest like a brick.
I feel so shitty.
There’s something about facing life-or-death decisions with someone you love (even a small furry someone) that rips open every other time you’ve been on the end of that phone call.
And boy, did the guilt pour in.
When you don't know what the “right” choice is
It pulled me straight back to those hospital end days with my dad.
The daily conversations with doctors about his treatment whilst he was isolated in a red-zone ICU.
The weighing up of options that all sounded rubbish in different ways whilst COVID destroyed his body. The way I tried to advocate for him from the end of the phone because I wasn't allowed into the hospital.
I'm the next of kin. The “responsible one” because mum didn't know what to do.
The one they called at all hours to explain risks and percentages and “no guarantees.”
How a treatment option would help one symptom but make another worse.
Every day a Hobson's choice to pick the best worst option and sit and wait, defeated.
The one trying to keep my voice steady whilst explaining the key bits to my family and protect them from how bad the details really were.
I did what you do when you’re drowning. Ask questions, scribble messy notes, made the best call I could on crap sleep.
But my guilt doesn’t remember that part.
Guilt isn't interested in context, loss-brain, or surviving in a plague.
It doesn’t care about how your brain stops working when you’ve watched someone you love unconditionally deteriorate day after day, when you were taking selfies a week ago.
Guilt remembers the one sentence you replay daily at 3am:
“If I’d chosen differently, he might still be here.”
Each treatment decision changed hour to hour. It was overwhelming trying to keep track of things.
What I remember is feeling that there was no “good” option. Just different versions of risk.
We chose one after another after another.
Then they tried to resuscitate him for 40 minutes.
He died anyway.
My brain quietly translated that as I picked wrong.
The guilt equation is rigged
For ages, guilt is fact, not (a mistaken) feeling.
My evidence? Dad died, therefore I’d failed him.
My brain quietly built an equation which fit this story. If I’d loved him more, tried harder, not missed anything, he would have lived.
When he didn’t, it rearranged itself into something harsher where he died because I didn't do enough.
I didn't love him enough.
I'm a terrible daughter.
No wonder guilt feels endless.
There’s no amount of care that competes with “death being a clear result” and “life being a win”.
It’s a rigged game.
The first crack in the verdict
The first crack came in a conversation with a friend who'd lost her mum earlier in the COVID pandemic.
She was a consultant doctor and specialist. But her experience was like mine.
Groping around in the dark trying to figure out what might work with the doctors in daily conversations.
I list all the things I “should” have done differently and she just said,
“You did what you could with what you knew at the time. Once these things take hold, it's hard for them to recover.
He was on chemo too. You did your best. It was enough.”
I resisted her words at first. Because in my head, “enough” meant he doesn’t die. Nothing else counted as enough.
There's no version of this story where that’s going to happen though.
That realisation didn’t magic the guilt away at first, but it shifted the story from “I failed” to something more honest.
That I loved him and wanted a different ending, but I couldn’t make that happen.
That’s not a crime, but grief.
We think we're so powerful that we can save someone in hindsight but not in real time.
Such a fallacy.
Letting guilt show you what mattered
The more I sit with it, the more I notice how guilt narrows reality to fit the rigged and wrong equation.
It drops the full context, the silly moments or kind acts with our loved ones that gave them joy or relief.
And it makes us believe we have magic powers that perform miracles after the fact.
These days, when guilt shows up, it feels less like a bully and more like an overzealous know-it-all. Terribly nosy, very committed, but pretty much wrong.
When it whispers, “You didn’t do enough,” or the coulda-woulda-shoulda thinking loop revs up, I question what it's trying to achieve:
“What function are you trying to serve? Trying to teach me future lessons, or feed the “you're terrible and a failure” story?”
In reality, there is no amount of “enough” that could have stopped it. I did what I could, with what I knew, in a situation no one could fix.
It's the same with Poppy now. I can’t outsmart biology or time.
But what I can do is sit with her, stroke the fluffy patch under her chin, and listen to her loud and low purr that I missed so much.
Maybe guilt’s job isn’t to prove we failed, but to show us what mattered so much that we don't forget.
Key takeaways
Guilt loves to prove you failed, but it’s often just oversimplified and bad maths: “they died, therefore I didn’t do enough.”
“Enough” is impossible if the only acceptable outcome is that the person you love doesn’t die.
None of us can win that equation.
When you step back, guilt often reveals what mattered most.
Who you loved, how deeply you cared, and how you did what you could with the resources you had.
That's an epic sign of love, not a life sentence.
P.S. I'm creating a 60-minute(ish) on-demand workshop to help you Navigate Grief With Compassion. Hit reply or comment below if you want to be one of the beta users to help me shape it.