Almost everyone who has made this decision carries some version of the same questions afterward. Did I wait too long and let them suffer. Did I do it too soon and steal time we could have had. Was I really doing it for them, or because I couldn’t bear watching anymore. I looked away at the very end. I felt relief when it was over, and what kind of person feels relief.
Here is the thing about those questions: most of them do not have an answer that will let you set them down. Not because you got it wrong, but because love audits its own decisions forever, especially the ones made in love. You are turning it over and over looking for the version where nobody had to die. There isn’t one. That is what makes it unbearable, not anything you did.
The relief is not a betrayal. If you had been watching someone you love be in pain, or slip away by inches, relief when the pain stops is not evidence that you wanted them gone. It is evidence that you couldn’t stand their suffering. That is the same love wearing different clothes.
We won’t tell you that you did the right thing, because we weren’t there and a stranger’s reassurance is worth nothing against this. What is true is plainer than that: the guilt you are feeling is love that has nowhere left to go. The job it used to have — caring for them — is over, and it hasn’t found out yet. So it keeps showing up for a shift that ended.