Hound Dog Blues Read online

  Since I hadn’t moved out of state, I was able to visit home frequently enough to keep up with her changes. They could happen almost without warning. Once between visits, her silvery gray bobby-pinned curls turned white, which shocked me upon arrival. Trips to the hairdresser remained a pleasure, and helped me learn what she knew about her condition by hearing what she shared with the women in the shop. As she weakened, medication changes played games with her thinking. It was harder to say good-bye or to know, when driving more than three hours back home to resume work, that I was doing right by her. Bereavement’s uncertainties rode with me, inspiring noisy internal debate.

  Our mother had a cardiomyopathy—an enlarged, less efficient heart muscle. Diabetes and hypertension likely were factors. Up to her last year, she cooked, cleaned, and shopped much as she had done before. But during her illness, her blood pressure was lowered to decrease the workload on her heart; subsequently her brain was not well supplied.

  After Mom died, I briefly volunteered at Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ facility at Head Waters in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia. The renowned bereavement philosopher wasn’t there at the time, but it was arranged for me to stay with a bustling mountain family whose children had hardly ever met a woman in her thirties who hadn’t yet married. While I was already an accomplished enough journalist, for that aspect of my self-development I was something of a novelty in these hills, the same way my sister Louise, a trauma doctor, was during her years after college serving with the Indian Health Service in Ganado, Arizona.

  As a busy young reporter, I could not have cared less about doing things socially by the book, and was ambivalent about the prospect of early marriage. I wasn’t alone. Louise, whom we called “Weez,” recalls viewing marriage as the end of a woman’s life of her own. More than once, Mom urged her to claim and have her own life. The moment for that kind of thing was ripe outside the doors of our, by then, middle-class home, and the borders of our small town. Times were a changin’ in the late 1960s, when I graduated from high school and studied writing in college, and we welcomed the wave of new options lifting women out of their stuck places. Life was exciting enough. One thing I did fear was office boredom; in those times, many workers were, arguably not unlike their spouses at home, lifers in factory or desk jobs, resigned to trading curiosity and adventure for the security of routine, the known … stuck in desperate tracks, or so I speculated from the lush fields of youth. Often I turned to look back at passing strangers with lined faces and hunched shoulders and thought they looked whipped by adult life. No cabin by Walden Pond for them, and maybe no quickening vision.

  The main career fields for those of us called “the distaff” side back then were nursing, teaching and secretarial typing. Inexplicably, given their tight financial circumstances, neither of our parents pushed academic achievement—nor parenting. But Mom, with her Irish bloodline, stuck up for us finding our purpose in life, and that was that. With Dad’s support as well, our older sister Barb changed family history when she was the first of us to enter and finish college, and also to marry and bear children. Mom seemed certain that our middle sister’s purpose involved medicine and caretaking, and that mine included adventure. She didn’t drive a car, nor often work outside our home, and her own quest for adventure by mid-life seemed destined to be lived vicariously through us. But all too soon, her illness hinted time could be running out for her. Surgery to implant a pacemaker in her chest, we hoped, would help slow that march.

  So her early death took us by surprise, not unlike painful whiplash. What passions and adventures could come to her now? Her youthful exploits in San Francisco may have been capped with marrying Dad, a soldier stationed near her home there during World War II, and bravely moving out east to raise a family where he had grown up. Inequities of the 1950s assured it was a flawed plan to start with. She rarely ventured further from home than downtown on the city bus that she caught on a nearby street corner. Since she lacked the means and pitch of an avid consumer, she must have just enjoyed getting out of the house. She rarely saw her own family again, and then—just like that—we three flew the nest.

  Thinking of this, and how fast it happened, grieves me to this day. Since I had moved away to accept my first post-college job in journalism, and had partnered in meaningful relationships, I barely had two chances, before she was gone, to eat lunch out with her like I did with office colleagues. Occasionally she volunteered at the hospital, on the serving side of the counter. I imagined we would laugh and share freely as women when I wasn’t a preoccupied kid anymore and she, too, could begin to step out in this way. Even though the calendar pages were fast flipping over, there was supposed to be more time.

  The mystery of a significant person or presence in your life being here, then gone is what loss through death is all about. What does it all mean, and how do we mean to process it for ourselves and our future, including the idea it will happen to us as it happened to pets and loved ones? Maybe not as fast, but still so finally.

  This hit Weez hard even as a little girl, when she was shocked to discover the dead body of our kitten Frisky in dried leaves by the curb of our red brick street. Apparently the kitty had been hit and killed by a car, and now all animation was gone from this living, breathing jellybean who had made us roll with laughter. For a future doctor, this was a key moment, understanding the arrival of death as the end of life as we know it.

  Another feline, Midnight, used to limp home and retire to the musty cellar to recover from shrill cat fights we trembled under our cool sheets to hear rage outside our bedroom walls. Besides the backyard game and movie nights shared in our neighborhood, we held more than a few pet funerals with our friends. So Weez also took note when our puppy Cinders died of distemper, curious why that wasn’t prevented when she understood it to be preventable. Barb also was inconsolable over this first memorable loss of life. While we didn’t have many dogs around the house growing up, Dad was disgusted by adults who tied beagles to doghouses and left them to fend for themselves; he often said they shouldn’t be allowed to own dogs if they weren’t going to fully care for them. Watching tales of Lassie on TV at 7 Sunday nights, before Ed Sullivan, was sacred family time, enjoyed with home-made pizza. Besides this collie’s heroic deeds, we were raised on sweet tales of Mom’s German Shepherd Jack. She had to give him away as a child and yearned to see him again. I already had begun to understand that pets, like us, had emotionally complicated lives. After becoming acquainted with The Yearling story, I took nothing for granted when it came to practical survival and the love of a child for another innocent in nature.

  From the start I had heart for animals, and I’m sure I indentified with them in many ways. Very early on I collected money around the block, and in thin white plates or soiled tins fed stray dogs and cats canned food and evaporated milk. These were purchased, perhaps at a discount—I don’t recall—from the corner grocer. After the can was open, I’d pry loose the sharp-edged tin circle and dispense just a little of the thick whiteness, conserving the rest for the hungriest of the hungry. “Nick” always kept a running tab for our family at Nichols five-and-dime. “Cat got your tongue?” clerks would ask when I showed up on a mission with my nickels and dimes. Typically I just wanted to be left alone to do this, my thing, in peace, and it did keep me out of bigger trouble. Being a child meant being subject to endless limits, so discretion came with me to the corner store.

  A few times I’ve heard death described as someone passing from one car to another. That image of half-shrouded transition fits dogs almost more than people, since their lives appear to many of us to be so much less complicated than ours—and maybe also because they are so often drawn to riding in the car, no matter what! Also, as the many “missing” signs on the dog park bulletin board suggest, these sudden twists of fate or outright trafficking happen frequently to their domesticated species.

  Yes, the loss of a beloved pet is more than a dress rehearsal for real loss
. It is painfully authentic loss seeping into our pores before we are ready to let go of our markers and touchstones. We’ve been conditioned to think losing an animal from our family is not as awful as losing a person, and yet the reality can be that the shorter relationship was deliciously intertwined, less contentious, and much less conditional than most human ones. So the pain easily can run deeper than the number of years woven into the bond might suggest; the unconditional quotient deepens the impact of loss.

  Looking back over all of the dogs and cats we’ve loved and lost, along with the ferocious ferret Bandit, various birds, mice and other small animals we’ve sheltered, we may be forgiven for occasionally mixing one or two of them up, whether by name, looks or personality. That’s especially so in regard to remembering several dogs who shared similar traits over time; Reebok, Nina and Raven, our black and white “upside down” lineup, who all used to recline on their backs with their legs up and their undersides exposed in silly happy postures.

  Despite even a few pernicious quirks and some engaging commonalities, we are much less likely to mix up relatives who are in our family lives for decades, half a century, or even a century. House pets, if never quite replaced in our hearts, are constantly being followed by adorable successors, it would seem—more so than spurned or lost human partners. Going 10 years or 20 years without getting a new dog is not normal for dog-friendly people.

  Water-crazy Duke was a link to outdoor fun.

  BARGAINING (3)

  The hard reality of the moment seems to be that a terminal illness has hold of our Duke. Could that mean a window (or dog door?) has been opened for disease to move brazenly into our home? I’m not proud of it, as a spiritual counselor pledged to uphold faith and wholeness, but more than once I’ve speculated silently that a cancer diagnosis could easily be received by a strong and impatient person like me as an involuntary, imposed sentence of sort—to eat, breathe and study how to survive the high costs of this illness in every element of here-and-now life. That’s a tall order, and not how most here-and-now advice about coping with illness goes. If Duke does have cancer, it is happening in our home now, healthy cells going wacky within our four walls, under our roof. But why? How did this insidious danger gain entry?

  Why Duke or other large dogs like him are falling prey to cancer isn’t a simple question. Greater awareness and attention to health in general over the course of a pet’s life could be part of hearing more about it. When we were kids, our dogs hardly ever saw a vet beyond receiving their basic shots. Gosh, we don’t even know the answer to many cancer mysteries for humans either, although the experts have tied certain risky health practices, like smoking, to higher odds of illness. On the oncology unit, for a chaplain, being with a patient in the face of relapse can be especially humbling, for the patient may have the only expertise that matters at that moment, that person’s very own Ph.D. in resilience.

  Max, a medium-sized Chow mix we took custody of—and shared many adult years with—had a cancer cloud move in, it seems, some years back. Uncharacteristically, we don’t recall the details. Soon after we knew he was ill, on a family camping trip a distance from home, he went missing following dinner and a meaty bone chewed down to nothing against the cool grayness of the tent floor. He was so old and weak, he couldn’t have gone far. Given his condition, there may have been a sliver of mercy in his sad ending, but not one of us would have chosen it.

  Presumably, in his fragile state Max drowned in the raging creek behind our campsite. We searched for him that night and the next morning amidst an indifferent downpour. We posted missing-dog ads for a time in local papers, and drove home weeping over not knowing his fate. It’s like we went camping under the big sky, lifted him up around the fire and allowed spirit to snap him up into the starry expanse. Max is one of the few family dogs I can recall dying early, accidentally, or not of natural causes … as if cancer could even be considered “natural.” In his case, the idea that he may have had cancer hadn’t yet settled into our bones before he was so mysteriously ripped away from us.

  With Duke, days pass before we announce the heartbreaking news of his diagnosis on social media. We had been posting multiple photos of him—he was something of a ham with tennis balls. I was writing about our regional dog park for a book about how ordinary people connect with nature daily. The discipline had raised our own awareness of Duke’s daily life, and his own sloppy-funny central role in ours. Facebook friends no doubt thought we were just dog crazy, but posting these photos reflected deepening of my own awareness of our interconnectedness with the outdoor world. Duke was a direct link for us with fresh air and walking, and therefore with health and well-being.

  When I finally share Duke’s diagnosis online, the instant wave of empathy helps, and I wonder what ever led us to think Duke was immune to health challenges, any more than us in our relative good health. We had long sought out quality dry food, but embellished it—against sage advice—with table scraps and gravy-like canned food. Recently we’d almost been momentarily smug about Duke’s health and fitness, so this reality bite was tough to take. Worse yet, it was impossible not to think about ourselves in similar context. In your mid-sixties, the clock is ticking, and it’s a biological clock with a shrill reality alarm.

  When we first rescued Duke from the shelter, we were newly back in Colorado after two years in rural Alaska. We thought we would be there longer, but family concerns beckoned us back to Colorado. Before we left the Kenai Peninsula, one of our pups, Nina, had been struck and killed by a truck on the Sterling Highway outside Homer’s compact business district. We had been painting the rooms of our shoebox-sized caretaker cabin, and had cracked open the sliding glass door to the deck to let the fumes settle. How quickly it was that we missed our hound sliding back in!

  It was night, and very cold, and she couldn’t be found, but she had never been known to go near the road. The next morning we called the local humane society. They reported they had picked up the body of a “well-fed” black Lab who had no collar. We had slim hopes this was not her, but in the meantime got a call from a driver who produced her collar and tags and assured us she didn’t suffer when he hit her. Who can say? Yet it is decent of a stranger to track us down and let us know. In Alaska, with its sledding tradition, there is heart for dogs, and canines often ride in the back of pickup trucks while their humans run errands. We buried Nina on the south side of a hill where Todd was helping build a retreat center called The Bear’s Den. Who knows; perhaps she would have fancied that spot being her final resting space.

  Before that sad day, Max and Nina had befriended a sweet-natured, calico-spotted white pooch named Spirit. We hosted actual sleepovers so Spirit, an only dog who had been passed on by a friend to a solitary elderly gentleman, could occasionally hang out and play with our dogs in the cabin while the people around them obsessively worked. Eventually our fondness for Spirit grated on his owner, and access was cut off. This hurt, but we have overstepped more than once in behalf of canine freedom. Ownership boundaries blur awkwardly with love, as in human relationships, and it is no great shame to admit to the frailty of fierce caring. But it’s a sorry thing, too, when dogs—or circus lions, for that matter—are not to be ever allowed to step out of their rings and let their souls run free.

  Although Max, without Nina, made the long drive home with us through Canada and Montana—Todd slept through his dream state—we missed Nina’s high spirits. We also missed having two dogs. When we introduced Duke to family in Colorado, he ran from the city park where we unleashed him and gave us an ungodly scare with a sprint down a residential street or two nearby. He was ungrounded. I looked into his shiny eyes. Wild will stared back. Finding ways to tame this kind of stubborn streak is no easier with dogs than with restless teen-agers. Adolescence comes early in dogs.

  The family explores Colorado’s sand dunes.

  MORTALITY (4)

  Let’s face it: In our eyes Duke, an icon, had become
a bit immortal, like I was to myself before facing surprise surgery in my thirties for uterine fibroids. While these curious tumors turned out to be benign, for me the fear this untimely experience engendered was an early wake-up call to my own mortality. SSAF (single slightly anxious female) showed up on my medical chart, and I wanted to scream to clinic personnel that they’d be anxious too in my shoes! Late at night I was calling the cancer center automated line—or my sister, the trauma doctor—trying to calmly breathe and sleep but compulsively checking and rechecking the odds of malignancies and survival; was it 50-50, or 30-70, five years or longer?

  No longer am I troubled by many of the anxieties I suffered in youth, but this medical scare didn’t help me shake the sense of possibly impending doom I’d grown up with. And I hadn’t yet experienced the evolution of faith it took for me to come to accept that we live in an affirmative universe. Three decades after that early surgery, my healthy and fit husband, whose first major loss of a nuclear family member postdated any midlife crises, still hadn’t shucked a sense of invulnerability. Many of us don’t, until we are awaken by a shockwave like my own tumor.

  One worry then was that the mass could have been an ectopic pregnancy. Tests and plans for removal moved along quickly. It was a formative experience, the second after college and deciding to oppose our country’s participation, especially through the military draft, in the Vietnam War. Since I was deciding to go against the grain again in not planning to have a hysterectomy in my mid-thirties, I had to redefine my body-and-soul goals and beliefs. They leaned toward believing I would survive, and keeping what I could of the body, organs and life systems God had given me. I uncovered new confidence in my own wholeness that inclines me to this day toward holistic remedies.