Angels: a dog, a lot of people, and a revelation

It is December. For many that means there is music everywhere with lyrics about angels singing about peace on earth, good will among mankind. Some people believe there are actual angels, God’s intermediaries with us (from the Greek angelos, messenger), other people like the idea of angels, and others, well, I don’t know what they think.

I was not thinking of angels last Thursday, when the alarm went off and I had to get up and take Tucket into Boston for his therapy dog shift. I was thinking of caffeine. But then, he began to whine when I picked up the canvas bag with our volunteer things in it and the tail went furiously when I said it was time to “go visiting.”

I was in a good mood by the time we met people in the garage and kids and adults said “Ooh, look at the dog” and people began to pet Tuck. It took awhile to navigate through the lobby, decorated with tastefully winter-themed, but not too religious, ornaments and streamers. The hospital has over 1000 beds and numerous outpatient clinics and treatment areas, and it seemed a lot of people were working there, visiting, or had an appointment. I had to steer Tucket carefully among the crowds, a task made harder by people changing directions to come greet him.

We have been visiting since this summer, and I have become accustomed to staff saying “hello, Tucket” when we get on an elevator or arrive at the nurses’ station on an inpatient floor. Last Thursday there were joyful visits, some tender visits, and a few with tears. Tucket is gentle and attentive with everyone, and he seems to know when to move from one person to another, whether it is from child to parent, from employee to employee, or person to person in one of the waiting areas. The doctors, nurses, and other staff in the pediatric intensive care unit love him, and he them. He turns right coming out of the elevator every time, waits for the automatic doors, and cruises straight to the center of the workstation, where staff greet him, rub his ears, and tell him how wonderful he is.

Last week he was tired after the ICU, and the elevator that came first was nearly full. I said we would wait for the next when the group said oh no, there was room. So they made room for us, and while the elevator went down to the lobby people petted him and asked his name, and slowly pressed against the walls of the elevator and each other so he would have “enough room” to breathe.

I watched staff, well dressed visitors, and a few tired people who may have been there for treatment do the improbable: press against people they didn’t know in a crowded elevator in a city hospital at the beginning of flu season, and there were no complaints. There were smiles everywhere, strangers smiling at one another, at my dog, at me.

And then I had my Christmas revelation. There are angels all around us. We just don’t see them most of the time. We are all messengers, and like the people last Thursday, we can carry a message of peace and good will. Indeed, we can carry it all year round, just like my gentle, love-hungry dog.

Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz (c) 2010

Three tails of the lovely Lily

I. The Clumping Cat Litter Incident: first written autumn 1998

We always had litter boxes in the basement. It is sunny and opens onto the yard. First Arthur and Dax, the cats we had when we bought the house, and then Rufus and Jacob, who came after those first children died at 15, loved the basement.

For Rufus and Jacob, it was a dog-free zone. Teddy never showed interest unless Jeff or I went down.  After Joseph learned to crawl, Teddy wouldn’t let him near the door from the kitchen to the stairs. All of Lily’s first winter with us, she had no interest in the basement, either.

Then spring came, and Lily realized the quickest way to the car was through the basement. She set up residence on an old couch and discovered the litter boxes. I realized she was eating cat poop when I saw litter on her nose. We placed a child gate at the top of the steps. However, she had the spine of a limbo dancer and it was impossible to keep the gate low enough to keep her out and high enough that a Persian at full speed could get under it without the occasional herding beardie bearing down on him. By summer, I had given up, taken away the gate, and started cleaning the boxes several times a day. Lily remained Princess Litter Nose.

One day Lily came upstairs with litter on her nose, and I cleaned it off. A bit later, while we were eating dinner, she suddenly looked distressed and began to heave and sway as if she were going to vomit. Instead, she gagged and I realized she was choking. I was standing up to try the Heimlich maneuver on her when she made one horrendous wheezing sound and was fine.

We bought a cat door, which Jeff’s father installed for us on his next visit. Joseph had never had interest in the basement, but the permanently closed door was an insurance policy for him, too.

Thus was I saved from the challenge of writing a tasteful obituary about a little girl who choked herself to death on clumping cat litter.

II. Lily at Twilight: First written autumn 2008

On New Year's Eve 1999 I took Lily for a walk at dusk around a reservoir near home. It was biting cold but with no wind, the sky darkened slowly, and you could identify homes on the shoreline by twinkling lights in windows. She was two years old and dragged me up the steepest parts of the path, which wound through four-story-tall pines. I wrote a poem when I got home, but somewhere in the years it has gotten lost. Not the memory, though. I will have that forever.

I will not have Lily forever. Even last winter, when at 10 years of age she tore a knee ligament running on ice in the backyard, the veterinary surgeon twisted her this way and that, said she wouldn't have guessed Lily was more than 6 or 7 years old based on her arthritis, and told us to repair the knee. Lily, who had the superb floating movement of her mother and father, started to flow across my yard again.

In January of this year she had a urinary tract infection, a first but not a big thing. Then it recurred. In September I realized she had begun to snort more, as if she were trying to clear her nose. She failed suddenly, developing nasal discharge that neither she nor I could keep clear and began vomiting up stomach content and mucus. After three days and roughly half the cost of my first new car, the prestigious animal hospital in Boston told us what is wrong: Lily has nasal cancer, and it has advanced, eating through the bone of her nose as it has grown. Underneath her coat, she has gone from a too slim 36 pounds in January to a gaunt 34 pounds.

Other than milking it to convince us she should sleep on the bed rather than in her crate, she seemed much better when she came home, reestablishing her dominance over her loving but clueless brothers with a growl here and a bite on the nose there for taking a bully stick she had discarded.

Yesterday her breathing deepened, and she was slow to get up. Last night, I hand fed her dinner (to keep food in her stomach I've gone to five small meals a day, which she gracefully accepts like the queen she is) and saw blood coming from her right nostril. After a friend came to stay with our son, we went into Boston with brothers in tow. No one, except perhaps Lily, thought she was coming home in a crate in the van.

She fooled us. Her breathing was, and is, very loud, but I understand why. No air passes through her nose anymore, just her mouth. The emergency vet marveled at the wagging tail and the tongue in the ear as she sat with Lily on the floor and examined her. I understand why Lily takes small bites and spaces them out. She cannot breathe and eat at the same time. I cannot understand how she can breathe and kiss at the same time, but she has always been a kissing flower.

The vet did not offer us the option of giving Lily her final peace. She said Lily was oxygenating well, fully functional, and had attitude. She suggested we take her home and consult her vet today. So, it is morning but we are in twilight. I will never forget the three hours we were at the hospital or that her half-brother Tucket lay down and put his head on the vet's lap after Lily kissed her and moved to the other side of the room lest the vet want to feel her up again. I will not forget Angus, who gets anxious in veterinary clinics, sitting like a statue next to Jeff, licking his neck.

Enjoy your days and your loved ones, for you never know when twilight will come.

III. Lily: First written winter 2009

A year ago today the Earth paused for a fraction of a second before picking up its rotation: Lily died. I woke up to blood around the bedroom, some of it so abundant it had mounded on the carpet. It had to be Lily. Her front feet were red, but she wagged her tail and wanted to go out to the backyard, where she put a plastic hot dog in her mouth and whacked her brother over the head with it. Then, she sat down and panted, and I knew we had run out of time.

The lobby of the animal medical center was full of volunteers selling holiday gifts at one table, with a woman making beautiful all-natural wreaths at another. I tried not to cry while I asked for an emergency evaluation and told them Lily had been diagnosed with cancer in September and her file should be available. We got the same young vet who had seen Lily in October.

The Lily I took to the hospital in December moved slowly, leaned against me, panted more openly. Yet she recognized the vet, who took one look at the congealed blood I had brought along in a whipped topping container left over from Thanksgiving and said, "Oh my."

We waited in an exam room before another vet came and said the hemorrhage was major and the only question was how long we would wait for the next. Lily was very calm, even when they put in the IV catheter. I sat on the floor beside her, the vet in front of her. I thought she would want to sit or lie down, but she stood and looked at the vet, even when I put gentle pressure on her back. Then, at the last moment, she turned her head quickly and kissed my face. The needle went into the catheter, and I had to quickly put my hands out so she didn't hit the floor when her legs buckled.

The time after that was odd and in slow motion. I stroked her and apologized she had mats, told her I loved her, apologized for pulling her slip collar over her head awkwardly, and realized I was talking to the ceiling as much as to her body. On my way out, the vet and two volunteers from the ornaments table hugged me, and the wreath lady gave me a bouquet of roses on behalf of Lily. One dried rose remains.

For the last month of her life I mourned that cancer had ruined her face. The tumor grew outward, through the bone, and mangled her muzzle. I tried to puff up the white hair so it wasn't obvious she looked like a Klingon, but she did rather than the mirror of her beautiful mother.

Now though, a year later, I can't remember the mangled face. I remember her luminous dark eyes and the fact that a girl who rarely did as told (her attitude was more ‘Leave a message and I'll get back to you’) stuck with me patiently at the hospital. I remember that her last act in life was to kiss me, and I am so grateful I had Lily, still have Lily, perfect and at peace in my heart.

Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz © 2010

Essay: My Dog, My Son, Myself

Angus notices everything. He was the puppy who came out the morning after a rainstorm and realized one of dozens of twigs was an earthworm, that the sound of water at one place on our street signaled a storm drain he could not see. Although Angus has done better as he has matured, he still gets overwhelmed sometimes when there are too many stimuli, particularly sounds from sources he cannot identify.

In the woods, he is a different dog, confident, fast, smelling and marking and joyful. He is the dog I see at agility lessons. I love the woods, the sounds that reflect time of day, turn of season. One day this spring, we went into a forest and I heard a new sound, a gentle peeping. Frogs had come out at a shallow pond. The sound stopped as we passed, and I wondered at the lives in this forest that go on or end every day, independent of our existence altogether.

Last weekend I took Angus to a trail in another part of the same forest. I heard the sound, but it was following Angus’s gaze that I saw the squirrel in a tree. The squirrel watched us and ate a pinecone. Angus’s tail wagged. Knowing Angus, who has a gentle heart for skunks, birds, toads, and the lone snake that made our acquaintance, he wanted to say hello.

After several years of agility-based lessons with a kind and very skilled trainer, I am better with Angus. I read his body language better, and I prevent problems more often. When he does balk at a sudden sound (try not jumping when you hear a gunshot in the forest), I am more patient, prepared to ignore him for a few seconds while he collects himself, then saying “Let’s go” cheerfully or just making a clucking sound and starting again. I have learned how to give him the chance to help himself.

My first lessons with patience under pressure came with Joseph and the help of his kind, world-class psychiatrist. Joseph was diagnosed with autism when he was two years old, and he started having panic attacks when he was three. This was years before Angus came, Joseph was my son, and I was not effective. I would plead with a minimally verbal child and fall apart in tears almost as often as he did. But with medication, behavioral help, and time to mature, Joseph got better. He found his way.

There are times when I do not have the patience or concentration to deal with a possible Angus breakdown, and I do not take him risky places then. Joseph likes to have the TV on at the same time he plays his iPod, and sometimes I leave the room because he may be able to deal with the noise, but I cannot.

When I watch Angus or Joseph struggle, I remember that I had panic attacks frequently in the first year after my head injury, 25 years ago. Most of them were in relatively busy places, the hospital, the mall, the supermarket. I have vivid memories of suddenly going into a ball with arms over my head at a supermarket about a month after the accident when the bright lights, overhead music, and busy criss-crossing of loaded carts were just too much. A woman turned the corner, nearly bumping me, and I went down as if artillery had gone off.

My dog has wonderful strengths, but he will always have weaknesses. Despite his athleticism and love of wild country, he will never be a dependable hiking companion. He is the most affectionate dog I have had and he sticks near Joseph regardless of how agitated Joseph gets, devotion to his boy outweighing his anxiety. Angus is a great dog.

Joseph loves to read, loves to sing. He has grown into a smiling, joyful child who draws people to him. He will never graduate from high school or go to college, but he will have a loving life and a positive impact on people who know him.

I cannot cure my dog or my child. I could not cure myself after I had a head injury and developed epilepsy. There is much in life we cannot cure, cannot undo. But we can heal, can come into balance with ourselves, can discover the best life we can live. My dog is doing that, my son has done it, and, perhaps, I have as well.

Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz

Essay: Meetings and Partings

Thanksgiving has come, which means in our home that Christmas is coming. My husband has already brought down the box of holiday books and videos, and my son will shortly be throwing things all over the family room floor rediscovering the joys of Christmases past.

One of his favorite movies is the Muppets’ Christmas Carol.  It is also dear to me.  In one scene, Bob Cratchit (Kermit the frog) sits at his kitchen table and looks around the table slowly, at the faces of his wife (Miss Piggy) and each of his children. Then, and only then, does he look at a crutch propped in a corner of the room. His family sits silently, waiting to see what he will say.

He says that life is made up of a series of meetings and partings and that his family has experienced their first parting with the death of Tiny Tim. He says that it is Christmas, and they are gathered together, and he is thankful for all of them. In his quiet voice, he reminds them that they are precious, each unique, and that --- perhaps--- the best time to appreciate them is in the wake of a parting, a loss.

I watch the movie every year, but I haven’t watched that scene in years, since my father died. Its memory is fixed for me (and perhaps inaccurate), but its significance is unchanged.

We gather for holidays as family, whether established by blood or love or both. Over time, the faces at the table change: There are no meetings that will not eventually result in partings. This is the way of things.

Yet my memories remain, of my father, of everyone else I have loved and lost and will hold forever in my heart. Rejoice in the faces at your table. Remember those who are gone. Love moves inexorably from one year to another, one beloved to another, but it survives. Love is the glue of time. It holds us together.

Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz