Joy Unleashed

by Jean Baur

  “How can you do that job?” I asked her.

  “It hurts,” she told me, “but I do my best.”

  “But you’ve done payroll and accounts receivable and payable. Wouldn’t that pay more and not be so physically demanding?”

  She nodded but I could see she didn’t believe she’d ever find a job like her last one. In her mind, it was over.

  I waited to see if she’d say anything more. She didn’t.

  “May I ask you something?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think some companies hire people with a lot of experience?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you have a lot of experience, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So, while you’re working at the warehouse, could we make a plan to get you back to a higher paying, more appropriate job?”

  “I guess so.”

  I waited again.

  “You’ve got to want this and believe it can happen or it won’t,” I told her.

  Tears streamed down her face. She took a Kleenex from the box on my table.

  “I know,” she whispered. “But why did they let me go?”

  “You’ll never really know, but I can tell you this. I work with hundreds of people every year who have been let go. And you know what? They’re really good at their jobs. They’re smart, motivated, loyal, and they still lose their jobs. That’s just the way it is. At some point, you have to let go of that question and move on.”

  I saw a faint light in her eyes, as though she believed me. Before the light went out, I added, “Let’s set one simple task for the next week, okay? I sent you notes on your résumé, so your job is to go through them, see what makes sense, and email me a new draft. Can you do that?”

  She nodded.

  I got out my calendar and we scheduled a time to meet the following week. When she stood, I gave her a hug.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I feel a bit better.”

  I opened my office door, telling her that I would see her next week, and there in a cubical right outside the door was my boss. She was looking at me.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised to see her there, as she worked in another office.

  “Got a minute?” she asked.

  “I’m just going to the kitchen to rinse my mug out. Come with me.”

  “Let’s go into your office,” she said.

  Warning bells were clanging in my head.

  “No.”

  She looked stunned but not entirely surprised.

  “We need to talk.”

  I had turned to stone and couldn’t move.

  “Would you go to Roger’s office?” she asked, as though she were speaking to a wild animal or a child on the verge of a tantrum.

  I nodded. I liked Roger. He ran the office but wasn’t my boss.

  She knocked on his door and, as we walked in, he turned his head and wouldn’t look at me.

  “Jean and I are going to have our meeting here,” she told him. She sat and pointed to a chair. I didn’t want to sit. Roger pulled his chair over and I was trapped. I sat.

  “As you know, Jean, we’re acquiring another firm and that means we have to make changes.”

  I glanced over at Roger and saw tears in his eyes. I looked back to my boss who showed no emotion. No concern. She had a job to do and would do it. The end. I saw that she had a packet of papers for me and I knew how this story went.

  “You can work until the end of the year but then your job is done.”

  “My job or me?” I asked, glaring at her.

  “Well, you know what I mean. You in your job.”

  Roger was now crying.

  I got up and hit him softly on the arm.

  “Roger, you can’t cry. I’m doing my best to hold it together, but stop it. Stop right now.”

  My boss made a fatal mistake. She said, “Look at you. You’ve lost your job and you’re concerned about Roger.”

  I turned to her, wanting to strike her, wanting to smack that smug I’m-in-charge-and-you’ve-just-lost-your-job expression off her uncaring face.

  “That’s the kind of office this is,” I said in a low voice, my most threatening voice. “We care about each other.”

  Roger wiped his eyes and said, “I thought Jean told you a few years ago that if she were to lose her job, she didn’t want to be notified in a meeting. I thought she asked you to call her on the days she works at home.”

  “Well, I know but—”

  I didn’t listen to the rest. I announced, “I have to go. I have an appointment.” Which I did, with my chiropractor.

  “But we haven’t gone over your package.”

  “Don’t want to. I’ll read it and will email my questions to you.”

  I took the packet, headed for the door, and turned back.

  “Thank you, Roger. Your support means a lot.”

  I got back into my office, grabbed my purse and jacket, and walked out the door. By the time I got to my car, I was shaking. Furious. I sat still for a moment and called Bob on my cell phone. I told him I lost my job.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Come home.”

  “Got the chiropractor.”

  “Okay, but after that. It’s going to be all right.”

  I started my car and pulled out of the office park. Now, not my office park, not my building, not my anything.

  It was a quick drive to the chiropractor’s. “Really?” I said out loud all the way there. “Really? Me, really?”

  When I was face down on the adjustment table, I told my chiropractor. She was a wonderful woman and told me she was glad I was there.

  “I feel as though I’m on the edge of a cliff, falling,” I told her.

  “You are,” she answered, “but for right now I want you to imagine that you’re falling into a deep pool of water. Lovely, warm, blue-green water. And you’re safe.”

  I felt her skilled hands on my back. I imagined the water. And my tears soaked through the paper under my face.

  Sometimes it’s good when things aren’t too easy. Passing the Canine Good Citizen and Therapy Dogs tests wasn’t easy, but I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to start volunteering at the hospital with Bella. And without realizing it, I wanted something to be easy, as I was hurting from having been notified a few weeks earlier that my job of sixteen years would be over at the end of the year. I was no longer needed. No reason, no apologies, just good-bye. I got into a useless fight with my boss over the severance package and finally came to the conclusion that I had to let it go. I had to move on.

  And on some unconscious level, I think I knew all this was coming because, in my first book, Eliminated! Now What?, published a year earlier, I’d started the first chapter:

  There are almost always signs before you lose your job, but many times you don’t see them until after the fact. So you’re called into a meeting with your boss, and someone from HR is sitting there as well, and they both look as if they’d like to sink through the floor. You are politely told to have a seat. And as you wonder why you’re there, you’re told that, due to: restructuring, downsizing, acquisition, loss of business or the current financial crisis, you’re no longer needed. And then they might reassure you that this has nothing to do with your performance, in fact … (this is the point where you can’t hear anymore and you’re sure this is a bad dream or hallucination). So their mouths keep moving but nothing is sinking in…. in the course of less than an hour your whole world has been turned upside down.

  It’s now December 2011, and in the middle of preparations for Christmas, getting ready to put our house on the market, and working the last few weeks of my job, my friend and neighbor, Cathy, and I have been running back and forth to St. Mary Medical Center. We got our TB tests done (not once, but twice), we had mountains of paperwork to hand in—including our dog’s veterinary records so that the hospital could verify they were up to date on all their shots—we and our dogs had to have photos taken for our ID badges, and
we were required to attend a half-day volunteer orientation.

  At this orientation, which we attended without the dogs, we learned about patient confidentiality, hospital codes—including a dress code: no jeans or open-toed shoes—and which areas we could visit as well as the ones we couldn’t, like maternity and the surgical floor. We heard about a wonderful program they’d recently initiated called No One Dies Alone. I was amazed there were volunteers who sat with people who were dying, people who had no family with them. The hospital was like a complicated machine. There were so many needs filled by volunteers, from delivering magazines and books to escorting patients in wheelchairs. Then we were told that when we heard the Brahms lullaby over the PA system, a baby had just been born.

  As the days shortened and the nights grew cold, I realized this was my life raft, my future. The one bright spot on the horizon. Even then I found it amazing that my dog, my bundle of crazy energy, was saving me.

  PART IV: WORKING GIRL

  Chapter 20

  EXPECT NOTHING, BE SURPRISED

  Fall 2012

  Stonington, Connecticut

  Hospitals were made of different communities, and physical therapy was one of the hopeful places, communal and often full of activity. Bella liked going up what I called “the stairs to nowhere.” And she was fond of platforms from her agility days. I was a great believer in the “nothing is wasted” philosophy, so Bella’s agility training kept her focused on me, and she read the slightest changes in my body or facial expressions. She often knew before I did what my next move was.

  But physical therapy was also a place where fear and pain battled it out with healing and recovery. It reminded me of what my mother told me about grief: you have to get through it. There were no detours or shortcuts.

  A woman who had had a stroke sat slumped in her wheelchair. The physical therapist tried to get her to use her right hand, which laid abandoned in her lap. Bella and I approached from the right.

  “Would you like to see the dog?” I asked.

  She nodded and a flicker of light shone in her eyes. At least this was something different.

  Bella wasn’t too sure about the wheelchair, but I lured her next to this patient’s right leg with a treat. She was watching Bella intently.

  “Try to pet the dog,” instructed the therapist, and the woman froze, as if this was too much to process.

  I asked her, “May I put a treat in your hand for Bella?”

  A nod.

  And as Bella nudged her hand with her nose, as she gently got the treat, it looked to me like a finger or two moved.

  “Again?” I asked, and we did it again. And once more.

  Like a child who sat obediently in school all morning, Bella needed to burn off steam. After saying good-bye to the patient, I let her fly up and down the stairs to nowhere before moving on.

  When I asked the next patient, an elderly man, if he’d like to see the dog, he didn’t respond. I gave him a few minutes to see if he would change his mind, but he looked blankly ahead. I reminded myself that he may be in pain. Or he may be overcome by fear at what his life had become. I didn’t know, and I realized it was not my job to figure it out. I was simply here with Bella, encouraging her to do her thing. Having worked as a career counselor for many years, I reminded myself that all jobs had aspects that were ordinary and uninspiring. There was no reason why pet therapy should be any different.

  We left the physical therapy ward to see if there were other patients who would like to have Bella stop by. If I saw a doctor in a room, I didn’t go in. I knew they had too much to do and wouldn’t welcome a distraction. If the nurses were really busy, we stayed out of their way. But many times, seeing into a patient’s room was difficult, so I learned to walk a little way in and then ask my question: “Want a visit from a therapy dog?”

  In this particular room, a woman in her early forties with her arm in a sling and an IV pole next to her bed said, “Oh, yes! Bring him in.”

  “This is Bella,” I said, letting her figure out the gender issue.

  A nurse came in to check the IV drip and I asked her if it was okay if Bella put her paws up on the bed. She nodded, but I hesitated, as this patient’s legs were so white they looked like bandages. The woman decided to sit up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. I gave her a treat to give Bella, and as soon as Bella ate it, her hand moved in one swift motion to Bella’s head. She ducked.

  “You can cure that, you know,” she told me.

  Not really, is what I thought, but I said, “I’m working on it.”

  “You have to desensitize her.”

  I used my standard defense about Bella being a rescue, while realizing this was a somewhat hollow excuse. Bella was either born or dumped on Dead Dog Beach in Puerto Rico, but I didn’t know how long she had been there. Now she was five years old. Would early trauma still affect her?

  I wanted to tell this woman that she had let Leonard pet her on the head. I wanted to tell her that Bella had come a long way from a puppy we had to keep on a leash or in a crate in the house to a dog who walked by my side with no leash. I wanted to say: maybe you smell funny or perhaps there is something about you she just doesn’t like. But I didn’t. Instead, I gave her a few more moments, told her it was nice to meet her, and left.

  Bella and I had a super game of tug of war in the hallway, and I told her that she did a really good job. It would be so much easier if she didn’t mind being touched on the head, but that wasn’t who she was. The way I figured it, some of this work had to be on her terms.

  When I visited the hospital with Kat and one of her Australian Shepherds, Wren or Boo, I noticed two things: one was that Kat’s take on this work was that everyone needed to see a dog, so if there were families in the hallway, or one of the janitors taking out trash, they got the same attention as the patients. They were just as important and perhaps needed a dog visit more than some of the patients. The other thing I noticed was that she was shy; it was hard for her to go into a room, but with a dog, she could do it.

  I was not shy, but there was so much to learn both about this work and about how hospitals were run, that I sometimes hesitated before walking into a room if one glance gave me the feeling the person inside might be disturbed by a dog visit. Over time, I got better at this, but at almost the one-year mark as a therapy dog team, Bella and I were still on the steep part of the learning curve.

  Kat’s dogs were well trained and beautiful. Their coats were luxurious and they knew some cute tricks. Kat said, “Boo, time for bed!” and she dropped to the floor and closed her eyes. Wren knew how to open closed cabinet doors. Bella’s repertoire was mostly: sit, stay, paws up, lie down, shake, and up. I could also put a treat on her paw when she was lying down and tell her to leave it, and she did. As I told the kids in the bite-prevention programs, “She’s not a circus dog. Tricks aren’t really important, but coming to visit people is.”

  As I drove Bella to the hospital on a warm fall day, I realized that it had been one year since I was notified my job was about to be over. Weeks had gone by and I hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t replayed the conversation with my boss, hadn’t had fantasies of revenge. I knew time helped create perspective, but I believed it was this work with Bella that was healing me, not time alone. Having something that I loved to do, having a purpose, getting out of the house and meeting other people, had put my layoff in perspective. I could almost see it as business as usual.

  Plus, I now had another job. I had designed a course for “mature” job seekers, a class I’d named Boomers Back to Work! And starting in November, in just a few weeks, I would be teaching the first class. I’d already had meetings at the four CTWorks! (unemployment) offices to share with the staff what my course was about, and almost every day, I reviewed my PowerPoint presentation and the handouts. I was ready to jump back into a field I loved, but this time as an independent contractor. It felt really good and eclipsed the occasional work I was doing for my former company.


  Bella and I signed in at the hospital volunteer office and had a nice chat with Jamie, the head of the office. She loved Bella and didn’t get upset that Bella did things on her own terms. I handed her a pile of magazines I’d brought from home so they could distribute them to the patients.

  “Any requests?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not today.”

  So Bella and I took the elevator to the fifth floor, visited a few people, and were just about to head down to the Cancer Center when a woman in the far bed of a room we were passing asked us to come in.

  “Sure,” I said, and as we entered the room, the woman in the near bed sat up and yelled: “What is a dog doing here?”

  I caught my breath and did my best to answer quietly. “She’s a therapy dog. We’re here every week.”

  “Get that filth out of here!”

  The woman in the far bed watched this drama unfold. It was a lot more exciting than daytime TV.

  “We won’t come near you,” I told her, “but I’m going to visit this other patient, and we’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “I’m calling the nurse. Dogs don’t belong in hospitals.”

  I ignored her and introduced Bella to the other patient. She apologized for her roommate.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her, “it’s very rare.”

  And it was. This was the first time it had ever happened.

  “She has such a sweet face,” said the patient in the far bed.

  “She is sweet,” I told her, and as we were leaving she said, “I appreciate your service. It’s so kind of you.”

  Holding on to that affirmation, I quickly left the room, wondering if I was going to run into a nurse or be kicked off the floor. Out in the hallway, I told Bella she was a good girl and filled her water bowl, a collapsible cloth one, from the drinking fountain and let her have a good drink.

  “One more stop, girlfriend,” I told her, as we still had to visit the Cancer Center. One of the patients we had seen for weeks was standing by the Cancer Center reception desk. She had on a new wig and looked terrific.