“No, actually the person who recommended SunRidge to me told me about Wrigley,” Bee replied, looking over at me with a smile. “It’s one of the reasons I came here.”
Score one for the house dog.
I always liked to welcome new residents, whenever possible, because I knew my presence—around those who wanted it—could help ease the anxiety, ambivalence, and often times sadness, they felt when moving into an assisted living home. It was one of those hard transitions in life that a dog can help soften.
After Jane left, Bee began sorting through her belongings, trying to make sense of where things were.
“A friend’s going to come later to help me with all of this,” she said, looking at a tall stack of boxes, “but I might as well get busy doing something.”
She opened a small box beside her, and pulled out a few things she needed. When she came across an envelope of photographs, a smile spread across her face, and her eyes lit up.
“That’s Jim,” she said, holding up the picture for me to see from where I was lying, a few feet away. “We met on my first day of high school . . . he was a senior. I remember my father saying I should be with someone my own age, instead of a boy who was about to graduate, and go off to college. But I knew he was the one for me. It was hard having a long distance relationship those first few years, but it was well worth it in the end . . . we had such a wonderful life together.” Bee paused and silently reflected for a moment before continuing. “I can’t say I thought it would end this way. With all of my ailments, we both assumed I’d be the first to go . . . but here I am. When they say love lasts forever, that means even after the person is gone. I miss him so much, Wrigley. But I know he’ll be waiting for me when God decides my time here is done.”
Bee slowly shuffled through the remaining photographs, stopping at a couple of them to tell me stories. Once she finished, she stared out the window, and I sensed a sadness coming over her. She called me over to her side, wrapped her arm around my shoulder, and began to cry.
“It’s going to be okay,” she reassured herself, after releasing me from her embrace. “You’ll help me through it, right, Wrigley?” I wagged my tail, and sat down. Bee reached over to pet my head, and when she felt the moisture from her tears on my fur, she started laughing. “Look at me,” she said, “we just met and I’m slobbering all over you. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” I lifted my paw onto the arm of her wheelchair, and she put her hand over my paw.
“Well, I guess this is home,” she said, scanning the room, and allowing the reality of where she was to sink in. “I can’t say I was in any great hurry to get here. I asked the driver if he didn’t mind taking a detour on our way over. It turned out to be a twist on This Is Your Life from the back seat of a taxi. We went by my first job at the movie theatre, the ballroom where I used to dance as a young girl, then to the restaurant where Jim took me on our very first date, and finally through the neighborhood where we lived as newlyweds. None of the places look the way they used to, but I still see them as they once were. I don’t know when I’ll have the chance to get by them again, so I’m glad I did. Believe it or not, Wrigley, the driver didn’t even charge me for the ride. What a sweet, young man.”
Bee finished talking, and closed her eyes, as if she was trying to gather strength. When she opened them, she looked over at me and said, “It’s been a long day, and I need to get some rest. If you’re not here when I get up from my nap, we’ll see each other again real soon . . . okay?”
Not long after Bee laid down, Jane came by to check on her, and found me staring out the window. She called me to come, and closed Bee’s door behind us.
28
The next morning, when Jane came to work—before she put her things down—she walked over and gave me a big hug.
“My best friend’s Golden Retriever, Chloe, died last night,” she told me, looking upset. “I just want you to know, Wrigley, how much I love you.”
She then grabbed my leash, clipped it to my collar, and told Theresa we would be gone for a while. We got into her minivan, which was idling outside the entrance, and drove until we reached her friend, Karen’s house, fifteen minutes away.
After she rang the doorbell, Jane looked down with a sad expression on her face. “I hate that silence,” she said to herself, “when you’re expecting to hear a barking dog.”
When Karen opened the door, her eyes were red, and you could feel a heavy sadness coming from her.
“I’m so sorry,” Jane told her, reaching over to give her a hug.
“Thanks so much for coming over.”
“I brought Wrigley with me . . . I thought he might help.”
Karen got down on her knees, buried her head in my coat, and hugged me tight. “He looks great,” she told Jane, getting back to her feet. “I haven’t seen him, since he got bitten by the snake.”
“Please, don’t remind me—what a horrifying experience that was.”
The three of us walked into the living room. Karen and Jane sat on the floor with their backs against the front of the couch, and I laid on my side close by.
“The last month was so hard for her . . . I’m glad that at least she’s no longer in pain,” Karen told Jane, “but I miss her already.”
“Of course you do, it’s a huge loss,” Jane responded, reaching over to take Karen’s hand.
“I wish dogs could live a little longer, and humans could live a little shorter,” Karen said, looking over at me.
“Are you trying to put us out of business?” Jane joked.
“No,” Karen replied, smiling.
“I’d be happy if dogs lived longer,” Jane responded, “but I’m not so sure I want to give up any of my years.”
“I probably feel the way I do, because I don’t have kids,” Karen offered.
“Maybe so.”
“Would you mind if we walk to the end of the street?” Karen asked, as she stood up. “I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to sit still for long.”
“Of course not,” Jane answered. “Wrigley, do you want to go for a walk?”
I quickly got to my feet, and stood wagging my tail, while Jane put my leash back on.
“I just want to go down to the grass bluff,” Karen told Jane. “It was one of Chloe’s favorite spots.”
We walked a short distance, and along the way passed a couple of barking dogs in their front yards. When we got to the bluff, we crossed paths with a short-haired woman, who was walking a super-spunky Chihuahua that was missing its left eye. Jane asked the dog’s owner if it was okay for me to say hello.
“Definitely . . . this is Giuseppe,” the woman said proudly.
“I’ve seen you guys before,” Karen said to the woman, while leaning down to pet Giuseppe.
“Aren’t you the one with the Golden?” the woman asked.
“Yes…” Karen managed to say before starting to cry.
“She passed away last night,” Jane said, speaking for her friend.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, she was such a beautiful dog,” the woman responded.
“Thank you,” Karen replied.
“I know how you’re feeling . . . I lost my Chocolate Lab six months ago, and I’m still devastated. Every time I walk down here with Giuseppe, I think about Roscoe. We spent twelve years together. He was by my side through so much . . . divorce, two surgeries, and a career change. He’s gone, but I still feel him here,” the woman said, putting her hand over her heart, and getting teary-eyed.
The woman leaned over and gave Karen a hug. When they separated, she unclipped Giuseppe’s leash, and the little guy and I ran around together. Small dogs sometimes irritate me because they get nervous around dogs my size, and they bark at their own shadow. But Giuseppe had the spirit of a big dog. When his owner threw him the ball, he was after it in a flash. He looked so funny with a big ball in his tiny mouth. I tried to pry it from him, but he would have none of it, easily darting away from me every time.
When Giuseppe ran of
f with his owner, I sniffed around for a while, leaving my mark on a few fragrant bushes before rejoining Karen and Jane, who were sitting together on a nearby wooden bench.
I found a spot on the ground in front of them, and watched as people passed us by on the walkway. Not long after, Jane told Karen she had to get back to work, and we slowly made our way down the block again. In Karen’s doorway, Jane wrapped her arms around her friend for a long embrace, and then we got into the minivan and drove off.
29
Once we returned to SunRidge, I crashed on my bed for a few hours. When I woke up, and walked out into the hallway, I came across Sally. I happily went over to her, and when she reached down to pet me, I smelled Walter’s unmistakable scent of cologne mixed with cigarette smoke.
I followed Sally, as she headed toward Walter’s room, hoping that he had returned during my nap, or while Jane and I were visiting Karen. Just before we got to his door, I realized that Mark and Michelle were a little ways behind us. I waited for them to reach us, and greeted each with wags and sniffs. After Sally chatted with the two of them for a minute, she headed across the hallway into Ellen Lubuck’s room, while the three of us walked in and found Walter resting on his recliner.
“Well, if it isn’t the whole welcoming crew,” he said, looking over at us.
“Hey, Dad, how are you feeling?” Mark asked him from across the room.
“I suppose I’m in good shape for the shape I’m in,” he answered. “Damn glad to be out of that place, I’ll tell you that much.”
Mark and Michelle walked over to opposite sides of Walter, while I sniffed around his feet.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Mark told Walter, reaching out to put his hand on his father’s shoulder.
“What exactly happened, Walter?” Michelle asked.
“I took Wrigley out with me to have a cigarette, and then, I don’t know…”
“We’ll call this episode, Two Stooges in the Snow,” Mark joked, leaning down to give me a scruff on the head.
Walter and Michelle both laughed.
“Dad, we brought you a turkey sandwich from the deli, if you’re hungry.”
“Thanks, I’ll have it later. I have to rid my system of that hospital food first.”
“That bad, huh?” Michelle asked.
“Let’s put it this way, if I were there for any length of time, I’d starve.”
“I can’t remember where, but recently I read that hospital food is much better than it used to be,” Michelle replied.
“Well, apparently the change hasn’t reached where I went . . . you know it’s a bad sign when you’re using a spoon for your vegetables.”
“Michelle,” Mark interjected, “keep in mind you’re talking to a man, who never had a meal he didn’t complain about. If there were a dictionary for descriptive terms, under picky eater, you’d find a picture of my Dad talking to a waiter about something.”
“That’s not true,” Walter responded, meekly defending himself.
I followed Mark as he took the brown sack with Walter’s sandwich to the refrigerator.
“It looks like you have a friend, Dad, who’s willing to help you, if you can’t eat the whole thing,” Mark said, noticing me trailing him.
“Oh, I bet he will,” I heard Walter say behind me.
“He’s such a great dog,” Michelle said, greeting me with a smile and a pat on my head, when I returned to the living room.
“I can’t remember, Mark, did we have a dog when you were growing up?” Walter asked.
“Yes, Dad,” he answered, sounding slightly annoyed. “Remember after you left the house, I came home from school one day, and discovered Mom and her new boyfriend had given the dog away.”
“What?” Michelle responded, shocked. “Why did she do that?”
“She said she was having a nervous breakdown and couldn’t deal with anything,” Mark answered.
“Sounds like your mother,” Walter responded.
“Let’s talk about happier things, shall we?” Michelle suggested.
“Dad, did you hear about the trade the Cubs made?” Mark asked.
“I caught the tail end of them talking about it on ESPN in the hospital.”
“I’m telling you, next season they have as good a shot, as they’ve had in a long time, to finally doing it.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Mark replied. “I don’t think either of us ever recovered from ’04, when they were five . . . five outs away from the World Series, leading three to nothing, and lost eight to three.”
“Remember what I told you when you turned to me and said ‘Dad, we’re five outs away?’”
“Yeah… Never count outs. How can I forget?”
“An old gambler’s rule. Unfortunately, it proved to be prophetic.”
Somewhere during the conversation, I fell asleep. Baseball is hard enough to watch, but listening to people talk about it is beyond bearable.
I opened my eyes when Mark and Michelle were getting ready to leave. Mark walked over and wrestled me for my Kong toy before he shook his father’s hand and said goodbye. Michelle gave Walter a hug, and then reached down to give me one as well.
Even though Walter didn’t say anything to me about it, I could tell he was happy with Mark and Michelle’s visit. It was the only one I had witnessed, where there wasn’t any real friction between him and his son.
A little while after they left, Walter got up from his recliner and walked over to the refrigerator. He stared inside for a few moments, contemplating what to eat. Sensing it might be time for his turkey sandwich, I repositioned myself to the edge of the kitchen. Just then, he closed the door, and walked away empty-handed.
Why do humans do this? You have all this incredible food staring at you, and the free will to eat it, and you turn away without having anything? It’s unbelievable.
Instead of eating, Walter put on some music, and went back to his recliner. I sat beside him, and he reached over to pat my head. The room was dark now, except for the last rays of daylight, which were slowly surrendering to nightfall.
“Another day…” Walter said taking a deep sigh and looking out the window, as the sun sank behind the mountain. “I guess you have to be grateful for every one you get, when you get to where I’m at.”
30
The next morning after breakfast, Walter called me back to his room to keep him company, while he worked on a crossword puzzle. Even before we got to his room—on our walk down the hallway—I sensed a restlessness in him I had never felt before.
Once he settled into his recliner, he began having a difficult time concentrating on the crossword puzzle. He kept picking it up, and putting it down, and getting up and staring out the window, and then pacing around the room. Something was obviously eating at him. I sat on my bed and watched him, wondering what it could be.
At one point, when his eyes met my gaze, he called me over to the side of his recliner. “Listen, Wrigley,” he said, pausing to look out the window before continuing to speak. “I want to let you know that I’m not going to be around much longer. They ran some tests on me, when I was in the hospital, and found out that I have pancreatic cancer. I wanted to tell my son yesterday, but I just didn’t have the heart to. It’s not that I don’t think he can face the fact that I’m going to die soon, but I hate to be more of a burden than I’ve already been.”
Walter seemed a little less agitated after he told me the news. He picked up his pen and crossword puzzle, and looked to find where he had left off. A second later, he dropped his hands to his lap, looked over at me, and said, “I know it’s strange telling a dog this kind of stuff, but I had to get it off of my chest, and if it’s possible for you to understand, I wanted you to know. Also, I wanted to thank you for being my friend.”
Walter then retracted the foot rest on the recliner and signaled me to come closer. Once I was directly in front of him, he leaned forward as far as he could, and wrapped his
arms around me. Once he released me, Walter got up, and without the aid of his walker, slowly made his way to the kitchen. When he returned, I was sitting and waiting for the peanut butter treat he had in his hand.
Walter didn’t speak about his illness to me again, but over the next week I saw him leave SunRidge often, and return with a pensive look on his face and paperwork in his hands. I assumed he was coming back from doctor appointments.
When Walter finally told his son about his condition, he did so over the phone, while I was lying beside him on the couch. The words that were coming out of his mouth—terminal, cancer, death, hospice, and funeral—normally carry with them great emotion, heaviness, and dread. But Walter delivered the news to Mark like a weatherman announcing a sunny day with a slight accumulation of clouds by nightfall. After he finished answering what sounded like a series of questions from Mark, he put down the phone. Looking exhausted, but relieved, he rested his arm on me, closed his eyes, and fell sleep.
Early the next morning, Mark and Michelle arrived at SunRidge, and before going to see Walter, they stopped by the front office. While they discussed Walter’s medical situation with Jane, I aggressively worked on a new rope toy.
As you can imagine, living at a place like SunRidge, I’ve heard many conversations about illnesses, surgeries, and treatments. I always listen long enough to find out what’s going on, but as soon as someone mentions chances of survival, I do my best to tune out. It’s not that I don’t have faith in doctors, or their ability to assess a person’s medical situation correctly, it’s that statistics can’t measure a person’s will to live, and they don’t allow for the possibility of miracles—and as the house dog, I’ve seen my fair share of those.
Before I stopped listening to Mark and Michelle’s conversation with Jane, I did find out more about Walter’s medical history. The combination of Type 2 diabetes—which I knew he had from his daily insulin shots—and a lifetime of smoking, had made his circulation so poor that, according to his doctor, he risked having one or both of his legs amputated. Before coming to SunRidge, he had undergone two surgeries—the first for a Carotid artery, and then another a year later, to remove a buildup of fluid from around his heart. According to Mark, both procedures took their toll on Walter. The recovery from the last one was especially slow and hard, with the pre-surgery anesthesia taking a long time to pass out of Walter’s compromised kidneys, which caused him to have hallucinations for months. Adding advanced pancreatic cancer to a man in Walter’s general health created a very difficult, if not dire, scenario.
All That Ails You: The Adventures of a Canine Caregiver Page 11