He’s the good Jakey, I think, and I am just about to share his overconfidence when suddenly he shivers all over, the nose drops, and the tail goes from a sway to a wag. This is the very kind of animation we may see in search dogs the moment they catch human scent. There is nothing about the Home command that should torque Jake up in this way; I’m thinking that even as he moves from the trot to a scramble and, nose down, begins to pull me along the sidewalk—right- direction-right-direction-yes-it’s-the-way-we-came—and then suddenly goes across the street on a diagonal, onto the opposite sidewalk, and into a row of bushes. Jake is crittering. He has chosen a place where possums like to sleep off the day, and I have no doubt he’s trailing one now. He is on it. He thrusts into the green so deeply that all I can see is his madly waving tail. By this time, I’ve abandoned my role as observer of the process and am pulling him into me, heaving hand over hand down the long lead. We meet somewhere in the middle of the thicket, and as a huddle of little possums scatter in the underbrush, Jake sits and turns to look at me. His expression isn’t guilty. He beams as though he thinks he’s done the job.
“Jake, come out of here,” I say, leading him out, giving an embarrassed little wave to an elderly man grinning from a neighboring porch.
No treat. Sit for Jake. Deep breath. Let’s try this again.
“Jake, take me home.”
Jake stands and looks pointedly at the hedge, then back to me.
“No, Jake. Take me home.”
His expression mystified, as though he can’t imagine why a hedge full of baby possums is not the thing I want, Jake begins again. We move away from the hedge in a cloud of Leave Its; Jake crabs sideways, looking back toward possum land as long as he possibly can. Somehow, though, when we hit the sidewalk, he seems to shake off the hedge’s allure. He is service dog in training again, and I am hopeful that this time he’s got it. He’s slowed from a trot to a walk, a better pace for a human handler behind him, and I’m glad to see he made that choice. (I hope he made it out of consideration for his partner, but he may have made it because we’re now upwind of possum.) The lead between us is slack.
Two blocks from home. A block and a half from home, and we’re still moving in the right direction, at a partner-sensible pace. A car passes, honks lightly, its driver smiling at the two of us. I smile back, because really, we are on it this time, and here we are, woman and dog, the picture of obedience and collaboration. A nice walk now; Jake-goes-home-now-Jake-goes-home-now. No pull, no tension on the lead, still moving in the right direction.
A block from home, Jake’s head pops up with interest, and for a moment I fear he’s on another possum. But no—though Jake has snagged some happy scent on the wind, he doesn’t break stride for it. Instead, he moves forward with great confidence, leading us down the last block, up a low set of steps, and to the front gate. He sits and grins at me, eyeing the treat bag.
This was right on so many levels. Right direction, right pace, no startle at the car honk, a lead up the steps, to the gate, and the happy Here we are! Sit. The only problem: We’re at the wrong house. Not only the wrong house, but one of the most splendid historic properties in our little town. A beautiful full-blown Victorian mansion with turrets and wraparound porches, its lovely landscaping bounded by a wrought-iron fence.
To Jake’s credit, we passed this house outbound, and today it’s immediately downwind of our own. I can see home from where we stand. So could Jake if he were looking for it, but at the moment he’s happy with the house he’s found for us. Holding his Sit, he perks every time I look at him. This is home, isn’t it? I give him credit for having good taste, if not accuracy. He seems pretty sure we should just head on through the gate.
21
SHE HAS DREAMS SHE CAN’T wake from and rooms she’s unable to leave, and she recognizes that these events, a part of her existence for two decades, are congruent to the life she lived as a child. That she still pays a price for childhood trauma doesn’t surprise her. That it took thirty years for it to surface in the first place does. Nancy is a fifty-five-year-old wife and mother of a daughter who is grown and gone. She’s a petite, pretty woman with a rich voice reminiscent of Big Band singers from the time she was born, a voice that tightens to a whisper every four minutes, literally like clockwork, caused by a vagus nerve stimulator implanted five years ago. The VNS is another in a long list of experimental protocols targeting Nancy’s diagnosed treatment-resistant depression. It is a condition that has otherwise resisted all medications and shock treatments. The vagus nerve stimulator doesn’t hurt, but when it pulses, her voice binds as though she’s on the verge of tears.
She is not on the verge of tears. Nancy speaks of her psychological state frankly, the way one would speak of a house inhabited for a long time. These are the rooms you’d expect and the strange spaces you wouldn’t. This is where the foundation’s wonky. And God knows what exactly is going on here.
I’ve known Nancy for more than a decade. As happened with Paula, our slim but affectionate connection was forged online, this time through a Pomeranian message board on AOL. When we both found ourselves on Facebook years after our days on AOL, Nancy and I reconnected, finding—or looking for—other old friends too. Some were missing, never to return. Nancy remembered our friend Erin and had followed her journey beside Smokey and Misty with compassion. Much has been written about the peril and falsity of online friendships, but many of us can vouch for the support system we find there at three in the morning when a child, a dog, or a jobless spouse takes a turn for the worse. We keep up with each other, and it’s not too much to say that when one of us has a serious loss, the other genuinely grieves. And now Nancy comes to me as her own path is turning.
She sends a private note online. She is straightforward. She’s struggled with mental illness awhile, has run the gauntlet of meds and therapies and alternative therapies, and at the point when she felt like giving up was the only option, her therapist suggested a psych service dog.
A psych service dog? Nancy loves dogs, of course, but this is new ground. This would be a dog like no other. A dog to be present, a dog to intervene. She has no idea where one might be found. Nancy asks if I can help. She’s excited, uncertain, but she’s intrigued by the possibilities, and there’s a lot of good energy in that.
She is a good wife, mostly, she says, and a better mother than she was for the longest time, when she almost derailed her own daughter in the way she too was derailed back in the sixties, before anyone really knew how to help a family like hers—five children in a household reared by a mother who was manic-depressive before the term was widely known.
Her father couldn’t take it. He fled her mother’s “spells” the year Nancy’s youngest brother was born, and in a Catholic family where divorce was a disgrace and appearances were sacred, Mary carried on, working to support her children, drinking as an answer to her undiagnosed condition, and carefully separating the children for the sake of decency: two of the girls in one bedroom, the two boys in another, and first-grade Nancy in the same room as her mother.
Seven-year-old Nancy accidentally discovered her mother after two separate suicide attempts. Mary’s recovery was a patch-and-go affair. Nancy became the gatekeeper who protected her mother from the other children’s squabbles; the caregiver who got her through weeping spells; the sprinter for the phone or the long-distance runner when help was needed. There was nothing right or fair about any of it. The family was so good at carrying on that the neighbors never knew. Nancy rethinks this. How could they not have known? She laughs a little, short and sharp, in the telling. Her story belongs on a therapist’s couch she says—another bad mother story, get in line. But for Nancy, the problem with talking about her mother is that somewhere in all her meticulous, elementary-school-age caregiving history, something so bad happened to her that she can’t remember it, and her brothers and sisters, shuffled off to relatives in secrecy at the time, don’t know enough about it to tell her and set the matter to rest.
Funny, she says, that the color white figures so frequently in these memories: white bag, white truck, white bra, white dogs rushing to a fence.
Whatever had happened to her made things better at home for a time, until the police presence faded, her siblings returned, and her father left again. No one mentioned Nancy’s abduction, even after their mother died unexpectedly, ten years later. As an adult working through mental illness now, she has plenty of questions and very few answers. Those who knew everything about what happened are dead, and the siblings sent off to relatives hardly remember it at all.
In the spirit of maintaining appearances, young-adult Nancy carried on, trailing the weight of her grownup childhood. Pregnant, married, divorced, scattered, she became a liberated variant of the mother she had cared for. She was in her thirties and thriving in a high-stress career with a worldwide shipping company when she had a catastrophic nervous breakdown and depression so severe she was hospitalized. Variously diagnosed—borderline personality disorder, bipolar, PTSD, manic disorder, agoraphobia—and even more variously treated with medications and electroconvulsive therapy, Nancy was ultimately unable to return to work and unable to care for her family. Depressed, agoraphobic periods were followed by manic episodes that led her to spend money wildly and disappear, sometimes for days.
Nancy has "a husband in a thousand, who stepped up,” she says. Twenty years her senior, second husband, Harv, raised Nancy’s daughter, maintained the household, loved and cared for Nancy with the numerous small adaptations that a marriage built on a fault line requires. But he is no longer strong. Nancy’s therapist has pointed out that the caregiving will probably soon need to change hands. Nancy understands this inevitability, hears the sound of its approach in the ragged breathing of her husband asleep.
She is very much afraid. On very good days, she can imagine managing all of it—the whole house, the retirement, the illness, the love with pending losses. On bad days, the fear comes back, fear she has known since childhood, suggesting the worst is about to happen and proving that it sometimes does, fear that prevents her from leaving the house and sets up a cycle of catastrophic thinking that she paces out across the living room floor. Nancy still dreads nightfall and the insomnia that goes with it, knowing that insomnia is the trigger for manic attacks that are even more dangerous to her husband and herself than doom thinking.
Nancy is smart, practical, and aware of her own frailty. She needs to be able to leave the house, and she needs to be able to be at peace when she stays. Her husband deserves every care she can give him, and she, Nancy, deserves to believe that the end of his days will not have to be the end of hers too.
“Most therapists would have locked me up if I mentioned suicide as the only possible option,” Nancy says, but when she was honest with her current psychiatrist, this one calmly suggested it was time to find the therapy that would teach Nancy that survival was possible . . . and desirable. A psychiatric service dog might be an option here, a dog taught to intervene and redirect Nancy’s dangerous behaviors and comfort the night dread that keeps her awake. “A large dog and a calm one,” the therapist recommended, “a dog with great physical presence, so you feel safe in its bigness.”
Nancy read my first book, Scent of the Missing, and came to know my search partner Puzzle even better through the book than she had through our conversations online. When her therapist recommended Nancy find a service partner, Puzzle’s nature attracted Nancy to golden retrievers. She says she’s looking for a golden like Puzzle, with a kindly manner and a friendly expression, but she isn’t sure where to turn or how to determine which dog is best. On a practical level, she is new to big breeds. Worse, Nancy’s heart is wide open, and she knows she could choose a dog based on an impulse, a dog that wouldn’t be right for the collaboration she needs to forge.
“Safe in its bigness.” She repeats her therapist’s advice to me, realizing that my Puzzle is petite and wondering how many goldens are larger. Having a big dog is quite a concept for someone with her particular memories, Nancy says. This will be a serious step, and despite every objection she has conjured (house size, fixed income, husband’s health, situational cynophobia!), she has moved forward. And so the research and thoughtful quest for her partner has begun, with all its issues of age, health, and temperament required by nonprofit service-training facilities. Nancy describes her search as often discouraging, but she feels grounded and proactive. Is it possible that simply searching for the right canine partner is a therapeutic step?
One day, after weeks of e-mails, phone calls, and near misses, “The universe aligned and the gods laughed,” Nancy tells me. Enter Lexie, a very light blond retriever from a bad situation who could use a little rescuing herself. On meeting, Lexie is friendly, calm, and gentle. She is also a big white dog.
The universe was looking out for her, Nancy believes, and looking out for Lexie, too, on the day that they first met. Taking her therapist’s advice and the general good PR surrounding golden retrievers, a dog lover who found it easy to believe in their innate goodness, Nancy had launched herself hopefully toward a therapy she believed could work. She recognizes now that she had no clear picture of the training involved and the rare kind of dog that might be able to meet the demands of the work. Though big dogs were still frightening to her, Nancy had agreed to her therapist’s recommendation. She agreed to a meeting with the breeders who were surrendering Lexie.
The reason for the surrender would have washed Lexie out of a formal service dog program. She had pupped, and pupped, and pupped again—litter after litter of beautiful light golden retrievers—and multiple pregnancies had been very hard on her hips. Lexie now had hip dysplasia, a condition that rendered her useless to her previous owners. She wasn’t an old dog, but multiple, heedless breedings had aged her.
There is risk for the person who makes a choice of service partner that’s driven by compassion, and Nancy says that even as she was moved by Lexie’s plight, she was aware that she was choosing a dog whose limitations would also limit the ways the dog would be able to serve. Lexie would never be able to walk long distances on hard surfaces. For a younger handler needing daily assistance at home, at work, and in between, Lexie would not have been an appropriate candidate. But Nancy was already aware of the tasks she’d need from a canine partner, and long-distance walking would not be one of them. Nancy needed a dog who would disrupt the loop of her obsessive anxiety, a dog who would wake her from nightmares, and a dog whose presence would encourage her out of the house and into the neighborhood. Without help, without formal evaluation of any kind, Nancy was making the choice on instinct.
She was aware that the partnership might not work out. She also knew that Lexie needed an advocate, fast, and if Lexie couldn’t ultimately be trained to assist her, Nancy could at least keep her safe and find her an appropriate home. Nancy adopted Lexie out of instinct, compassion, and what she says was a nudge she couldn�
�t deny. Something good would come of it for both of them. She felt sure of that, even as she watched, with trepidation, Lexie enter the house. Nancy found that every movement from the dog was unfamiliar and a little threatening. The dog wasn’t hyper. She wasn’t aggressive. She wasn’t loud. Lexie was just so big.
It took a month, Nancy says, before she found herself able to relax and really trust the dog that had given her no reason not to trust her. It helped that Lexie was gentle with Nancy’s Pomeranian, Jerry, who was by nature timid with big dogs. It helped that Lexie almost immediately connected to Nancy, choosing to move with her through the house, be in the same room, and settle nearby. And it helped most, perhaps, that Lexie seemed to naturally pay attention to Nancy in a considered way. After her life as a kennel dog, perhaps she was as surprised by the gift of fellowship as Nancy was. The freedom of movement and the opportunity for companionship may have been as important to her too. Whatever the reason, Lexie had the gift of steady gaze, and she would watch her new owner with a soft eye and friendly interest. Nancy says it didn’t take long for Lexie to recognize her partner’s state of being, and after her first experiences with Nancy in periods of deep, cyclical anxiety, it took very little for Lexie to choose to intervene.
Nancy describes the wheel of her obsessive thought as being as unpredictable as it is maddening. The product of anxiety that can attach itself to anything (“even this phone call,” she tells me during an interview), whatever it is that worries her presents itself, sparks an anxiety, is addressed, brings up a tangential problem, causes more worry, is addressed again—perhaps resolved, even—and then, in the brief, light free-fall moment after resolution, it introduces itself again. The pattern is so entrenched and the worry so compelling that Nancy finds it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to lift herself free.
The Possibility Dogs Page 20