The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  That was the beginning of the visits that continue still, though they happen at random. Some days we might see the pair twice a day. There have occasionally been weeks when we don’t see each other at all, a condition that used to make my heart catch, concerned that something might have happened to mother, or daughter, or wheelchair. Soon it made better sense: their presence or absence is driven mostly by weather. Neither mother nor daughter can bear the heat. A strong wind makes the wheelchair harder to push.

  As we meet across months, our language skills don’t improve much, but we have a few rituals we’ve come to understand. Mizzen moves from my arms into the daughter’s, and then onto the mother’s lap, where we both hold her until she settles. The elderly lady has had a series of strokes, it seems, and in the time I have come to know them, I’ve seen one hand fail, and parts of her face seem to go slack, giving her a harsh expression that seems cruel for such a gentle soul. There are other issues. Alzheimer’s, perhaps, or another form of dementia—there is a childish vulnerability that is more pronounced some days than others. She speaks rarely. When she does, her voice slurs across the Spanish, making it even more musical to my ears. Though her daughter always bends forward to hear her, their communication seems almost free of speech. The daughter cradles her mother’s shoulders when the wheelchair isn’t moving, sometimes folding over the wheelchair to press her cheek to the soft down of her head, guiding her hands to curve around Mizzen’s back and holding them there. The moment is bittersweet. Sometimes the daughter turns her face into her mother’s temple and closes her eyes.

  Mizzen sits calmly with them. In the house she can be a little hyper, and I wasn’t sure how well she’d adjust to the senior lady’s frailty, but somehow she’s able to contain herself and lie quietly, enjoying the tentative strokes on their own terms. She seems to like it best when both mother and daughter are touching her. She relaxes into the caresses, burying her nose into the cupped palms, then looking up into their faces. Sometimes, in the way of dogs being adored, she will look at me as if to make sure I am noticing it all. She croons a little, Winston Churchill rumbling low, when her ears are rubbed. She enjoys a gentle inspection of her white-gloved paws. There is not another dog in my house more suited to these visits than Mizzen.

  I am grateful. If I spoke better Spanish, I could better express to mother and daughter what their affection brings to Mizzen too. They’ve made her special, something I think she can sense. If I spoke better Spanish, maybe I’d give them my phone number or tell them to knock and ask for Mizzen if we aren’t outside. But if I spoke better Spanish, or they spoke better English, perhaps we’d make appointments we couldn’t keep, obligations we’d feel guilty about failing later.

  Buenos días, we say for hello and goodbye; nods and gracias, gracias all around.

  Once, after they set off again, the daughter turns from her grip on the wheelchair. She smiles at Mizzen first and then at me. She says in English: “Every day we come for the little brown bear, we are good.” Then she turns back to the wheelchair as the wind catches both of them—a harder progress, a rasp of wheels, her mother’s fine hair lifting light and free.

  23

  I AM STANDING IN the kitchen, ringed by curious dogs. They are watching me sneeze for the sixth time, perhaps waiting for some kind of levitation. A series of sneezes in rapid succession, separated only by pauses while I stare stupidly, fixedly, open-mouthed, waiting for the next one that’s already burning in the chute to actually happen. The dogs have heard me sneeze before, but really, this is something extraordinary. Kuh-chow! Kuh-chow! Kuh-chow! Kuh-chow-chow! Kuh-chow!

  Just before another one, Jake Piper comes forward to sit by me, rests one paw on my right foot. When I sneeze, he leans away a little, ears swinging back.

  It’s my own fault. I’ve got chalk on my hands, and I’m allergic to chalk. Now I’ve absently rubbed my nose. I discovered the chalk allergy thirty years ago when I was a student teacher in the days before whiteboards, but I had forgotten all about it when I got the bright idea of a little chalkboard in the kitchen to post lesson plans for each dog as we train forward. Just the kind of absent-minded, kitschy little idea I come up with, and now, as I squeak across the chalkboard, making the dogs’ heads tilt, reminding myself to wash my hands, I think that at least I’ve amused them. They all came into the kitchen to see what was up. They all remained for the show.

  “Jake,” I say, “these are your marching orders, buddy.”

  I’ve lost some of my long-ago chalkboard skills and have erased several times to make the words legible, then to make them neat across the slate.

  The chalkboard reads:

  JAKE

  TASK: REDIRECT REPETITIVE BEHAVIOR

  The writing is crooked and unreadable. I erase and rewrite it again.

  With Merion and others with similar conditions in mind, I am about to begin training Jake to intervene in sample OCD behaviors. There is a wide range to choose from, some easier for a dog to redirect than others. OCD refocus is an important skill for psych dogs partnering handlers with the condition.

  While OCD was once considered rare, which might have been due in part to limited understanding of the condition and patient reluctance to disclose behaviors they recognized as irrational, that is no longer the case. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that about 1 percent of the adult American population suffer from the disorder—about 2.2 million people—and approximately 0.5 percent of that group are classified as having severe symptoms.

  A search-and-rescue colleague once remarked that she has known plenty of OCD behaviors in first responders. “Firefighters check stoves,” she said. “Police officers get hung up on locks.” That was an uneasy comfort to me in 2004, the awareness that maybe I wasn’t alone in my reaction to the search field, the recognition that for many people, the work can strike very deep.

  People with the full-blown condition and mental health professionals alike describe a life with OCD as a life in secret chains. Whether fearing germs and compulsively washing, frightened of harm and compulsively locking, holding rituals or numbers as a talisman against catastrophe, or hoarding goods, even trash, out of fear of future need, those with OCD have a deep anxiety to soothe at the same time they often recognize the unreasonableness of their actions. Many describe being terribly embarrassed. They withdraw socially and avoid mentioning repetitive behaviors to family and therapists.

  Dr. Steven Phillipson and others suggest that many people who don’t have clinical OCD have nonetheless experienced repetitive thoughts (a nagging, perhaps overblown, worry that lasts for days; a song you can’t get out of your head) and performed acts not far from the OCD array (always using a foot to flush the toilet, habitually knocking on wood to prevent a bad event from happening). The line can be a fine one. What constitutes true OCD? Phillipson suggests that one simplified test is to ask yourself what amount of money it would take for you to not perform the habit that results from the troubling thoughts. Those without OCD might cheerfully stop the behavior for ten to a hundred dollars. Those with OCD might find it impossible to give up even for a hundred thousand dollars.

  While I have known this ugly cycle, and it took only an insistent puppy to lead me free of those habits (I might have said, Yeah, I can give this up for a hundred dollars, and maybe I could have), it is not difficult for me to imagine how overwhelming the condition could be at its worst. Respondents on mental-health forums post about it with equal parts fear and frustration, and behind their online avatars, they describe their own struggles.

  There are those with an obsessive desire for order, placement, or symmetry, which they believe keeps some bad thing—joblessness or poor health or the death of a family member—at bay. There are lucky numbers that must be repeated in order for some to survive the day, objects that must be vanquished by some ritual behavior or saying. There are those who never touch a doorknob or who scrub their hands raw after picking up the mail—in gloves. Some talk about sleepless nights caused by fea
r of the stove being on. They go to bed, worry about the stove, get up, check the stove, go to bed, wonder if they really checked as carefully as they should have, get up, check the stove, go back to bed, get up, and so on. Hours of checking and rechecking, lost sleep, anxiety soothed only at the moment of touching the stove and then renewed the moment that contact is lost. And then, one woman writes, there is the anxiety produced by the fear that all of this means she is completely losing her mind.

  One young man I talk with calls his OCD “the boa in the basement”—this huge thing not visible to outsiders, always there, mouth open wide, ready to consume him if he doesn’t feed it. Light switches are his nemesis. He feeds his fear by flipping them. A whole house of light switches: if they are off, they are turned on and then off again; if they are on, they are turned off and then on again. What is he afraid of? He can’t really say. Electrical fire, maybe, if the switch is on. Darkness, certainly, if the switch is off. The flip of a switch gives him a brief reprieve, and then the snake’s mouth opens once more. The boa is a perfect metaphor by a guy who’d like to write a book, he tells me, a work-from-home guy by trade who lives in a two-story house and finds it increasingly difficult to get his job done because the boa gets bigger and more demanding by the year. He estimates that on a bad day, he loses three to four hours flipping switches through the house.

  Psych service dogs, in conjunction with cognitive-behavioral therapies, can be a big help to partners with OCD. Fully trained to redirect the handler’s compulsive habit, the dog alerts the person to the behavior, then offers an alternative one. Some of these behaviors are typically provoked by departure or bedtime rituals, so the dog might urge the person toward either the door or the bed, offering affection or play as a distraction. Some, like Merion with her assistance dog Annie, train their dogs to bring the leash, “suggesting” a walk. The service dog acts as a reality check, a refocus, and a healthier reward for the handler.

  Nancy writes:

  For most people, there is extreme embarrassment involved [with OCD], because to the observer, it makes no sense whatsoever. . . . It is an extremely hard cycle to break because of the nature of anxiety → reward → anxiety → reward. Reward being a break in the anxiety for a short time. For me, to interrupt the cycle, it needs to be a larger reward than continuing the behavior. Enter petting/cuddling silky soft Lexie who deposits herself in front of, on top of, in the way of me. I cannot resist her love, and closeness with her has an instant calming effect on me. i.e.: reward. Does it always work? No, but it works enough of the time to be hugely beneficial to my life.

  For Jake’s refocus task, I choose a common compulsive habit. It is one that I have never had but understand: double-checking that the stove is off.

  That Jake naturally wants to be where I am is a bonus. That the stove is in the kitchen is another one. All the dogs tend to keep an eye on the kitchen, so getting Jake to follow my movements there is probably not going to be too difficult. Even though stove-checking is not my problem, Jake and I need to live as though it is. The first step is for Jake to attend to my movements at the stove. On lesson one, I simply want him to stay near me and watch me work there. I call him to sit, I tell him to stay, and I begin cleaning the stove. The Sit and Stay commands he is used to, but he’s a little bewildered by the commands in this context. He holds his Sit and Stay politely for a few minutes, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see his ears swing back and his posture shift. He’s had about enough of this. He doesn’t get the point.

  “Hold your Stay, Jakey,” I tell him, and when he is back in his attention posture, I give him a treat. Clean a little more. Give him another treat when we release. Lesson one over. The day outside is sloppy, but we go out to play ball anyway. I want to reward the good-natured, willing dog that seems happy to learn just about anything, even if it makes no sense to him. I watch him shake loose all the energy that being still and paying attention requires; he reminds me of students I’ve seen dance their way down the stairs after a final exam. The first time I throw the ball, Jake is so ready to play that he almost explodes, jumping so high and awkwardly I’m afraid he’ll take a hard fall. We play hard until he flops down in the grass and pants a smile up at me.

  An hour or so later, we try the same lesson again. When I move to the stove, Jake needs to be there, out of the way but watching. We will try this over and over, across days, with variations of time and activity. Jake will watch me clean and cook—in fact, I do more cleaning and cooking in this period than I have perhaps ever done, a bonus the first time I take my lunch and enjoy roasted vegetables in a soup broth I’ve made, with Jake as my audience. As long as I’m working at the stove, all he has to do is attend.

  But now we need to train to trouble. There’s no shortage of posts about stove-checking behaviors on the Internet, and I can sympathize with almost all of the descriptions. They sound much like my own intermittent problems with locked doors. In fact, some people posting on message boards talk about their anxiety as a beast in motion: they have transitioned from checking doors to checking the stove or from the stove to the dryer (one even from the dryer to the curling iron, double-checking that it was off, unplugged, and in the drawer), then back to the stove again. What is the meaning of all that? they wonder. Many respondents describe simply standing at the stove and staring at the knobs, looking hard across each knob to make sure the indicator is turned to Off. Some have to touch the knobs and attempt to turn them, feeling for the pressure of the Off position. Some touch the knobs and say “Off” aloud.

  What to teach Jake Piper? I decide to have him intervene if the handler touches knobs repetitively, says “Off, off, off, off” in a sequence, or simply stands and stares at the stove. Getting Jake to interrupt me touching the knobs or repeating the word off seems easy to train. The clear behavior or the significant word becomes a cue for action. It may be harder to train Jake to interrupt a frozen stare.

  And what should be his action? A few handlers tell me of their missteps in this direction. Some encouraged their dogs to bark then realized how annoyed they were getting with the barking that they themselves had asked for. They came away from the stove more irritable than redirected. One taught her Lab to squeeze himself between the stove and her, but instead of being redirected, she began to accommodate his position, determined to touch the knobs of the stove from three feet away, bending forward awkwardly over the dog. One handler had the bright idea of having the dog raise up with his forepaws on the counter beside the stove—an in-your-face Hey there that she couldn’t possibly ignore. She admits she (and her trainer) came up with that without thinking of her dog’s history. As a youngster, he’d been a terrible counter-surfer, had managed to eat whole bags of cookies and once an entire green bean casserole without ever dragging anything to the floor. The handler remembered only that the dog was tall enough to stretch up to the counter, didn’t consider that maybe he shouldn’t. Intelligent disobedience carried the day. She thinks her dog knew better. The first time she and the trainer attempted to teach him the paws-up-on-the-counter response to her knob fiddling, the dog looked at her in surprise and some suspicion, as though he remembered stern correction for counter-surfing in his youth. Was this some kind of trick? He refused to do it.

  It took a little while for the handler to recognize the conflict. Then she felt guilty. Worse, she realized that if her dog’s paws were in close proximity to the stove, he could possibly turn the knobs. She ultimately taught him to nose-bump her knee and stay there, leaning his weight against her until she bent down to pet him.

  Unlike the Poms, Jake Piper does not bark simply for the sake of it. He will flush a squirrel with a bark; he’ll bark to let me know about strangers coming too close to the house. He’ll bark at dog frenemies. But he’s happy to communicate with his voice, and he’s already learned the Speak and Whisper commands: the former produces a single ARF, the latter little more than a wuf.

  We decide to go with a Whisper and a lean-against-the-legs alert, followed b
y a rope tug as a refocus for the partner and a reward for the dog. Jake loves tug, and it’s a game the handler can’t play halfheartedly—especially with a strong, bull-necked dog like Jake. As we train, I carry a rope tug in my pocket.

  For the next step, I move to the stove, and Jake settles into his watch position. I begin by touching each stove knob and saying “Off” with every touch. The first time we do this, Jake is puzzled. I don’t normally talk to myself, and in our quiet house, he’s not used to free-floating words not directed to another human or another dog. In my peripheral vision, I watch him watch me, the head tilting, the wayward ears flicking. I touch, say “Off,” touch, say “Off,” touch, say “Off,” and at the end of the sequence, I turn to Jake with a happy “Whisper!” and swing the tug rope out of my pocket.

  Wow, Jake did not see that coming, and he porpoises up with a bark that makes the stove burners ring, grabs the tug toy out of my hand, and races down the corridor. Certainly not a Whisper, not exactly in control, but it’s a start.

  “My service dog helps me grow at my own rate, on my own terms,” a handler tells me. As well-meaning as her family is, and as supportive, she feels she couldn’t achieve the kind of growth she hopes for with only human help. For every week of good days, she has two bad ones, she estimates, and in the bad days, she can’t help feeling she’s failed her husband, “who tries very hard,” and her children, “who have lost some of their own childhood to the problem of me.” At night—and sometimes in daylight too—she becomes worried about windows, unable to shake the sense of voyeurs or intruders. She has been afraid of this since she was a child and watched old horror movies where something was always waiting just outside, but instead of fading as she matured, her anxiety deepened. She can’t help checking that the windows are shut and locked, the curtains carefully drawn.