Will's Red Coat

by Tom Ryan

  Not a day went by when I hadn’t thought about euthanasia, but here I was running toward our car and telling him, “Don’t you die. Not so soon. Not yet!”

  “It’s one of two things,” Christine O’Connell told me in the examination room. “It’s either a stroke or something called old dog’s vestibular disease. We should know within three days. If it’s ODVD, it will dissipate, and he’ll mostly be okay again. There may be a lingering head tilt and some other signs. If it’s a stroke, we’ll . . . Well, let’s just hope it’s not a stroke.”

  When I laid William on his bed at home, I covered him with a towel warmed in the dryer. The fire, rage, and distrust had left his eyes, replaced by a vacant watery sadness. I lifted his head and placed it on the back of my hand. Our eyes met. What I saw was helplessness.

  Throughout the next day and a half, I did everything for William. I tried feeding him by hand, but he didn’t eat much. I propped his head up so he could drink from a shallow dish. I carried him outside every three hours while holding him up when he went to the bathroom. When I did this, his head flopped to one side. There were no fights when I brought him up and down the stairs. Instead, I hugged his head against chest with my free hand.

  That first night Atticus and I slept on the floor next to William’s bed. I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

  The next day passed as the previous one had. There was no improvement. When William slept I took Atticus for a walk, or I’d do chores around the house, but whenever he woke up, I lay next to him and Atticus would lie down next to me. I continued to place William’s head on my hand, and he would keep it there.

  When it was time for bed on the second night after his incident, I decided not to sleep on the floor again because I hadn’t slept well the night before. I placed William in his bed and took one of my unwashed hiking shirts, folded it, and placed it under his head for a pillow. I wanted him to have my scent with him. I kissed his forehead and covered him up.

  Atticus and I slept up in our bed, five feet away. Looking out the window, I watched the stars above us. I prayed for guidance, patience, and acceptance. I prayed for the wisdom to be able to do the right thing at the right time. Mostly, though, I prayed for William. Not for him to live or to die, but to be without pain throughout his body. And I prayed for his suffering heart. He didn’t ask to be left behind or to live with someone he didn’t know. He didn’t ask to be neglected or forgotten or discarded or left off in some strange place when he got old. He didn’t ask for the pain in his body, the way his teeth were rotting, the way his hips ached so much he couldn’t sit down. He didn’t ask for any of it.

  When I woke up with the rising sun, I looked over at William’s bed. He was gone.

  But where? And how?

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and that’s when I saw him. I sat still, not knowing what to think. Atticus hopped to the bench at the foot of the bed and then onto the floor and went over to William. It was the first time he’d approached him. He looked down at him, and then up at me.

  The little white body was as still as could be. Time stopped. I held my breath as if it would help. Eventually, the slow rise of his chest came. He was breathing.

  But how did he do it?

  Somehow during the night, William dragged a body that couldn’t move to the side of the bed and slept beside and below where my head was. He was as close as he could get to me. His nose was nuzzled into my hiking shirt, which he had hauled along with him.

  It would take several more days for William to walk on his own again. For the rest of his life, his head would often slant to one side, but the most important healing had nothing to do with his body.

  It was clear to me that William had made a choice to live again. He was reaching out.

  There are lyrics in the late Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that are perfect for what transpired that weekend. “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

  That’s the way it was with William. The crack brought the light, and the light brought a new chance, and the chance brought a new beginning with new friends and a new voyage was born.

  Something else had changed on that May morning.

  There was no more William. There was only a Will, and his desire to live.

  Once again, spring was following winter.

  2

  A Mack Truck Full of Crazy

  This is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast,” a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  Will had decided he wanted to live. But I had no idea what to do with him, or how long he would live. Our troubled start was nothing like I had expected. His rage was a surprise. I knew it came out of pain and fear, but I wasn’t sure I was equipped for it.

  I didn’t know what to do for him, so I thought back to when Atticus was a puppy. Paige Foster had suggested I carry him wherever we went the first month we were together. That obviously wasn’t going to happen with Will, because he seemed to take me as a threat. So I tried to think of other ways to reach out to Will. One of them, an obvious choice, was to respect him and allow him to be himself.

  All I ever wanted for Atticus was to simply be Atticus. I hoped he’d be his own dog as much as I was my own man. I wanted him to have choices. Meaning no disrespect to the likes of Cesar Millan, Patricia McConnell, the Monks of New Skete, and other published dog experts, I wasn’t interested in raising a dog. I set out to raise an individual. That was the way I prepared Atticus for the world. With Will, I wished to do the same, but with obvious differences.

  I was ignoring the contemporary professionals on animal behavior and relying instead on a pair of fellows from Concord, Massachusetts, named Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. I suppose that might make me the only person to ever nurture first a puppy and then an angry old dog on the tenets of transcendentalism.

  In 1830 Emerson wrote in his journal, “In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”

  How grand is that? Infinitude.

  It speaks of endless possibilities for the individual so he or she can flourish and make more of a contribution to the world.

  Emerson was a proponent of the individual, believing that government, the education system, organized religion, and society exerted pressures on people to always conform. He also noted, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

  This is how I raised Atticus, and what I wanted for Will. If a person’s individuality could be respected and celebrated, I reasoned, why not an animal’s?

  Atticus and I learned together, and I wanted the same thing for Will. I hoped we’d grow through authentic experiences.

  I’ve always believed it was naive to think that every lion is exactly like every other lion, or every black bear is the same, or that each fox is a clone to all the others. I’m not deeply knowledgeable about science, but common sense and my own experience tell me this is true.

  I have always believed in this, to some extent, which is why when Max died it was silly for me to go looking for another version of him. As it turns out, Atticus and Max couldn’t have been any more different. I don’t ascribe all those differences to the way they were nurtured. I think it also has to do with nature. And yet they were of the same breed.

  Will was also of the same breed, but the three of them had nothing in common, other than—me.

  Similarly, I am the youngest of nine siblings. Although we share blood and the same upbringing, I have little in common with my brothers and sisters, and many of them have little in common with one another. Like dogs of the same breed, we may look alike, but we don’t act alike. There is nothing wrong with any of that—nothing wrong with them or me. It’s just the way life plays out. Vive la différence!

  I didn’t set out to change the world by the way I raised Atticus. I wanted only to live in a way that would work for the two of us. It was a private choice for our private lives.

  It’s ironic that I
am at the point where I don’t give much thought to dog breeds. Any kind of “breedism” conflicts with my deeply held beliefs. And yet I’ve now lived with three miniature Schnauzers. But that has more to do with dear old fate than it does my wishes. Max needed a home, so I took him in, not really knowing what a miniature Schnauzer was. I had to look up the breed online after I agreed to take Max in sight unseen. When I figured it out, I cringed. I considered myself more a Black Lab man. Atticus came into my life because I went in search for another Max. And Will, well, you know by now why I took him in. It wasn’t the breed. What mattered was that it was reported he was good with other dogs, and more important, he desperately needed a place to die with dignity.

  One morning last year when I was shopping in North Conway’s Four Your Paws Only, I was approached by a woman.

  “Tom!”

  “Yes.” I didn’t know her.

  She pressed closer and leaned in, like we were coconspirators. “You and I have something in common.”

  “Oh?” I stepped back. “What’s that?”

  “We’re both Schnauzer people!”

  “Oh, um, I’m not really a Schnauzer person.”

  “Now that’s funny!”

  “No, seriously, I’m not. I know it may not seem that way, but the whole breed thing doesn’t mean much to me.”

  She stopped for a moment and settled on a compromise. “Okay, but at least you’re a dog person. Just like me!”

  “Actually, I’m not really a dog person either.”

  She cocked her head to one side. Her forehead wrinkled.

  “If you really need to say I’m something, you could say I’m an elephant person.”

  “An elephant person? But you live with two dogs.”

  “That’s because I don’t have room for two elephants.”

  But even if I did, I wouldn’t treat them as elephants. First and foremost, they’d be individuals. I’d treat them as I have always treated Atticus and Max, and finally, Will.

  After much education from the animals I’ve known, I would say that yes, dogs of the same breed share many physical traits and are susceptible to comparable health issues, and of course they can look similar, but that’s where it ends. I no more think every Schnauzer is alike, or every beagle or poodle or bulldog for that matter, than I think every Kenyan, Croatian, American, Republican, Catholic, Jew, Democrat, vegan, hunter, Bostonian, Kansan, or New Yorker is exactly like all his or her counterparts.

  Of course I shared none of this with Will, not that he could hear me pontificate or would want to listen. He was having a difficult enough time trying not to fall down. While he recovered, he slept most of his days away, and when he was awake he didn’t want much of anything to do with Atticus or me. He wanted to be left alone.

  Atticus and I would return from a walk and I’d see Will curled up in his bed in the corner. He’d raise an eyelid, see that we were home, and ignore us. When he did get up and move around our apartment, he didn’t interact with us or look at us. When he became a little more mobile, he’d go into the bedroom to get away from us.

  During a telephone conversation with my aunt Marijane, I said, “I want to help him, I just don’t know how.”

  “Tommy, sometimes the only thing you can do in hospice is be there for someone. They’ve come to a great reckoning in their lives and they have to figure things out. You can’t take it personally.”

  “Hospice?”

  “That’s what you are doing for Will, isn’t it? Offering him hospice? Didn’t you say you wanted to give him a place to die with dignity?”

  That’s exactly what I was doing, but the term hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “Tommy, you are giving him a sacrament,” she added.

  Marijane was a desert flower of mysticism, insight, compassion, and empathy. She was such a visionary that in 1977 People magazine wrote about her work.

  When she was young she became a nun in the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and earned a nursing degree, specializing in helping the disabled. She had never been farther than an hour outside of Boston when, as a thirty-three-year-old, she was sent to St. Michael’s, Arizona, in the middle of the Navajo Nation to take care of another nun who was dying of cancer. There was only so much she could do for her patient, so she began to walk among the Navajo people and talk with them the best she could with her strong Boston accent.

  It wasn’t long before she had a second patient. A Navajo family brought their polio-stricken eight-year-old son to her. She worked with him for months with little success, observed constantly by a Navajo medicine man from atop his horse. Every day he’d watch silently as she put the boy through exercises. His silence drove Marijane crazy, because she was outgoing by nature. Back in Boston, many of the other nuns called her “Maria” after the Julie Andrews character in The Sound of Music. Ebullient and youthfully innocent, she played the guitar, liked being active, and laughed with ease—and she was pretty.

  One day, finally, her polio patient was able to stand up on his own by using two chairs. The silent medicine man watched intently, then road away as fast as his horse could carry him, but returned quickly, bringing his three-year-old grandchild, who suffered with cerebral palsy.

  Within a few months, Marijane was working with twenty-five patients. She immersed herself in the Navajo culture and founded St. Michael’s Special Education School, which created change throughout the Navajo Nation. In return, she was changed by their culture.

  The Navajo people fell in love with Marijane—but they weren’t alone. She was witty, bright, and kind, but her most endearing quality was her rare ability of looking into another, seeing his or her darkest side, and responding without judgment.

  Many were surprised when she left the Church and St. Michael’s, although she always stayed close to the people she met, returning often to visit with them. She went on to receive a degree in psychology and worked in hospice.

  After my father died, Marijane and I became close. She was in Arizona, a Phoenix Suns fan, and I was in New Hampshire, a Boston Celtics fan. We’d joke and joust when the teams played each other.

  When Following Atticus was published, I flew Marijane out to join Atticus and me for several days along our book tour. It’s something I would have wanted to do with my father. Although he wouldn’t have accepted the offer, secretly he would have been pleased that I wanted him along with Atticus and me. So instead I asked Marijane to join us.

  She and I had never spent much time in each other’s company except at an occasional family reunion. But we’d spoken and e-mailed often, and after we spent three straight days together, our connection was fortified.

  My family had splintered when my mother died. We were never close, and I longed for any kind of intimacy with them, but, as Marijane would say, some people don’t have a lot to give. They do the best they can. “Sometimes I’m surprised some of your brothers and sisters are able to sit up and take nourishment. You kids didn’t have it easy.”

  She’d also say, “I don’t envy your father either. I wouldn’t want to walk a mile in his moccasins.”

  Many times she told me the story of how after my mother died, he’d call her out on the reservation late at night and all he could do was cry. It would last for as long as thirty minutes. “I’d answer the phone. Jack couldn’t talk. All he had to give were tears. We did a lot of that the first year. He’d call and cry. I would listen, and inside I’d cry for my brother.”

  At the conclusion of every one of our conversations, or in closing each e-mail, Marijane would end with “Walk in beauty.” At first I thought it was from the Byron poem, but she later explained that it had to do with living in a loving way toward the world. The Navajo told her that she “walked in beauty” because of the way she danced with the natural world and all its peoples and animals and gave freely of her heart.

  During her trip east for our book tour, Marijane was fascinated by Atticus. He would sit on her lap in the front passenger seat, as if they’d always known each other.
At the end of each day, when we’d say good night, she’d say, “Good night, Tommy, walk in beauty. Good night, Atticus, walk in beauty.” She talked to him like I did, as a peer, and I appreciated that.

  When she arrived home in Phoenix and Atticus and I continued on our tour, we would talk after each event. She wanted to know how things went, how many people showed up, and how they responded to my talk. Late one night, after we said good night, she sent me an e-mail that greeted me in the morning.

  “You know I love dogs. I’ve lived with some wonderful companions, and I can never pass a dog without saying hello. But Atticus is very unusual. He’s the one who walks in beauty. He’s what I’m trying to be more like. I know you don’t talk about him in that way, but you know it’s true. Spending those days with you two was very special to me. I think Jack was smiling down on us. I love you both, please pass that on to Atticus.”

  When Will came to live with us, Marijane asked questions about his mood, his health—she wanted the smallest bits of information. When I let her know that Atticus was keeping his distance, being respectful but not warm, she said, “He’s waiting until he’s needed. You’ll see.”

  With Marijane as a role model, I became less judgmental of others and myself, but understood I had a long way to go. I asked Marijane what she would do if she were with us, and she said, “You’re already doing it. I see you putting yourself in his moccasins all the time. Have faith. He’s been through a lot.”

  When I told Marijane about an old girlfriend, she listened and waited until I was done, then responded, “You know, Tommy, none of us are perfect, but be careful of the ones driving a Mack truck full of crazy.”

  That was one of the differences between Marijane and me. While we both could see a Mack truck full of crazy coming our way, she didn’t judge the person. She protected herself, but also offered compassion and understanding, if only in the form of prayers. I would never hear her belittle anyone. She would talk about getting angry with someone, but I never witnessed her being judgmental.