LULLED by the peaceful darkness of the reading room I thought about what Sandi had said.
Take Cleo’s spirit on a journey … realize all the wonderful qualities she embodied … pour all the skill, effort, and talent you had intended for Cleo into the lives and health of other unfortunate animals.
This promise, hastily but sincerely made in a flitting moment of supreme emotional susceptibility, suggested that I somehow knew how to take the spirit of a deceased dog on a sterile expedition into an operating room. Of course, I didn’t. This scenario didn’t come with a set of instructions as to how to proceed. To make this happen my scientific rigor would have to embrace intuition. To my way of thinking, Sandi wanted me to think of Cleo as a clinical touchstone, there if I, or some other animal, needed her. And it was clear if any dog did, it was Helen. I was facing a very tricky surgery trying to rid Helen of a cancer that had snuggled up to her heart, a location many of us consider to be the emotional and physical core of our being. Everything about this scenario required that I make an enormous leap of faith. So why not jump? These animals seemed like kindred souls. If anyone could guide me on this endeavor it would be Cleo.
Many clinicians (far wiser clinicians than I) might prefer to ignore, refute, or circumvent the concept of an animal possessing a soul. For the most part I had fallen into the latter category, but for my promise to be more than convenient lip service, I forced myself to dig deep, to consider some tough questions, to wander down ignored, forgotten, or neglected pathways and try to justify why this commitment seemed reasonable.
Much to my parents’ chagrin, as a pimply teenage boy I rejected Church of England Sunday school and its ecclesiastical arguments for life after death, and that left the scientist in me succumbing to the sway of cynicism. Okay, so the law of thermodynamics, the one claiming energy can change from one state to another although the total amount of energy remains the same, gave me pause, but I found it a stretch to believe that some nineteenth-century German physicist had actually intended to engineer a scientific proof of a metaphysical afterlife. In fact, I would go so far as to say it wasn’t until I became a father, with children of my own, that I came to realize there was so much more to life than could be grasped by mere mortals.
When my youngest daughter, Emily, was three years old she claimed to see dead people. One day we were in the car and she was strapped into her car seat, watching the road, singing along to another stirring riff by a purple dinosaur, when we were overtaken by an eighteen-wheeler and from nowhere she announced, “I remember when one of those took my skin off.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror looking for Bruce Willis, waiting for the green vomit and a Linda Blair cranium spin, but Emily sat there smiling back at Daddy, totally unfazed.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My doll was in the road,” she said. “I ran out to get it and it hit me.”
This sixth sense reappeared some days later when I was tucking her into bed. Instead of sleeping in the middle of her twin bed, she made a point of setting up her pillows, stuffed toys, and blanket off to one side.
“Aren’t you worried about falling out of bed?” I asked.
Again, with a weary look that she would later perfect as a teenager, she said, “This is where Grandma Ann sleeps.”
I’m certain the hairs on the back of my neck plumped up like gooseflesh.
“But you’ve never met Grandma Ann,” I said.
My wife’s mother died four years before my youngest daughter was born.
“Yes I have,” she said. “We met in heaven.”
Coming from an older child, I might have blamed this on a vivid imagination, attention seeking, inappropriate channel surfing on the TV, or the rehearsed lines of a practical joke. But Emily was so young and she seemed so innocent, so sincere.
Only when a dog trainer came to the house to teach our Jack Russell terrier, Sophie, some tricks (or was it the other way round?) did we have an explanation (of sorts) for this unsettling phenomenon. I remember the guy clearly—late forties, transparent skin, baby-bird features, wispy hair of the postchemotherapy patient. Despite his frailty he was upbeat about his remission from leukemia. He worked with Sophie for about an hour, happy to have my daughter join him in the session. As he was leaving he told me he was a practicing Buddhist, but as I braced for the literature and awkward invitation to join him and his friends for coffee, he said, “Emily’s a messenger. You need to listen to her.”
Sadly, my understanding of Buddhism was restricted to shaved heads, orange monk suits, a reluctance to kill creepy crawlies, and the concept of reincarnation. I asked for clarification.
“Sometimes children get caught between two lives. They can remember their past. They may or may not be able to verbalize what they remember but for most of them that do, this window into their past closes by the time they are about four years old.”
We never saw the cancer-survivor dog trainer again. I don’t remember why exactly, because all of us liked him very much. Perhaps it was Sophie’s fault for being too smart, too easy to train. Not that it mattered. What he said was absolutely true. Well, at least the closing window part. From time to time Emily would regale us with snippets of information that seemed as disturbing as they were impossible to contrive, and shortly after she blew out four candles on a birthday cake, her echoes from a past life faded away and were gone, forever.
I know what you’re thinking—not exactly proof of a great hereafter—but please, bear with me. Leaning back in a comfy chair, hypnotized by Helen’s X-rays, I realized this trip down memory lane was not a quest for definitive answers. I was just hoping to unearth some kind of vindication for my pact with Sandi. And again, I found a connection through my daughter.
Although Emily entered our world as a beautiful blue-eyed blond, her outward perfection was belied by her DNA. In an unwitting roll of the hereditary dice, my wife and I had beaten the one-in-four odds of a crafty Austrian monk by the name of Mendel, and passed on a defective pair of recessive genes. Our invisible, enduring gift to our daughter would be the number-one genetic killer of children and young adults, a disease called cystic fibrosis, or CF.
I won’t go into the details of bringing up a child with a chronic disease for which there is no cure, apart from saying that such an experience has a funny way of changing your outlook on both life and death. As I stated earlier, in my opinion none of us are spared suffering of some description. Perhaps suffering is simply part of the plan. We might flail and thrash, cry out for help, make a lot of noise and smother anyone who comes to our rescue, but ultimately our choice to survive our personal form of suffering must come from within. Briefly, during my own battle, I considered quitting veterinary medicine. How could I justify working on pets when my own child needed me to find a cure? I should go back to school, become an MD, a researcher, and make a real difference in her life. Though the chaos and fear never subsides entirely, eventually I had a breakthrough. They call it acceptance, and with it came an appreciation of how lucky I was, how blessed simply to have this child in my life.
There’s something to be said for the certainty of death and our absolute incapacity to control when our number will come up. Despite the prospect of a bony grim reaper finger tap-tapping on your shoulder at any time, it seems as though we only appreciate the dogma of living every day as though it were our last when our doctor drops his eyes and shakes his head. It doesn’t have to be this way. For me, it took a sick child to make me recognize the fragility of life and the need to enjoy the moment and to live in it, until the desire to squeeze all the joy out of it becomes overwhelming and, with a lot of effort, even possible. I believe Sandi Rasmussen found this kind of joy in Cleo. Of course it’s simply not possible or healthy to live every day as though it were your last. We’d go out of our minds, permanently tortured in some sort of hellish wonderland at the bottom of a rabbit hole, striving toward a goal guaranteed for failure. But Sandi found a compromise, able to relish and bask in every wond
erful memory of her little dog, and in doing so, even given the relatively short amount of time they had together, she realized how lucky she was. Somehow Cleo cast her spell and also managed to squeeze in a little wisdom and a whole lot of loyalty. Regardless of when or how we lose them, our pets are with us for such a short period of time. Through my daughter, I came to find a renewed empathy for my clients, the “pet parents” whose fear of losing a loved one is no less heartfelt than mine. Sometimes I think this lesson helps me connect with people in ways that would have been unattainable before Emily.
Constant reminders of the possibility of loss can leave you vulnerable to the notion of what lies beyond the logistics of physiological death. And what’s so bad about that? If it gives me comfort to believe in a spiritual afterlife then so be it. I promise to keep it to myself, no one’s going to bill me for wasting my own time, and I seriously doubt that one day I will find myself standing alone in that silent black abyss, ridiculed by a James Earl Jones voice-over for being such a misguided loser. Why not extend the same courtesy to pet owners? Should the animals in our lives be any different? Think about your own pets, the ones who are no longer with you, and the ease with which you can conjure up their presence. They linger in our memories with remarkable clarity. Nearly forty years later I can still see my first dog, a formidable German shepherd named Patch, accidentally released into our backyard, chasing down a bunch of my childhood friends like he was tracking down escaped convicts. I call his name and he’s turning to face me now, right now I can clearly see him, ignoring thrilled kindergarten screams, his enormous pink tongue flopping out the side of his mouth, offering me a look that says, “What? I’m just funning with them.”
Then there’s my first cat, Reginald, a tough ear-torn barn cat adopted as a stray. Reggie never backed down from a fight. It didn’t matter if you were a Pomeranian or a Great Dane, he would shock his hair, arch his spine, and stand his ground. Right now, a decade after his death, I can still feel the weight of him as I pulled him out from his favorite shelf in the linen closet, still feel the barbs of his scratchy licks across the back of my hand, see the contentment in his closed eyes, his body warmed by a carefully selected band of sunlight, empty paws making muffins as he slept. How can these animals from so long ago be so close, so tangible in our minds, so able to vividly conjure all the sensations of what it meant to have them in my life? Perhaps it goes back to the purity of our relationships with our pets. What is shared is plain and simple, uncomplicated by disapproval, resentment, or conflict. Their attributes remain clear and easy to retrieve and can be relied upon just the same after they are gone. How far away can our pets be if they are with us faster than a pickup on the first ring? Sometimes they are so close they may as well be calling us.
Having come this far, exposed and candid, perhaps I can find sanctuary behind one incontestable truth pervading operating rooms across the country—the reality of everyday miracles. From time to time the inexplicable and the impossible happen. Behind a paper mask and under artificial lights I get to perform surgery on an unconscious body, the physical part of what we think of as a pet. Essentially I’m working construction. I’m the guy splicing wires, welding pipes, shoring up support beams, and generally renovating the house. All the other stuff, the important stuff, I cannot influence. These are the intangibles, the memories, the history, the bonds, the things that make the difference between a house and a home, the things that make the difference between a body covered in scales or feathers or fur and our pet. It is this everything else that eludes me. This everything else is the spirit of the animal. Under anesthesia, it might move out for a while, but when the surgery is done and the gas turned off, it comes back. In our worst-case scenario, regardless of whether it returns or not, it doesn’t cease to exist. Anesthesia is just a training run for the soul.
In relative terms, I could argue that Sandi Rasmussen’s request was actually quite pedestrian in comparison to that of a client I met several years ago, a fellow I shall call Mr. Prestone. Mr. Prestone was forcibly dragged into my examination room by his sturdy Akita, Phoenix, in the manner of a fabled Saint Bernard from the Austrian Alps on a life-or-death rescue mission. Having delivered his master at the appropriate destination, the dog glanced my way, calculated that I was as worthless as an empty food bowl, and found a perfect patch of cool flooring on which to lie down. Subjectively Phoenix appeared to be a picture of health, unlike his master, for Mr. Prestone was a young man prematurely aged by his weight, tired eyes lost in socket shadows and hound-dog cheeks hiding behind a lackluster attempt at facial fur. He was probably in his early twenties but I felt certain that he had not been carded in a bar for some time.
After introductions I rummaged with my paperwork, trying to glimpse the name of the referring veterinary hospital and the reason for this consultation. But no practice was listed and the dog’s problem described only as “second opinion.” Such a vague justification for our meeting was most unusual.
“So, I see here that Phoenix is nine years old. He looks great. What seems to be the problem?”
Mr. Prestone sucked back an enormous breath and let it out through his nostrils.
“Nothing,” he said, a smile seeping into the corners of his lips, as he obviously savored my confusion. “At least, not until he’s dead.”
I nodded, trying to act casual, forcing a trite “uh-huh.”
“Do you think he is going to die? Is that why you are here?” I said realizing too late that each word had come out loud and well spaced, as though I might be trying to grab the attention of someone in the waiting room who could rescue me.
He blinked several times and leaned forward as if to confide.
“I need the expertise of a surgeon when the time comes to put Phoenix to sleep.”
I assured him that, flattered as I was by his thinking of me, technically any veterinarian could perform the procedure.
My response garnered another snappy sniff and forced exhalation.
“I’m talking about cryonics,” he said, a tetchy edge creeping into his words. “I imagined, incorrectly it seems, that you would be sensitive to the timing and requisite needs of this delicate procedure.”
Involuntarily muscles around my eyes must have betrayed confusion or trepidation. Mr. Prestone pressed on.
“See, I need a surgeon who can be on call 24/7 as the time approaches, available to perform the act of euthanasia, flush the vascular system with heparin, and initiate the cooling process prior to exsanguination and the administration of cryoprotectant solution.”
I looked over at Phoenix sleeping at his master’s feet. I looked around the room hunting for the hidden camera. Nothing. Mr. Prestone was still talking, rambling on about details beyond my understanding—neuropreservation versus whole body, nanotechnology, vitrification, and ice crystal formation. It was obvious that he had done his research and was prepared to invest tens of thousands of dollars in the possibility that Phoenix could rise from the frozen tundra at some point in the distant and, in my opinion, extremely remote and scary future.
Now I understood his reason for being here, this second opinion: Dr. First Opinion had probably run from him screaming.
Yes, this was a most unusual end-of-life discussion, but still, diplomacy and respect were in order. I assured him that when Phoenix died our hospital staff would do their utmost to accommodate his wishes within the realms of safe and ethical medical practice.
But I still found one question irresistible.
“Mr. Prestone. Pardon me, but why?”
I was rewarded with a grin. Perhaps he was relieved that someone had finally taken the time to ask the obvious.
“Because I am going to be cryonically preserved myself. I want to come back, and if I have a future after my death, I want it to be with Phoenix. If I’m riding this lifeboat into the future, there had best be room for my dog.”
His grin was contagious. He would get no argument from me.
THE beeping pager on my hip finally shat
tered the introspection—a liquid crystal summons to surgery for my next case. I returned Helen’s X-rays to their folder and headed over to the prep area, where my patient lay ready and waiting. I put on a pair of sterile surgical gloves and sidled into position. I couldn’t help but notice that both of my colleagues appeared to have been injured, making me wonder about the savagery of this particular beast.
“What’s his name?” I asked, looking down upon this architect of mayhem.
“Pikachu,” said the technician, adjusting the face mask feeding anesthesia and oxygen into a ferocious snout.
“And how much does he weigh?”
No one answered, the technician all business, shaving a patch of fur, hunting for a heartbeat with a goopy Doppler probe.
“Fifty-nine grams,” said Dr. Hurley, the intern on the case after consulting her record. “But don’t let his size fool you.”
She held up her hand, the tips of her index and fourth fingers crudely wrapped in Band-Aids, blood seeping beyond their sticky margins. The technician joined in with her own pair, worn like the matching rings of people inducted into some kind of clandestine society.
“Perhaps it’s time to put a ‘caution, will bite’ warning in his record,” I said, draping off the back leg of this demon masquerading as a little white mouse. “How many people has he bitten?”
Love Is the Best Medicine Page 18