“Cleo doted on Odin, loved him to pieces, and during the second week of our stay, she suddenly decided that she would rather spend her nights sleeping with Sonja and Dave and Odin than with me. At the time I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that Cleo would abandon me. Every night for the next two weeks she would say goodnight and trot off down the hall to sleep where she preferred, with someone other than me. All I could do was watch her go. And every morning she and Odin would come bounding onto my bed, happy to wake me up and thinking nothing about it.
“Then it hit me. It wasn’t that Cleo didn’t want to sleep with me. It wasn’t that she was making a conscious choice or demonstrating a preference. She just loved being around Odin. Simple as that. She wanted to spend time with him. And I started to realize where we go so wrong with love. We waste so much time imagining, idealizing how we think love should look and how it should feel. We miss out on all the good stuff, the subtle stuff which is what it’s all about. If it is real love, all we have to do is focus on making the people or animals we love happy, giving them what they need, and you can guarantee it will come full circle. The first time there was a thunderstorm, it was under my sweater where Cleo wanted to hide. When she got a thorn stuck in her pad, she hobbled over to me for help and nobody else.”
“Long before I got home that day I came to believe Cleo was trying to teach me a lesson. I think Cleo wanted me to understand that if you really love something, true love, be it for a dog or a daughter, show them by loving them the way they need to be loved.”
Okay, I thought, I liked the sentiment but what about all those lopsided, futile relationships, with one partner doing all the work for little in return. Maybe that was why she used the phrase “true love,” a reciprocal love. Or maybe her conviction was better suited to the unembellished, uncomplicated love of an animal.
“After Cleo died, Sonja flew back to Bermuda, devastated. She felt like she had let me down. She desperately wanted to make my pain go away and she didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t push her or try to get her to open up. To this day I still don’t know exactly how all this happened, how Cleo got injured. And what difference would it make? Would Sonja have been in any less pain? My daughter is an extremely private person. She’s not like me. She keeps her feelings bottled up inside.”
She waited a beat, collecting her thoughts, coming back on track.
“And that was when Cleo’s lesson hit me. I needed to learn to love Sonja the way she needed to be loved. I have wasted too much time expecting her to love me my way. What makes my way right? Just because Sonja uses a different emotional vocabulary doesn’t mean I can’t learn to speak her language.”
I was beginning to wonder where all this was leading. It seemed so personal.
“In the end it was your letter that brought us together, closer than we have ever been before.”
“My first letter?” I asked, thrilled that she actually received it and stunned by its apparent impact.
“Yes. I still carry it with me. It’s all dog-eared, and I’ve folded it so many times it’s held together with Scotch tape.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I just wrote to tell you about Helen. To let you know I took my promise to you and Cleo seriously. I didn’t know if it would make any difference, but I did know Helen was a dog who deserved a chance, the perfect underdog, precisely the kind of dog Cleo would have rooted for.”
“I agree,” said Sandi, “but because you didn’t have my address the letter went via Sonja. It was addressed to her and naturally she read it. When she did, your message caused something about her to change.”
I was lost. I didn’t remember being particularly eloquent or poetic. What on earth had I done?
“You wrote so many nice things about me and Cleo, and when Sonja read them, it was as though she was able to see me for the first time through another person’s eyes. Don’t get me wrong, she’s always loved me, but she loved me on her terms. You gave her another, different perspective, as though it had been hidden in plain sight, and now she knew exactly where to look. It has changed everything.”
“For the better, I hope.”
I made the appeal in my voice pretty obvious but she didn’t answer.
“Even before Cleo’s passing, Sonja had been struggling to save her marriage. She wanted me to be angry at her, to blame her, and in turn, she ended up blaming Dave. It was the final straw. She left him, filed for divorce, and moved back to Canada.”
Somehow I kept the “Oh, my God” to myself. This was why I had been unable to reach her in Bermuda. I had created a butterfly effect. Because of me a dog dies under anesthesia, and it ruins a marriage and drives an irreparable wedge between a mother and daughter.
“Don’t worry,” she said, as if divining my anxiety from the static between us, “they’re back together and better than ever. In fact not long ago we had an incredible reunion. It was the first time I had seen Dave since Cleo’s passing. I wanted him to know that this was nobody’s fault, that there was no blame to assign, but he was so sad and so sorry, the three of us ended up hugging each other and crying.”
And then Sandi returned to the way her daughter had rediscovered the importance of her marriage.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t touch and go for a while, but ultimately Cleo’s death awakened something inside both Sonja and Dave. They both realized they were making a classic mistake, living their lives only appreciating what they had when it was taken from them. This little dog may have been gone, but ultimately her absence alone was powerful enough to salvage a marriage.”
I was already speechless and in need of a handkerchief, but Sandi Rasmussen decided to finish me off with the kind of philosophy and celestial insight guaranteed to pierce the armor of even the most hardhearted cynic.
“So you see everything happens for a reason. Everything is connected. Cleo lived a wonderful life and even in death she reached out and changed lives. She changed your awareness of, and attitude toward, a dog named Helen. She rescued a failing marriage. And she forever changed the relationship between a mother and a daughter. As painful as Cleo’s passing was, I cherished every moment we were together, and when you can see it in this context, the amount of actual time is irrelevant because the intensity of the moment is guaranteed to last. I could have lost a child, a dog, a cat, or an elephant. It doesn’t matter, because what remains, and what can never be lost, is a spirit. And besides, she was never really my dog. I just had the privilege of sharing fourteen months of my life with her.”
NOT so long ago, over at a friend’s house for dinner, I was introduced to a man who had just celebrated his ninety-first birthday. His name was Jim, and though the years had stolen a few inches from his spine and his tidy white hair had reverted to the fineness of the newborn, he was sharp and witty and full of life. Call me sentimental, but when I get a chance to talk to someone who’s done a whole lot of living you can be sure I’m looking to learn a thing or two.
I made a point of sitting next to him, and over our meal Jim discovered what I did for a living and leaned into me.
“A word of advice,” he whispered, as though this pearl was for my ears only.
I stopped eating, my knife and fork drifting from mouth to plate.
“Never breathe your soul into a dog.”
His milky blue eyes tried hard to focus in on mine as though this was the best way for the old man to give his point extra weight.
I swallowed and began chewing his sentence over in my mind, wondering if I should have heard the phrase before, if it was a quotation, something Jim had picked up along the way or plagiarized to fit his needs.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
For a moment, he worked his cracked lips, taking his thoughts for a test drive, as though he were trying to remember the lines he had rehearsed. Then he said, “A dog is just a dog. You would do well to remember that.”
His tone was warm, more fatherly advice than disciplinary action. Even so I just stared back, let
ting him know I was waiting for more.
It took another beat before he capitulated.
“I’ve had dogs all my life,” he said. “Beagles. Best dogs in the world. Over the years I’ve had eighteen of them.”
Funny, I thought to myself, the way we never forget the animals in our lives. It’s like asking a mother who has lost a child how many children she has. No mother ever does mental subtraction before she replies. The number is a constant, homage to the memory. And for so many pet owners, a similar logic applies.
“Every one of my beagles lived outside in a dog pen I built special. Every one of them,” he paused, “except for Bee-bee.”
“What was so special about Bee-bee?” I said.
And he smiled the smile of someone who doesn’t have the time or the talent to put it all into words, but a smile that says it all. I smiled back.
“You let her in, didn’t you?” I said. “You let her into your house and you let her into your heart.”
He said nothing.
“When you say that,” I said, “when you say ‘never breathe your soul into a dog,’ it sounds like you’re defending yourself against the pain of having lost something special.”
I saw a glint of something in his eyes, perhaps a memory of this dog, his favorite, abiding dog, talented and relentless, scenting a rabbit, barreling through the woods; or maybe it was a simple recollection of his late wife seated in front of the TV, Bee-bee, the lucky conscript, curled into a ball at her feet. And then he was back, pretending not to have heard what I said, quickly changing the subject to safer, less tender territory.
So here’s the thing. How many of us can share our lives with animals and not become attached, involved, committed, or even, for some pet owners, infatuated? I’m not talking about turning cats, dogs, rabbits, or ferrets into so-called fur babies. I’m talking about the normal, natural, unavoidable, inevitable, and wonderful attachment that develops through time spent doing what it takes to properly care for an animal. Even Jim, old-school, hardnosed dog lover that he was, couldn’t resist, broke down, and became infected by the love of a dog, and, at ninety-one years of age, he was still paying the price.
Perhaps Jim had it the wrong way round and what he should have said was “never let an animal breathe their soul into you,” for once we become smitten, true love will always come at a price. For all the smiles, the laughter, the simplicity, certainty, and ease of sharing each other’s company, at some point in the relationship, the price that must be paid will take the form of emotional pain.
Okay, so maybe love and pain are not conjoined twins, but frequently they are inextricably linked, an unwanted twofer, and sometimes it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Pain will come for us when we are parted from our loved ones, cheated by our loved ones, face the fear of losing our loved ones. Sometimes it is this awareness of pain that makes us realize we must be in love, pain that signifies a love worth fighting for. It can make you wince, buckle, and scream. It could be a niggling ache, a stab of cold steel to the gut, or a heavy, intransigent weight, impossible to crawl out from under.
While I was trying to straighten this out in my head, hoping to divine the power of Sandi’s take on life when it came to losing Cleo, I received a letter from a woman whose sister has cystic fibrosis like my daughter Emily. It struck a chord, perfectly tuned in to the heart of Sandi’s philosophy:
“The doctor told my mother (a widow at the time) that she should tell my twelve-year-old sister that she will die. My mother said, ‘Doctor, you are going to die, I am going to die, we are all going to die. I will not tell her she will die because right now she’s too busy living!’”
And isn’t this what it’s all about? It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about time spent with a child or an animal, the message is clear—savor the moment, big or small, and get busy with the joy of living.
The letter concluded with the kind of told-you-so statement parents of sick children live for.
“Paulette is now forty-six years old with two children of her own.”
BEYOND living in the moment, I wish I knew how to defend against the pain, how to make it bearable, make it possible to love and not get hurt. In these last twenty years of working with sick animals, Sandi Rasmussen has arguably come the closest to offering me an answer because she was able to see what lies beyond the pain. She appreciated that loss is a part of life—not an end of life. She chose not to dwell on the unfairness of losing Cleo. She chose not to let it become the catalyst for anger, resentment, or self-pity. She never saw Cleo or her daughter or herself as a victim. There was no “poor me,” no “poor Sonja,” no “why did it have to be my dog?” She had every right to harbor resentment, to feel aggrieved, to want to avenge her loss. Cleo had died on my watch and inadvertently, indirectly, and unceremoniously I had compelled Sandi to react. She could have gone either way, and most of us would recognize anger as the natural, reasonable response. But Sandi opted for something far more difficult. I don’t know how she did it, how she had the strength to resist its allure, but somehow she saw anger for what it was—an all-too-familiar siren, its rewards transient and hollow. Perhaps the answer lies rooted in her childhood, in the lessons she learned from the stray and abandoned animals that more than paid her back for her kindness and devotion. For whatever reason, Sandi chose to surrender to the pain, to say “I will not be defined by the events of my life, by what happens and is beyond my control.” She didn’t fight her loss, she accepted her loss, she saw that the loss had a purpose, a purity, an impact, and a lesson from which many might learn. In essence, Sandi Rasmussen let go, and as she already knew, letting go can be a powerful thing. The pain became tolerable and, for those of us who witnessed it, even inspirational.
I WISH I could tell you that Helen was still with us, but some twenty months after I performed her thoracic surgery, her cancer returned and she passed on, at her home with Eileen and Ben by her side. For a while I succumbed to sadness, but only for a while because every recollection I had of this dog brought me right back to her greatest attribute—Helen was a survivor. She had already achieved the medical holy grail of “miraculous.” What did I expect, “everlasting”? This was cancer after all. There are no rules of fair play. Cancer wants to have the last word but I won’t let it. You can look at this story from all sorts of different angles but I choose success and a remarkable victory. Thanks to veterinary advances, dedicated owners, and a whole lot of love, Helen got to enjoy more than two years as part of a family who doted on and adored her. Somehow this crafty, determined little dog had beaten the odds but eventually her luck had run out. Our pets will never be with us for long enough, at least not physically, but when they have been blessed with opportunity and been able to live a full life, how can we respond with anything less than pride and celebration?
One of the things that struck me about Helen’s story was her wonderfully agreeable temporal distance from the physical and chemical intrusion of our veterinary medicine. This far out from surgery, from the bouts of chemotherapy, her survival had become all about her. We may have played our part, but ours was only ever a cameo performance. Helen had been the one beating cancer, and she and her family were the ones who deserved the credit.
If you are still curious about the final pathology report on Cleo’s postmortem, no specific cause of death was ever defined. I wasn’t surprised or relieved. I didn’t know whether Sandi would feel any differently if she had an answer, if she had someone or something to blame. Given my read on her, I imagine it no longer mattered. Perhaps it never did, pointing fingers was not her style. Truth is, more often than not, unexpected or accidental death fails to leave a calling card. In my experience speculation and inference rarely coincide with the pathological equivalent of a smoking gun. Maybe the element of mystery in life’s disasters and miracles packs a bigger punch. When we are left to wonder, uncertainty becomes a clinical terrorist, a permanent threat meant to keep us vigilant.
&
nbsp; IF writers of crime fiction are to be believed, detectives are sensitive to, and leery of, coincidence. Too many connections, mutual friends, and chance encounters, and suspicious minds become aroused. But for those of us traveling through life’s more mundane destinies, when does coincidence become fate? What were the chances that Cleo and I were destined to cross paths? Looking back over the events leading to our encounter I began to realize the odds were far shorter than I first imagined.
Cleo’s leg could just as easily have fractured for the third time in Canada rather than Bermuda but this particular Min Pin had a penchant for living the island life. If such an injury were to occur, there was a fair chance it might transpire in a land of quaint shorts and gauche socks.
Bermuda lies about seven hundred miles from Boston and there are many direct flights to closer veterinary referral clinics capable of performing her surgery along the East Coast. Sonja could have picked the Carolinas, Virginia, or New York. However, the island’s pet population is served by two major veterinary practices, both of which regularly refer their tricky surgical cases to yours truly. Of course I don’t have a monopoly on Bermuda’s surgical referrals, but the odds favor me.
This leaves the minute probability of anesthetic risk mentioned earlier, small but not nearly as small as all of us would prefer. When I tally these variables, consider my and Cleo’s flight path, the choices made, the chances that things would turn out the way they did, the odds are long, but nowhere near as long as picking a Powerball winner. Clearly, not everything that impacts our lives will be good or pleasant, but if we are open to learning from our experiences, regardless of their nature, they can at least be meaningful. Cleo’s clinical outcome may be the epitomy of failure and yet for me, thanks to Sandi, her legacy has been powerful and far reaching. Call it coincidence, fate, or whatever, sometimes it feels as though we live our lives like an iPod Shuffle—we may think that everything comes at us in a random fashion but every so often a particular sequence feels just right because, when you get right down to it, we are the ones programming the tunes!
Love Is the Best Medicine Page 24