Drinking from the Trough

by Mary E. Carlson, DVM

  I rode the elevator with Larry every now and then, and we’d always talk about horses. That began when Larry asked me what the letters AAEP, emblazoned on my jacket, stood for. “American Association of Equine Practitioners—horse doctors,” I said, slightly awestruck that this big-name guy had even noticed me. I was a huge fan. I always listened to his radio show and had even called into the show a couple of times. I never thought I’d talk with him face-to-face, never imagined that he’d be so cordial, especially considering how we met: I’d dropped my bags of groceries at the door to the building, spilling stuff all over the place. He’d helped me pick everything up while I babbled stupid question number one—“Aren’t you Larry King?”—and stupid question number two—“Do you live here too?”

  Bill, Bev, and I visited back and forth frequently; I even took my laundry over to their house and ran my things through their washer and dryer when they weren’t home. The laundry room in the basement of my building was creepy, and the one time I did use it, the security guard was there, drinking whisky straight out of the bottle. After that, I sneaked my laundry out the front door of my building in a gym bag and across the street to Bev and Bill’s.

  Tippling security guards aside, the neighborhood was pretty safe. Even so, if my visits lasted until after dark, Bill always insisted on escorting me from their home through my parking lot to the front door of my building.

  Earl had stayed back in Colorado the year I worked in Falls Church. Once a month, I had a three-day weekend, and one of us would travel to the other. We’d get together on vacation days too—my contract with the clinic allowed for three weeks of paid time off. When Earl came to Virginia, we’d go on excursions to places like Gettysburg and Tangier Island.

  The rest of the time, it was Bill, Bev, and me exploring and seeing the sights, from local adventures—hiking to Roosevelt Island, attending free military concerts and the DC Fourth of July fireworks, going to the theatre—to cruising Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains and traveling to Charlottesville to visit Bill and Bev’s daughter, Susan, and her family. Susan was working on her PhD in health education at the University of Virginia, complementing her RN degree, in order to become a college professor.

  The Falls Church clinic owner asked me to continue working with them, but I was ready to move back to Colorado when my yearlong contract was up. Eventually, Bev tired of the climate in Northern Virginia and announced to Bill that she’d bought a house in Denton, Texas. Her decision wasn’t as strange as it sounds; Susan had accepted a position at Texas Woman’s University in Denton.

  Bill retired and they moved, despite the fact that Bill detested the hot, humid climate of their new town. The plus side of their move was that Bill especially spent a lot of each summer with us in Colorado, enjoying our cooler temperatures and much (much!) lower humidity. Every summer, he and Earl had all sorts of projects in the works, and they even finished most of them. Bill’s energy and enthusiasm for life seemed endless.

  In September, not long after Bill’s diagnosis, Earl and I went to Denton for a short visit to help out. Bill kept wondering what was happening to him and why it was happening. He said repeatedly that he didn’t understand how he could have gotten sick.

  I understood his confusion—how could someone who had always been so robust and full of energy now be so weak? It was a painful reminder to me that being a patient is profoundly different from having technical medical knowledge and that it is very hard to rationalize, let alone understand, your own illness when it’s a terminal condition.

  On a Wednesday morning in October, just a few weeks after we’d returned home, Earl had an emergency call from Susan saying to get down to Denton ASAP; Bill was fading fast. Tickets would be waiting for us at the airline counter that evening.

  Earl called me in tears—I was in my classroom—and I couldn’t understand what he was saying, because he was crying so hard. He finally got through to me: we had to go now.

  I started to cry, and so did some of my students. I’d warned them early on about my father-in-law’s illness and that I might have to leave suddenly, even though at the time I hadn’t believed it would be so soon.

  I made a panicked call to my friend Nancy. There wasn’t time for us to get Tipper to her regular kennel, where she stayed when she couldn’t travel with us. Nancy and her husband, David, had dog-sat Keli for us for years and were well-versed in the challenges of husky care. They knew Tipper, and Tipper knew them. Could she—?

  Nancy said yes, they would be happy to dog-sit. I heaved a sigh of relief; one less thing to worry about. I knew they would take good care of Tipper.

  We got into Denton Wednesday night after dinner.

  Bill’s hospital bed had been set up in his and Bev’s bedroom. He was awake when we arrived, but it was clear that he was rapidly failing.

  Hospice oversaw Bill’s end-of-life care, but Susan was a registered nurse and handled his pain medication, opening the small red vials of morphine and dripping the contents under his tongue. Sometime Wednesday night, Earl fed his father a dribble of vanilla ice cream, which was the last food he ate.

  After that, all we could do was wait.

  Earl and I stayed by Bill’s side almost nonstop. We managed to duck out for groceries to restock the kitchen, but I refused to leave Bill alone while family members were off doing other necessary things. Susan slept on the floor next to the hospital bed. I took naps on Bev’s bed, ignoring Bill’s death rattle. This prodrome of death can be disturbing, but it didn’t bother me. The sound comes from fluids that accumulate in the throat and upper chest as we lose our ability to swallow, which can begin to happen two or three days before we die. When we’re close to death, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to swallow at all, even a tiny bit of water.

  The next day, Thursday, Bill slipped into a coma.

  I woke up early Friday morning and padded into the bedroom to look at Bill, expecting to find him dead. Susan woke up from the floor and said he was all right. I returned to the guest room and went back to sleep.

  Friday evening, Susan, her husband, their two daughters, plus my little great-niece and great-nephew and Bev, Earl, and I were gathered in the bedroom watching TV. Bill’s condition hadn’t changed; he was still comatose, and we knew death was coming.

  We were watching a show about the progress of Elizabeth Smart, the kidnapped Utah teen who had been rescued by police officers after nine months of brutal captivity.

  The minute the show was over at ten o’clock, Bill drew his last true breath.

  Whether animal or human, after the last breath, there are several “agonal respirations,” which are loud, deep postmortem breaths. Bill had three of them.

  I looked at Earl; he was weeping silently. I hugged him, then went to Bill’s bedside to talk to him and kiss him goodbye. Everyone else had left the room immediately.

  In my faith, a body isn’t left alone. After the last breath, the brain is still alive for about five minutes; that’s why I talked to Bill after he died.

  The hospice nurse was out in the field, so we had to wait for her to return and officially pronounce Bill dead, a little over an hour later. My niece, who was pregnant, had already gone back to her home in the country, so Earl and my brother-in-law drove out to pick her up and bring her back to the house. I waited up for them; they returned about two thirty in the morning.

  The funeral directors arrived. They transferred Bill’s body to the gurney, wrapped it with a special cover, and maneuvered it down the steep stairs. All I could think was, “God help you, don’t drop the body!” We followed along behind, out to the waiting van.

  Over the next few days, to take some of the workload off my mother-in-law and to distract myself from my own grief, I arranged Bill’s obituaries for four newspapers and reminded our hometown paper that they had done an article on the family the previous year, when Bill celebrated his fiftieth vet school graduation anniversary and Earl his twenty-fifth. Since Bill was a giant in the world of veterinary medicin
e, the paper wrote a kind article about him. A colleague whom he had trained wrote a warm memorial piece for the Journal of the American College of Veterinary Radiology. Three years later, this veterinarian would also die of a radiation-related cancer.

  I held my emotions together until Sunday, when Nancy called.

  “I need your voice mail code,” she said, sounding half-panicked. “Tipper’s escaped, but there’s a message. Maybe someone found her, and I need the code.”

  Nancy and David live near one of the most dangerous intersections in town.

  Tipper had slipped through their fence at the one place they hadn’t known was loose.

  It was typical husky escape behavior. And huskies are known for running far and fast without stopping, let alone looking both ways before crossing the street. Numbly, I recited the access code, then hung up the phone.

  I was sure the worst had happened to my beloved girl. I began to cry and couldn’t stop.

  I was still crying when Nancy called back: Tipper was safe!

  The message was from a nice lady who had taken her son to the two-dollar movie theatre located across the intersection from Nancy and David’s place. Tipper, her tail wagging furiously, had come up to them in the parking lot to say “howdy” and (I knew) to be admired for her beauty. She’d let the lady look at her signature ID tag, a hot-pink dog bone. This kind stranger had taken Tipper home, where her little boy and Tipper had had a fine time playing together until Nancy had arrived to take my adventurous girl home.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I was completely wrung out from the emotional vortex of the last two days: grief from losing Bill, the trauma of Tipper’s escape, the joy of her safe return. I lay like a wet noodle on the guest room bed, beyond exhausted.

  My lucky dog had managed to cross eight-plus lanes of heavily traveled road safely. I’d never know how many new friends she made in the parking lot before the lady and her son realized that she needed rescuing. I giggled to myself, imagining her trotting up to the box office, buying a tub of popcorn and a Coke, and settling into the theatre to watch a double feature. I thought of her beautiful face with those crystal-blue eyes. I was so grateful that she’d been found and that I would hold her in my arms in a few days.

  Another day to get through and then, on Tuesday, Bill’s funeral. Bill’s sister, Elaine, and her husband flew in from Colorado. Their son, Dan, an ER doctor who had just finished a twenty-four-hour shift, flew in too, then immediately out again after the service to face another shift. I was touched by, and am still grateful for, Dan’s generosity and kindness, spending those precious hours to honor Bill.

  The church was packed. Bill had been such a humble man, I don’t think anyone in the congregation really knew all he had accomplished in his life or how famous he was in the veterinary community. There was no doubt, however, that the people here knew, loved, and respected him. Later, I learned the generous donations received by the church went to two exquisite wall hangings in the sanctuary in memory of Bill.

  A luncheon followed Bill’s memorial service. I know it’s a cliché to say that everything is bigger in Texas, but this meal was huge, even by Texas standards: roast turkey and all the trimmings, plus at least twenty different side dishes weighing down the sagging buffet tables.

  I hadn’t eaten much since arriving in Denton—I tend to not eat when I’m stressed out, and I usually can’t eat in a crowd of strangers. But these parishioners, people who had loved the man I was so proud to have had as my father-in-law, felt more like old friends. As I tucked into the feast, filling my belly with roast turkey Texas-style, I thought about how funerals are really for the living. Meals like this one weren’t just hospitality; they were for caring, for sharing stories and memories, for nourishing our hearts as well as our bodies.

  After the luncheon, Earl and I headed to the airport and home—no time to spare, because not only did we have to prepare for the open house we were hosting on Friday in Bill’s memory, we also had to arrange to bury Gram’s ashes.

  Gram—Jewell Bradshaw—was Bev’s mother and Earl’s grandmother. She’d lived on the other side of Bill and Bev’s duplex. Bev’s brother Ralph—Earl’s favorite uncle and his kidney donor—had lived with Gram. In early October, Gram had suffered a massive stroke and been brought home to hospice care.

  On October 12, Earl and I had been at our home, getting ready to go out on a trail ride, when the phone had rung: Gram had died. She was ninety-four years old.

  I loved Gram so much and miss her to this day. She and I liked to shop together, and she’d always suggest that I buy masses of clothes—she was definitely a power shopper! We loved discussing the stock market. Back when she and Ralph lived in Utah, they’d drive over to Nevada to play the slot machines. When Earl and I visited, we’d go to the casinos in Wendover, Nevada, and Gram always won more than I did. She was sharp as a tack her whole life. Her only symptom of old age was a bit of deafness that sometimes got in the way of conversation.

  Gram’s original plan had been that when she died, her body would be brought to Fort Collins and laid to rest beside Gramp, who had died twenty-five years earlier. Instead, with the need to stay focused on Bill’s care and impending death, her body had been cremated, and her ashes had been set aside to be brought home with the family later.

  Later was now.

  On Wednesday, October 29, Fort Collins weather was sweltering, extremely unusual for late October. I arranged for Gram’s grave to be opened, her stone engraved, and Gramp’s stone cleaned in preparation for Gram’s burial on Thursday. I picked up Tipper and, in spite of her misdeeds, hugged and kissed her, thankful to have her back safe and sound. Earl and I worked to get our house in shipshape condition for the crowd of people we expected to visit on Friday—Halloween, of all days.

  Exhausted from the heat, the travel, and the emotional upheaval, heartsick from the loss of both Gram and Bill, I wandered outside. Marcie was standing in the corral. My beautiful palomino paint mare turned to look at me, seeming to understand what I could not. She stood patient and still as I wrapped my arms around her neck and let the pent-up tears flow, soaking her hair.

  Thursday, the weather did an about-face: the temperature plummeted from Wednesday’s high of eighty degrees Fahrenheit to near freezing. We called family coming in and told them to prepare for serious cold. Then, shivering despite bundling ourselves against the weather, we buried Gram’s ashes.

  Friday was even colder, but the house was ready, and Earl and I were as ready as we could be. And as we’d hoped, about five hundred friends and colleagues filled the house, keeping each other warm with their memories of Bill.

  23

  A Lesson in Newtonian Physics

  It didn’t hurt at first.

  I lay there, feeling a little disoriented, peering up at Hannah. I could tell she was wondering what the heck I was doing on the ground.

  I wasn’t supposed to be riding Hannah. It was Earl’s turn, but he had a sore on his leg, and when he rode, his boot rubbed the painful spot.

  I was supposed to be riding Marcie. She was up there in years by now, but no horse had ever been a more dedicated and focused jumper. When I steered her toward a jump, she took my cue and sailed over like the finest champion, her forelimbs tucked up in tight flexion above the rails.

  Earl and I were here with both horses so Hannah, “The Baby,” could take her jumping lesson from Sue, the trainer. Hannah had turned four years old that year, and, as with our other horses, we’d begun a year of jumping lessons to teach her agility and discipline and to teach us how to ride our young horse. Earl and I alternated lessons; one week, he’d ride Hannah, and the next, I’d ride her.

  When Earl and Hannah worked with Sue, I would ride Marcie with English tack, watch the lesson, and practice some moves and jumps with Marcie.

  I’d volunteered to swap with Earl. We’d traded mounts but not English saddles.

  Sue talked Hannah and me through various basic leg commands. Hannah hadn’t yet p
icked up her right lead when I asked her to canter. It was difficult urging her to take the correct lead.

  The natural inclination for the rider is to lean forward in the saddle to help the horse along. That’s what I was doing as I worked with Hannah on taking the correct lead, and it’s the opposite of what you really should do. Sue noticed and advised me to sit back in the saddle.

  I did as Sue asked at the same moment Hannah changed to a fast trot. As I sat back, Hannah brought her hips up in the gait, our butts crashed together, Hannah swerved unexpectedly to the left, and I was launched like a rocket.

  So, technically, at that precise moment, I wasn’t actually riding Hannah.

  I soared into the summer sky, evidence of Newton’s first law of motion: “An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.” The external force of my hitting Hannah’s tushy had triggered my upward trajectory. I continued in that direction while her sharp turn took her elsewhere, riderless.

  I’d learned about Newton and his laws during my first semester as an undergraduate physical education major, in one of our required courses, Basic Body Movement and Rhythms. We PE majors called it Basic Bod. My father, who was a medical doctor, sneered at the course content, but it was a wonderful class. Newton’s laws helped me understand how my field hockey cleats worked. A variation on Newton’s first law, conservation of angular momentum, addressed the angles of rebound and spin, which forever improved my pool game.

  Most people think of Sir Isaac Newton as the guy who discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. His law of gravity, commonly stated as “What goes up must come down,” seemed especially appropriate just now, considering my upward trajectory and the opposing force of gravity.

  “Hang time” is the length of time that something stays in the air, whether the “something” is a leaping cat, a football arcing its way down the field, or a horseback rider ejected from her horse. Hang time often seems much longer than it really is. It’s one of those cool illusions of nature.