Drinking from the Trough

by Mary E. Carlson, DVM

  Earl never came home again. A week later, he sank into a coma and died, surrounded by his family, just before one in the afternoon on June 12.

  It’s funny what you remember. On June 9, I’d called my sister-in-law, who is a nurse, to come to Fort Collins to help my mother-in-law, who was coming apart at the seams. My sister-in-law brought my niece Olivia. They stayed in our little guest room while Earl was in the hospital. On June 10, my sister-in-law informed me that she would stay with Earl at night. It felt like she was ordering me out of Earl’s hospital room. Overwhelmed, I said okay. At seven thirty in the morning on June 12, Olivia woke me abruptly, saying, “We have to go, we have to go!” Her mom had just called her to say something bad had happened.

  I knew the horses still needed to be fed, so I called the surgical floor where Earl was and asked the nurses for a status report. They said, “Yes, we think it’s a coma.” I needed to come, but there was no reason to rush.

  I fed the horses and drove to the hospital. Olivia’s sister, Amanda, had flown in. I asked her for oatmeal; I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten, and I knew I needed something in my stomach. She found some in the hospital floor pantry, which is stocked with simple foods for patients and visitors.

  I called Terry, our insurance agent and one of Earl’s closest friends, and asked him to contact the funeral home to tell them we would need them today. Terry came by immediately, in tears. The room was crowded with Earl’s relatives, who had taken all the available seating. I was relegated to the windowsill, far from the bed.

  Friends and other doctors visited, not knowing how sick Earl was; they just happened to stop by on that morning. As the morning wore on, I quietly pointed out Earl’s blue fingernails to my sister-in-law, who just nodded. Later, Earl’s arm was blue; his circulatory system was shutting down.

  We asked Earl’s doctor how long he thought it would be. He said it could be as long as three days.

  It was three hours.

  Immediately after Earl died, Amanda screamed, and then she and the rest of Earl’s relatives left. I remembered how the family had deserted Bill, my father-in-law, right after he died; Amanda had screamed then too. I don’t know how long I stayed beside Earl; I only know that eventually, several hours after the resident doctor had pronounced Earl dead, the chaplain came in the room and gently said, “You know, there are things the nurses need to do. . . .” I knew he was right. I nodded and found my way to the car and home.

  Ten days: that’s what I kept thinking. Ten days between putting Tipper to sleep and my husband dying. I thought I would be crushed by the weight of the pain.

  I think I was crushed, for a long time. But I was determined to remember the deep friendship Earl and I had had, fostered first through the horses, a friendship and love that deepened and sustained us in our twenty-seven years of marriage. I was determined to remember all the fun we’d had with Tipper the Wonder Husky, to remember her love of snow and all things naughty, to remember our laughter at her silly dog tricks and sneaky antics.

  And I realize now that, even though I will always grieve for them, sharing their stories, even the hard stories, honors and celebrates the gift of sharing our lives with each other.

  27

  The Cobalt-Blue Bag

  Ashes. What do you do with ashes?

  My father-in-law’s ashes were in a pine box urn. His wish had been to be scattered at the family cabin by the Cache la Poudre River, but my mother-in-law had kept the box next to her bed. I shuddered. No way was I sleeping with my dead husband’s ashes.

  Keli’s ashes were in a lacquered heart-shaped box on a shelf in the living room. Tipper’s ashes were in another box, beside Keli’s, identical except for the amount of accumulated dust. A smaller heart-shaped box on the same shelf held the ashes of Kitty Alexander, the twenty-pound tuxedo cat.

  The boxes were sealed, but I’d opened one to peek inside: just ashes in a plastic bag. Looking at them didn’t feel creepy or scary. Even though I’d loved those pets and still missed them, looking at their ashes and the decorated boxes didn’t trigger new waves of grief.

  But putting Earl’s ashes on the shelf . . . well, that didn’t seem right. I was sure Earl didn’t want to be on the shelf either. Besides, I’d be moving to Texas when winter came, to attend Texas Tech University’s School of Law. My acceptance letter had come after Earl’s health began failing, and the dean had allowed me to defer my entry for a year. So no more ashes on the living room shelf. Plus, I doubted that Earl would want to be in Texas any more than he’d want to be stuck on a shelf. He’d always been a Wyoming man, through and through.

  The only thing I knew for certain was that he hadn’t wanted a church service. He’d been emphatic about that, not that it had stopped his family from having one anyway.

  My mother-in-law, Bev, was staying at Earl’s and my house—technically, her house, since we’d been renting it from her and Earl’s dad from the beginning, despite my wanting to buy it when we married—while I prepared for the open house I was having for Earl. She’d wanted the open house the previous Tuesday, but I’d pointed out that since that was the same day that Earl’s obituary would appear in the papers, no one would know yet that he’d died. She’d already been there for two months and had managed to steamroll a church service through. I’d just shrugged; everybody grieves in different ways, and if the service was what she needed, I figured it wouldn’t bother Earl all that much. It did, however, bother me. Right after the service, the rest of Earl’s family packed up and left. Bev announced that she’d stay until after the open house, because it was important that people see her.

  The day after Earl’s death, the funeral director met me at the house to discuss arrangements. Bev wouldn’t come downstairs and made it clear by her action that she didn’t want to have any input into these final decisions. So I met with the funeral director alone and said, “Cremation, save the ashes, no urn, I’ll take care of the rest.” Then I gave her a copy of the obituary I’d written the night before, when Bev and the rest of Earl’s relatives had gone out to dinner without me to plan the unwanted church service.

  And now it was four days later, and the funeral home had called and left a voice mail saying that they had “things for me to pick up.” The “things” were Earl’s ashes and the death certificates.

  I pulled the car into the drive and turned off the engine. I stared at the cobalt-blue, faux-velvet bag on the seat beside me. The box containing Earl’s ashes was inside the bag.

  I sighed and pulled the bundle into my lap. I knew how upset my mother-in-law was. I knew that she’d been dealing with depression and insomnia for a long time, as well as so many deaths so close together. Earl was my husband, and he was her son. I could at least do her the small kindness of not displaying the ashes in a way that might cause her more pain. I had to admit that I didn’t want to risk her disapproval either—I could imagine her berating me for not buying an urn to keep by my bedside.

  I would scatter the ashes but only after Bev left, which wouldn’t be for at least another week. For now, I had to stash the ashes somewhere, some spot where Bev wouldn’t find them. That ruled out the house. I stared through the windshield, wishing I didn’t have to deal with in-laws who clearly thought I was an interloper.

  The house was never going to be mine anyway. She’d made that clear: after she died, her entire estate was going to Earl’s sister. If I wanted to stay, she’d have her lawyer draw up a lease for me.

  But I was moving to Lubbock for law school; I didn’t care about the house. Without Earl, the house didn’t feel like home anymore anyway.

  I blinked away tears that were trying to form. I would not let my mother-in-law’s issues derail me.

  I missed Earl so much. I remembered watching him the last morning he was home, as he walked slowly to the barn to feed the horses.

  What about the barn?

  Earl had spent so much time in the barn with our horses, especially Scooter and Hannah, the last two horses we ever
owned. Horses had brought us together at the beginning and were part of every important event of our shared lives. They’d brought us joy all the years we were married.

  The barn.

  I closed the car door softly behind me and carried the blue bag and its contents to the wide opening. I stepped through and stood for a long moment, inhaling the rich smells of hay, dirt, and horse. Late afternoon sun filtered through the doorway. I took a deep breath and made my way to the hay room.

  Stacks of hay bales lined the room. I gently laid the blue bundle on the center of a bale and stepped back to examine the result. I nodded to myself: this would do. It was safe and secure and protected from the weather. Bev never came into the barn, so she’d never find it. If she asked, I would simply shrug and say that the ashes were safe.

  Tux, a feral black-and-white cat who’d adopted our neighborhood as his mousing grounds, strolled in to offer a second opinion. He leapt onto the bale and curled up next to the blue bag. When I came out the next morning to feed the horses, I discovered Tux snuggled up asleep in the same spot. Tux slept next to the bag every night after that.

  We made it through the open house, though instead of “being seen,” Bev spent the entire time in her bed in the guest room with the door closed. She finally emerged when the only visitors left were three of Earl’s high school friends. Earl had been best man for one of them, John Duke. John had flown in from Utah just for the day and flew back that night. Now that was love and loyalty.

  None of Earl’s other relatives returned for the open house, and none of them ever contacted me again. Bev went home a few days later. For the next year, she would occasionally call me to complain about the state in which I’d left the house when I moved out, and then even those calls stopped.

  After she’d left and I was alone in the house, I gave in to angry grief—not at Earl but at his family. Had they only put up with me for his sake? On our very first date back in 1977, I’d said to him, “You know I’m Jewish, don’t you?”

  He’d said yes and that it didn’t matter—and to him, it didn’t.

  But his family . . . had their acceptance of me been just a show all those years? Was the awful behavior and their disregard for me that began when Earl died long-hidden anti-Semitism? Earl and I had had such a wonderful married life, and I had loved his family, especially his dad, our nieces, and his grandparents. Now, when I needed a family, they had abandoned me without warning, without reason.

  I’d spent those long hours by Earl’s bed after he died. Toward the end of the afternoon, we put Earl’s few things into my car. Earl’s sister announced, “We’re going out to dinner. Are you okay getting home alone?”

  Of course I wasn’t okay. I was too numb to protest but not so numb that I wasn’t suspicious of how dismissive she’d been. Later, I realized that none of them cared that Earl didn’t want a church service, or maybe they didn’t believe me or didn’t believe that it mattered to me.

  I called two friends and asked them to meet me at home. I spent the rest of the evening writing an obituary to send to four newspapers and, with my friends’ help, cleaning up the rubble my sister-in-law and her daughter had left in the guest room.

  Earl’s relatives spent their evening planning a very strange church service to be held Monday afternoon. I was outnumbered and overpowered; there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  I had called Sid, a longtime friend of Earl’s who lived in Laramie, and invited her to the service. Early in our relationship, Earl had been worried that Sid and I might be jealous of each other—he’d taken Sid to the high school prom—but we never were. We became good friends instead.

  Sid didn’t come. Later, she told me that my mother-in-law had left a message on her answering machine telling her not to come to the service. My mother-in-law never mentioned it, of course, and neither Sid nor I ever figured out a reason Bev would do such a thing.

  As my rage the night after Bev left wore itself out, I thought about what it was like to go through death and what we do with the remains—the ceremonial rituals, the actual disposition of the body, and honoring someone’s wishes.

  Dealing with death, whether it’s a beloved human or cherished animal, is always daunting. In my veterinary practice, before I put a pet to sleep, I always gave the owner several options. The language I used had to be courteous and comforting, a little cautious too. I never used the word “disposal”; that sounded too much like taking out the trash. A client couldn’t dispose of a beloved cat’s body any more than I could dispose of Earl’s body. Instead, I said, “disposition”: the disposition of the body.

  Concerning the pet, there were three options.

  The first option was to take the pet’s body home and bury it. There is a city ordinance that bans this, but as a police officer once told me, no one goes around town checking for pet burials. I buried two cats, several songbirds, and Keli’s raccoon in our orchard across the street from the house.

  My old cat Pruney was the first to go into the ground of the orchard, in 1987, four months after I graduated from vet school.

  She’d been diagnosed with chronic renal failure when she was fifteen, but she lived for another two years. Back then, there were only two methods of treatment. One was a special canned kidney failure diet. It didn’t come in dry form like it does today.

  Pruney hated the canned food and immediately went on a feline hunger strike. She lost more weight until I decided that chronic renal failure was better than starvation and returned her to her usual diet of Meow Mix, water, and milk.

  The other treatment was subcutaneous (under the skin) administration of fluids to help flush out toxins that build up in the blood when the kidneys start to fail. Pruney never reached that stage of renal failure.

  I just left her alone, rechecking her blood work on a regular basis, and Pruney went about her normal life in fine enough condition. That’s the way it is with animals sometimes; they feel well even though their test results are awful. When my clients puzzled over this seeming contradiction, I always told them it was because animals don’t read their lab work.

  And in the end, Pruney didn’t die of renal failure.

  When Pruney was seventeen, the vet student and his wife who were renting our renovated chicken house got (wait for it . . .) a husky puppy. Unfortunately, they never trained the puppy. It hopped its fence and ran away frequently, usually into our yard.

  One Friday afternoon, I returned home from work at the hospital and, as usual, called for Pruney using my special whistle display that told her to come into the house.

  There was no response.

  Oh well, I thought, she’ll be back later. Perhaps she climbed a tree or was munching on a mouse she’d caught in the barn.

  I changed my clothes to go running with Keli, as I did most days after work, but we didn’t get far.

  I opened the back door, and there, under the bush right by the door and the family room window, was Pruney.

  She was alive but motionless in the dirt.

  I called Earl’s old clinic, which our friend Dr. John Mulnix had bought, and told them we were coming right over.

  As we examined her, we found tiny maggots around her anus. That meant she must have been lying there all day under the bush and that there must have been a wound with dead tissue for them to eat; that’s what maggots do.

  When John and I carefully turned Pruney over, there was blood on the table. It matched the area where her neck had been before we rolled her over.

  She was paralyzed from the head down and in a coma. The wound was from the vet student’s husky; it had attacked Pruney, for no reason anyone would ever be able to identify beyond the husky’s innate ability to hunt. I called Dr. Ingram, who had been my neurology professor at CSU, and asked him about options. Her radiographs were unconvincing about whether or not there was a fracture. On a seventeen-year-old cat, treatment was a poor option. The bottom line was there was nothing to be done but end her life.

  We prepared to put Pruney to
sleep.

  She already had an IV line with fluids running. John let me sit in his office chair in the back so I could spend some time with Pruney on my lap. She wasn’t in any pain, but I was a wreck. I sobbed and talked to the greatest cat of my whole life. I couldn’t see through my tears and went through almost an entire box of Kleenex.

  After a long time, I told John I was ready. He brought in the syringe filled with 1 cc of euthanasia solution. I asked, and he agreed to let me inject it into the IV line. Pruney slept away in my lap.

  I left the clinic soaked with tears, carrying Pruney’s body in her carrier.

  Earl was at work, so I called my best friend, Nancy, to come over and be with me. She was eight months pregnant, so I did the grave digging. We wrapped Pruney in a towel, lowered her into the hole, and covered her with dirt. I made a cairn of flagstones on top of the refilled hole to prevent wildlife from disturbing the grave.

  The second and third options for disposition of an animal body are variations on the same thing: cremation and not saving the ashes or cremation with the ashes returned to the owner. Keli and Tipper were too big for me to bury, and Kitty Al died in the winter, when the ground was too frozen to dig. So all three had been cremated, and we’d had their ashes returned to us.

  So now I had the cremains of three pets and my husband.

  Slowly, a plan began to form. Earl and Wyoming, always Wyoming. Those wide-open spaces, the sense that the Wild West was still there and always would be. Laramie, with the University of Wyoming and its football team, the Cowboys, Earl cheering them on every chance he got.

  Earl’s ashes belonged in Wyoming.

  Wyoming also has wind, a lot of it, all the time.

  If I was going to scatter Earl’s ashes without literally scattering them to the wind, I needed to practice.

  I also wanted my pets’ ashes out of this house, which was no longer my home. And I didn’t want to take the pet ashes with me when I moved.

  I lifted the heart-shaped boxes from the shelf and lined them up in a row on the kitchen table. I could solve all those problems at the same time.