We Lost an Original Today

“ ‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. … We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
—Roger Ebert

[Photo from Wings of Desire.]

News from Home

My mother just mailed another obituary to me—the second this week. Death has become an expected topic in her letters and in our weekly phone conversations.

At first, the deceased were the age of my grandparents and parents. Now they’re my age, too.

It’s sobering news. Reminds me to take nothing for granted. And reminds me of these lines from Billy Collins’ poem, “Obituaries”:

And all the survivors huddle at the end
under the roof of a paragraph
as if they had sidestepped the flame of death.

[Death in the Sickroom by Edvard Munch.]

Don’t Leave Your Dog in the Oven

“WHAT?!” you exclaim. “That’s just stupid. No sane person would leave her dog in an oven.”

Ah, but lots of sane people do. No, not the oven in the kitchen; that’s reserved for psychopaths. I’m talking about the ovens that parked cars morph into in warm weather.

Just yesterday, in fact, I saw a pooch overheating in a parking lot. Just as I was about to take action, the young couple returned to the car. They gave their spotted dog a warm reunion greeting and took off. They obviously loved their dog but were unaware of the potential harm they’d put him/her in.

The weather outside doesn’t even have to be hot to be lethal. With windows cracked open, the temperature inside a car rises nearly 20 degrees in 10 minutes; in 20 minutes, it goes up nearly 30 degrees—and continues to rise.

Just think about it: It was 98 degrees outside yesterday when said couple pulled into their parking space at the grocery store and left Rover in the car (turns out, we passed the couple as we were exiting the store). Now do the math.

And it’s not just that you could potentially kill your pet. There are a whole mess of medical problems heat can trigger if your pet lives through the ordeal. Some states have laws against leaving unattended pets and children in cars; the Bluegrass State does not. Without a law, too many people remain uninformed.

Please help spread the word about this.

[Visit the British Columbia SPCA Web site for symptoms and treatment of heatstroke. Art is from the American Veterinary Medical Association.]

A Barnyard Lady Killer Bids Farewell

He arrived at Catskill Animal Sanctuary with 13 ewes and lambs and he was bad to the bone. There wasn’t a stall that could pen him in, not a creature who had authority over him. The humans called him Rambo, for he was all horn and rage—until…at last…he wasn’t. He transformed from wild to wise and became the self-proclaimed guardian of all the barnyard animals. He herded them, rescued them, guided them, and comforted them. They looked up to the Jacob ram and, if they were female, had a crush on him.

Yes, Rambo attracted the fairer sex of many species, especially the wingèd variety. Barbie, the rescued broiler hen, was one of his favorites. In Animal Camp, CAS director Kathy Stevens describes seeing Rambo approach Barbie and hoof the ground, the signal he used with humans to get a massage out of them. But Barbie didn’t understand the signal, so Rambo showed her what he meant: Ever so gently, he massaged her body with the tip of his horn. A few days later, Rambo could be seen relaxing in the barn with a busy Barbie at his side, pulling hay from his coat. As their relationship intensified, so did the jealousy of Hannah the sheep.

Hannah fancied herself the rightful mate of Rambo, in a Fatal Attraction kind of way, and was never far from the object of her affections. In fact, she fretted if he wasn’t in her sightlines. As Stevens entered the barn one day, she saw Rambo but no Hannah. This was odd and prompted her to ask a CAS employee about Hannah’s absence.

“She’s in time out.”

“What happened?” asked Stevens.

“She head-butted Barbie halfway across the aisle.” Hell hath no fury…

As Rambo aged, arthritis gripped his body and slowed him down, but it didn’t impair his sense of responsibility to his flock. A couple of months ago when the cows escaped, he couldn’t round them up himself so he did the next best thing: He hobbled to the humans and alerted them to the situation. Stevens knew Rambo would soon face his final transformation and she tried to steel herself for it.

She was right. Last Saturday Rambo transformed from earthbound to spirit while surrounded by everyone who loved him, both human and nonhuman. In a fitting portent, just the day before, the sanctuary had welcomed 14 sheep rescued from neglect—one of them a Jacob ram. While a new era begins for the flock, it seems Rambo’s legacy is sure to continue.

The Wingèd One

In February I told you about Birdy, a pooch of sweet demeanor who was scooped up from the mean streets of Oakland—starving and riddled with cancer—by one person who bothered to notice her and knew to take the ailing creature to Bad Rap.

From there, Birdy was adopted by “The Lady,” who knew their time together would be short but full of heart. The Lady, a writer by trade, helped Birdy keep her own blog: Birdy Flies Home. It’s a lovely chronicle of living, of making each moment matter and of facing the inevitable.

Today, at 4:00 p.m. California time, Birdy is donning wings to make her great trek Home.

Please join with me in wishing her a calm takeoff and a brilliant landing into a world where bully sticks are in infinite supply, cones of misery don’t exist, and she may dig as many holes as deep and large as she wants with no ill effects.

Birdy, may your Blue Jewel light your way to Joy. We’ll miss you.

Heaven on My Mind: Never Can Say Goodbye

Heaven’s been weighing on my mind, but I’ve had a hard time envisioning it.

“Every living thing dies. There’s no stopping it.”
—the opening paragraph of Unsaid, by Neil Abramson

As I posted earlier on Lull, my reading these last few months has been full of heartbreak and partings—people from dogs, horses from people, goats from turkeys, geese from cows. There’s no end to these losses.

I grew attached to the animals I read about on blogs and in books and when they passed into the Great Beyond, my thoughts followed them. I was reluctant to let go.

I take some solace in imagining an idyllic Afterlife where once-Earth-dead creatures now frolic (or graze or float or whatever they desire) and live beyond their psychological and physical constraints.

When I finished reading The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse that Inspired a Nation, I kept thinking about the sweetness and patience Snowman had extended to everyone. He had a good life back in the day, but I wondered what his life was now. Surely his story continues.

I e-mailed a friend to share my thoughts about the book (which she had also read) and said I hoped Snowman had found his way to Just-A-Bob, our favorite character in Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven.

I e-mailed again after realizing my remarks had populated Paradise with fictional creations as well as the blood-and-bones variety. My friend, ever gracious about my many blunders, wrote back to say that of course our fictional favorites reside in the Afterlife. What’s more, fictional places are part of the landscape there (think environments devised by Tolkien and Lewis).

Fictional places? Wow! My friend had just exponentially expanded Paradise for me. I started rewinding my memories of all the books I’d read and all the films I’d seen. It made me dizzy.

“I have always imagined that paradise will be kind of a library.”
—Jorges Luis Borges

Playwright Eugene O’Neill imagines Heaven for us in “The Last Will and Testament of An Extremely Distinguished Dog,” a piece he wrote for his wife in dreaded anticipation of their beloved Dalmatian’s death. It’s written from the perspective of the dog, who describes Paradise as a place “where one is always young and full-bladdered … where each blissful hour is mealtime.”

Like Borges, O’Neill (on behalf of his dog) fashions Heaven in simple and self-serving terms that I can easily understand. It’s whatever you want most—every birthday and twinkling-star wish you ever made all rolled into one. While these are sweet notions, I suspect the truth is a bit more complex.

In his essay “Sick Dog,” environmental activist and writer Rick Bass speaks to the sorrow of loss and posits a different type of Heaven,* one that stokes my imagination and belief:

“[P]erhaps the seams, the laminae, between the various worlds—the past, present, and future, as well as the living and the nonliving—may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught, or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.

“Sometimes—not always, and I think I could even say rarely—but still, sometimes, I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world, or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world, for some little place in time, where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought that maybe there are layers of heaven, and that, with our species’ dependence upon visual acuity, we might fixate too much on notions of streets-lined-with-gold as indicator or marker of when a traveler arrives in that place.

“There are definitely moments in time and places in the world where we have each felt the peace and wholeness, the stillness, spoken of in such prophecies and promises. For me it is experienced most often when I am deep in the wilderness, or up on the ridges of mountains, or in the fields and prairies with nothing but field and prairie to the horizon, or when I am simply in the presence of family. In such moments I think very much that the case could be made that we are already ankle-deep in heaven.”

Ahhh. Thank you, Mr. Bass. A picture of Paradise is coming in clearer now.


I think again about the people and animals I’ve met through my reading—their deeply felt bonds, their unfathomable grief over the deaths of their mates. It’s a comfort and a relief to view them through Rick Bass’s lens: to believe that in each relationship, long before the untimely departure of one being, the pair’s Earthly life together was already “ankle-deep in Heaven.” In the future, this is the layer I shall try to commit to memory.

* Paragraphs may not be in original order. Essay is included in the anthology WOOF! Writers on Dogs.

[Painting by Abbott Handerson Thayer and recolored for Lull.]

Goose Guard Downed in Line of Duty

Many times in the past I’ve encouraged Lull readers to visit author Shreve Stockton at Honey Rock Dawn and The Daily Coyote. Her tales of life in wild Wyoming pluck you from your daily routine and transport you to the range. Her fabulous photographs capture the heart of whatever is in the frame. Her Farmily becomes yours.

If you haven’t visited for a while, you should know that the Farmily lost a beloved character this week and Stockton’s extended Farmily across the world is in mourning. Ricardo the goose, the bovine wannabe who took his duties as a cow shepherd seriously, met a too-early death at the jaws of a pack of a new neighbor’s dogs. He died while in the line of duty.

Condolences have been pouring in—maybe you want to add your own. Someone donated money in Ricardo’s name to a goose rescue in Australia. (In the U.S., you can do the same at the Farm Sanctuary.) Someone else suggested everyone “Honk If You Love Ricardo.” (Makes you smile a little, doesn’t it?)

Me? I’m thinking of poet Alphonse de Lamartine’s remarks about death, with one minor word change:

“Sometimes only one goose is missing and the whole world seems depopulated.”

Hugs to you, Ricardo. And to the entire grieving Farmily.

[Pics by Shreve Stockton.]

Being There: From Bug to Friend in 30 Seconds

As I headed inside from the backyard yesterday, I spotted him (maybe her). I don’t know how or why he caught my eye because he blended so perfectly with the pavement. He seemed purposeful, using both his wings and his legs to propel himself forward along the ground.

I bent down for a closer look. He soon stopped—his front half in the shade of the garage, his back remaining in the glare of the sun. Though he no longer moved forward, his legs and wings continued to stir.

I know nothing about bee behavior, so I had no idea what his movements meant. Did he just need to be in the shade? I scooched him into it, but it neither pacified him nor energized him.

Finally, I figured that whatever his goal was, it was better accomplished in the grass rather than the garage. He would certainly get run over if he stayed where he was. It became easy to interpret his situation as desperate.

I plucked a clover from the yard and offered it to him. He clutched it immediately and I gently pulled him onto a leaf and transported him to a shady spot in the grass. His back legs rested while he focused on the flower. Just as I started imagining that the nectar would revive him, he grew still.

I hadn’t known him long, but that didn’t stop me from tearing up. At least he didn’t die on the pavement, I thought. At least he got a nice final meal. Then he jerked alive again—holding tight to the clover as each of his legs and wings acted of their own accord.

I fetched another clover for him and went inside. I had an appointment across town and needed to change my clothes. I would check on him again before I left.

When I returned to his leaf, only the first clover was visible, already in a stage of decay. I hoped the bee had flown away, but then saw him to the side of the leaf—upright and leaning against two blades of grass as he worked on the second clover. I gently took hold of the stem to pull him back up on the leaf, but a surge of what can only be described as electric current passed through the stem to my fingers.

Was it a message? Was he saying, “Leave me the Hell alone and go to your appointment”? He looked content enough, so that’s just what I did (what I had to do).

My friend was gone when I returned, along with that second clover. I like to think that wherever he is, he’s no longer struggling; his legs and wings are in sync once again.

Not A Day Goes By…

It was this month last year that my husband and I took our beloved canine to the specialty wonder doctor we thought would turn her health around.

We waited at a lunch joint (called “Poochie’s”) across the street from the animal hospital while the doc conducted a battery of tests and MRIs. We returned to the vet’s office only to see the wonder doc in tears.

She revealed her diagnosis slowly, opening with news we already knew: “She’s the sweetest, most loving dog. No matter what indignities I imposed upon her, she was patient and kept giving me her paw or nosing me for a pet.” Then the doc told us what our regular vets had assured us wasn’t happening: “She’s in a great deal of pain.” The wonder doc proceeded to tell us all the options we had—none of them hopeful, all of them traumatizing.

We made what we thought was the humane choice. We sat on the hospital floor, hugging and holding our first and only dog while the doc administered a drug to calm her. After some time, the doc asked us, “Are you ready for me to give her the final drug?”

How do you answer that?

After our initial bewilderment, we nodded our heads to give the go-ahead. In seconds, she was gone. And we headed home without her—our shadow, our herder, our I’ll-make-everything-all-right-for-you-always companion.

The subtraction of her presence from our days felt surreal. As Donald Hall wrote in “Distressed Haiku”:

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

For years, I had counted on our pooch breaking all the longevity records and living longer than the average age for dogs of her size. But then what?

Was she ever going to reach that magic number where I would say, “Ah, yes. That’s a long-enough life. I’m ready to let her go now”? Not likely. Her passing would always be too soon.

Every day I half expect to see her again, the Heart O’ My Heart. Every day I have to remind myself that after her untimely death, she stayed dead.

Note: We have precious few photos of our pooch because cameras scared her.

Good Grief! When Does It End?

To grieve, or not to grieve.

I’m not sure we have a choice. It either happens or it doesn’t.

Trouble is, I’ve experienced so many rounds of loss in the last few years that I can no longer discern whether I’m in or out of grief mode. So I picked up one of the latest books on the subject by Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff—About Grief: Insights, Setbacks, Grace Notes, Taboos.

Years ago when I knew I was suffering from grief and needed to read about it, there was hardly a book to be found on the topic. Now it’s a genre with its own section head in bookstores and libraries. You can find books categorized according to the age of the deceased, your relationship to the deceased, the way the deceased left this world (murder, suicide, accident, illness), and the species of the deceased. You can find various approaches to understanding grief—through a lens of psychology, neurology, spirituality, or, as is the case with About Grief, through the tad flippant view of a literature/film buff.

One passage that gave me pause was this excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed:

I once read the sentence, “I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about toothaches and lying awake.” That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

I started pondering how often I pondered my grief. I wanted to know how normal I was. I also wanted to be like C. S. Lewis. But the truth is I’m neither.

Grief and I have been together so long that I don’t have to think about it anymore—it’s permeated me. Clings to my body, oozes into my marrow, reminds me of its presence through tensions and pain and overall blueness.

Case in point: Every November, no matter what’s going right for me, I wear a whiff of melancholy. And every November, I’m perplexed by this fragrance until I remember—once again—that this was the season of great loss for my family: a grandfather and a sister within a two-week period.

My brain no longer tallies the dead; the numbers entwine with my physical well-being.

So the real choice seems to be, To grieve mindfully, or to grieve without awareness.

The right decision may be obvious, but it’s not easy.

[Thinking About Death by Frida Kahlo.]

Another Friend Crosses the Bridge

“I guess you don’t really own a dog, you rent them, and you have to be thankful that you had a long lease.”

—Joe Garagiola

Sometimes genetics call the shots on the terms of the lease. And sometimes, as in the case of this fellow, the guardians get to set their own terms.

Burt was rescued as a pup from a park in Los Angeles. He was nearly feral—hence quirky—and would require an especially understanding human to care for him. He got that and more.

When he was diagnosed with cancer and an immediate death sentence three years ago, his humans refused to buy into it. They tried everything possible (acupuncture, massage, herbal remedies) to extend his days and keep him free from pain. And they succeeded for several years.

Burt knew it. And he managed to reach the average old age for large dogs, in spite of the vet’s prognosis. But two days ago, he couldn’t go on. He hid in the garden beneath a palm and waited for his main human to drive through two hours of Los Angeles traffic to get home to him. When he heard her car, he struggled to sit up one last time—to receive her affections and to communicate all that they had meant to one another over the years.

And then Burt crossed into a different time and space, leaving his humans and their friends with this stark reality from Marjorie Garber: “If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.”

But the timeline from joy to heartbreak is always worth it. I’m pretty sure Burt would agree.

Going Forward

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
—From The Reptile Room: Or, Murder! by Lemony Snicket [Daniel Handler]

[Pic from Pigtown Design of Stenton in Philadelphia.]

Robert S. Jackson

31 August 1928 ¬ 15 December 2010

“Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second.
Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!”
–Paul Gauguin

Watching Someone Fade from Life

“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. ‘What good will it do you,’ they asked, ‘to know this tune before you die?’”
—Emil Cioran, quoted by Italo Calvino in “Why Read the Classics?”

Yesterday was another milestone for my father. In August, his doctor told him he might not make it into September; in October, the doctor and his staff said their farewells to him. As November gained ground, the hospice staff intimated that my father might not live to see Thanksgiving.

But here we are, the day after, and my father hangs on—to his humor, his will, his memories—even as his physical health rapidly declines. He’s an unusual cancer patient in that he suffers little pain. Yet he suffers all the same.

In the last week or so, I’ve watched him grow thinner and less muscular. What little blood he has remaining won’t circulate at the velocity necessary to reach above his heart, so even sitting up has become a challenge. He is bedridden. And his hours of sleep now surpass his hours awake.

As caregiver and daughter, I am not an objective observer. Every change and every step toward Death affects me. But none has affected me more than my father’s wish to remain computer-free, book-free, magazine-free, and television-free. The one thing I always admired about him was his thirst for knowledge and interest in learning. Today, as dying has robbed him of his mobility and independence, he himself prohibits his mind from exploration and expansion.

The hospice folks asked him if it was too taxing to engage with these media, and he said Yes. But I’m not convinced.

I think his engagement stems from his perspective. My father has always been goal-oriented. He’s a compulsive list-maker whose to-do list has at last dwindled to one task: dying. He’s focusing all his efforts on that and, unlike Socrates, learning something new would distract him from the goal.

This mindset has been the most difficult change to observe and accept. It is a far greater loss than the physical losses of blood, weight, muscle, appetite, mobility, and digestive functions. It reveals a surrendering cloaked as a goal and distinctly separates the man he was from the man he’s becoming.

On the other hand, maybe it’s the ultimate freedom. Maybe learning and thinking are merely baggage when you’re traveling with Death. Maybe everything is as it should be.

[Woodblock by Gustave Baumann.]

Caught in Death’s Undertow

Our move to the South was spurred by my father’s declining health. He’s battled cancer for about 10 years and now faces the last stretch.

I anticipated keeping an eye on him—encouraging better eating habits, overseeing his meds, accompanying him to doctor appointments—and my husband anticipated working on art projects with him in the small barn behind my father’s home. We both looked forward to deepening our relationship with him.

But we came too late.

My father’s confrontation with the Very Grim Reaper is unfolding at breakneck speed. He has spent the past 1-1/2 months focused on his funeral and his legacy. It’s kept him busy certainly, but at the expense of the quality of life he’d planned for. Instead of taking short driving jaunts to the countryside and mountains, he’s been steeped in the minutiae of his funeral and the sale of his home after his death.

There will be no art projects—my father’s stamina is depleted. My hope for “better eating” has given way to “eating something” for my father has no appetite. Driving jaunts* will soon be out of the question as my father’s mobility deteriorates.

I’m in charge of the funeral service, for which I’ll create a program and deliver a eulogy. If my father had his way, both would be complete by now and in his hands for approval.

But I can’t bring myself to write eulogies for folks who are still alive—especially folks I’m close to. That time is precious and seems better spent in the present.

And so, dear readers, my writing on Lull continues to be sporadic. I’ll try to share tidbits and info worth your exploration, but longer posts will have to wait.

* My husband shot this pic of the Natural Bridge—one of many gorgeous spots in this state—on a recent outing with my father. Note: My father napped in the car while we hiked. He LOVES the comfortable leather seats of his minivan and would furnish his living room with them if possible.

Death Haunts Our Hallway

As I boiled water this morning for coffee, I tried to think through the best way to start my day. I thought of all the things that needed to be done, the things that should be done, and wondered if there was anything I really wanted to do.

It was too much to think about. As an avoidance strategy, I decided to fetch a book from the front of the apartment, which requires traveling down a 30-foot hallway to reach. I didn’t have my glasses on, but could see that something dark was on the hardwood floor in the space between the hall runner and the Persian rug of the foyer. Fortunately, just before I reached the blob, I reached the door to the master bedroom suite and took a route around the intruder.

I donned my glasses reluctantly and turned toward the blob. It was a tiny mouse, with froggy-positioned back legs and his/her extraordinarily long tail straight out. It was not alive, for which I felt guiltily relieved. I had already started worrying that I would find an animal in need of medical assistance, and I learned long ago that I may be a Florence Nightingale in intention and imagination, but not in ability or reality.

Poor little guy. I’d seen evidence earlier in the week that he was around. I’d tried unsuccessfully to entice the pooch to eat a bit of oatmeal from a soy sauce dish and left it on the kitchen counter overnight. The next morning, half the oatmeal was gone, and not by evaporation. We had been using ultrasonic gadgets to keep uninvited critters away, but obviously they weren’t working. (Note: Years ago we had an ultrasonic repellent that worked great, but it was discontinued.) Though our previous attempts to catch mice in live traps failed, perhaps oatmeal was the new key. Or perhaps we had to resort to poison, which I hated even thinking about. If the mice would clean up after themselves there wouldn’t be an issue.

Did this little mouse know what I was planning? Why did he make his death so visible? Hadn’t there been enough death in this household for one week? Was this a sign?

If you’re like my neighbors, you may lump mice into the same vermin category as cockroaches and silverfish. But when we were searching for a new home for a pet rat my husband had rescued from our backyard some years ago, we discovered the world of “fancy mice” and the people who love them.

Fancy mice come in as many colors as dogs and cats, with hair that’s long, short, or curly. They win prizes in shows, have articles written about them in magazines, have merchandise and food developed for them, and have adoring guardians just as cats and dogs do. Once you’ve witnessed this alternate universe of pet lovers, I think you’d be hard-pressed to continue viewing mice as vermin.

Sigh. Was this the only mouse in our house? Or do we still have to grapple with the unconscionable act of killing furry creatures?

Again, too much to think about. I’m headed for a book.

[Painting by Evelyn de Morgan; photo from Twice As Mice Mousery.]