Chicken Nostalgia

I dashed into the hardware store the other day, looking for niger seeds for my finches, and, this being Vermont and almost spring, I walked by a display of sugaring supplies. Next to them was a forty-pound bag of chicken feed, and the sight of that bag pierced me like a sword. 

It’s been six years now since I took my little flock to be killed, in preparation for our move to the retirement community where we now live. My hens were big, affable, butter-colored Buff Orpingtons, the golden retrievers of the chicken world. They were, as hens go, unflappable, and they made it through Vermont winters in their unheated chicken coop. They were not egg-laying machines, like those sad, nervous Leghorns favored by factory farmers. My hens’ egg production waxed and waned with the seasons, as God intended it to. 

On the other hand, they were composting machines, and my garden depended on them for its fertility. All year round, hunting for seeds, they scratched and shredded the layers of old hay that lined their coop, and deposited nitrogen-rich droppings into the mixture, which I periodically hauled to the garden to work its miracles. 

As thrifty as Depression-era housewives, my hens consumed every wormy apple and rotten tomato I threw into their yard. They even ate their own eggshells (after we’d eaten the eggs), thus recycling the calcium. I admired them for their usefulness, but I loved them for the eagerness with which they rushed out of the coop in the morning, for their cozy go-to-roost purrings in the evening, and because they knew and trusted me, and would let me sit with them in the sun while they pecked at the grass, and sometimes at my shoelaces. 

I have a long history with chickens, from the ones that my grandmother used let me feed when I was barely old enough to walk, to the live capons that she sent by train to Barcelona for our Christmas dinner, and the little lame chick that she sent to keep me company as I lay in bed recovering from measles. 

Now, as my autumn declines into winter, I would like nothing better than a couple of hens (you can’t have only one, because they get lonely) to comfort me. But as Vermontish and progressive as the community where I live is, chickens are not allowed. And so, whenever I run across a bag of feed in the hardware store, or drive past the “Chicks Are Here!” sign in front of the Tractor Supply every spring, I practice the art of letting go. I’ve read that this is important preparation for the ultimate divestiture, and makes it easier. 

I practice letting go of the idea of keeping hens, and of raising my own food, and of being who I was all those years ago. And in my mind I also practice letting go of Bisou, who is fine right now but who will be my last dog, and whom I’ll inevitably have to let go in another three or four years. 

On the other hand, carpe diem! we are told. Live in the moment! But how to do this while simultaneously practicing letting go is the emotional equivalent of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. The two things keep leaching into each other. No sooner do I enter fully into the joy of taking Bisou for a walk than I’m overwhelmed by the thought that someday we’ll be taking the last one. And I can only recapture the enjoyment of the walk if I firmly put out of my mind the inevitability of loss. 

It’s at moments like these that a couple of pasturing hens would come in handy, to turn my mind to dirt baths, grass, earthworms, compost, and the cycle of life.

My grandmother and I, feeding chickens

 

The Wolf's Last Gift

Some years ago, a couple of biologists living in the northern wilds rescued a wolf cub. For the next decade and a half, the man and woman devoted themselves to giving the wolf, a female, the best, most wolfish life possible, and to documenting it.

If, like me, you have entertained fantasies of what it would be like to have a wolf of your own, the documentary that the couple made would nip them in the bud. The inside of their cabin looked like a war zone. Cushions were ripped out and strewn everywhere. The rustic furniture had been chewed to pieces. There were holes in the floor where the wolf had dug.  It’s not that she was in the least aggressive; she was simply…active.

Winter and summer, every single day, the couple hiked endless miles to satisfy their protégée’s compulsion to roam. Whenever they weren’t trudging up and down mountains, they were scavenging for road kill and other sources of meat for the wolf, who flourished under their care. The couple, however, looked more haggard and worn with each passing year.

When the wolf grew old and died, they didn’t bury her. Instead, they carried her body to the top of a nearby hill and laid her on the ground, the way a wild wolf’s remains would have been left. Then they set up a camera nearby and made a stop-action video of the ensuing months.

In late summer and into the fall, as flies and beetles crawled over it, the wolf’s body seemed to flatten and sink slowly into the ground. Scavengers made off with a few bits and pieces, and then the snow came and covered everything.

In the spring, after the snow melted, the carcass had disappeared, and in its place there grew a thick, bright green patch of young grass, in the shape of a wolf.

Zero-Sum Game

Remember those stories, from what seems like a century ago, about dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice? I fell for them, even though they were absurd. Why would dolphins want to enter those narrow canals when they have the entire Adriatic to disport themselves in?

But the reason that so many of us fell for the story is that it corroborates the consoling idea that Nature, given half a chance, immediately begins to recover. In fact, many cities are seeing cleaner air as a result of stay-at-home rules. Here in Vermont, with traffic noise drastically reduced, I’ve never heard so much bird song. It’s an anything but silent spring.

While coyotes roam the empty streets of San Francisco and Chicago, around our cottage the foxes are flourishing. Yesterday evening I watched one kill a squirrel right under our bird feeder, and head up the hill to his den across the road. I told myself that his wife and four children would eat a good dinner, but the violence of the killing, although it was over in seconds, stayed with me.

I stood at the sink washing my hands for the umpteenth time and repeating my hand-washing metta: may all beings be safe, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be content, may all beings live with ease. But for whose safety and contentment was I praying, the fox’s or the squirrel’s? I couldn’t have both: if the squirrel is safe, the fox goes hungry; for the fox to live with ease, the squirrel must die. And it doesn’t stop there: when the squirrel eats the acorn, the future oak perishes. When the fox dies, its flesh melts into the earth and feeds the tree.

Everything comes at a cost. The clean air of the city is paid for by the cab drivers with no fares, and by the mountains of packaging materials overflowing the dumps. In factory farms across the country, thousands of pigs are being reprieved, while the workers who would have butchered and processed them at the now-closed Smithfield plant in South Dakota sicken and grow poorer by the day.

Is there no way out of this zero-sum game? Not, I think, as long as there are so many of us on this earth. And even if by some miracle all the visions of Margaret Sanger, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Rachel Carson were to come true at once, death would still be the necessary condition of life.

But to be human means, almost by definition, living with the illusion that we are exempt from the turning of the wheel. In our frantic culture, normal life allows us to maintain that illusion. But in this spring’s eerie silence (except for the birds), distractions are harder to come by.

And so between watching the fox on the prowl, and worrying about the sick and the unemployed, I strive to accustom myself to the image of my flesh dissolving and my molecules gently dispersing for the benefit and nourishment of something or someone. Does this seem morbid and medieval? I don’t think it is. Rather, I suspect that getting comfortable with this vision is where true ease and contentment lie.

Pasture

Sometimes I imagine, and not in a morbid way, that I’m lying on my deathbed, remembering my life. Like everybody else, I’ve had moments of high joy: wedding day, childbirth, work-related stuff. But there are also more subtly-flavored memories. Pregnancy, once the initial excitement abated, was one. I would lie on the sofa in the afternoon, not reading the book on my lap, not crossing items on my to-do list, not writing letters to my mother, but content to simply gestate.

Nursing my babies was another. Those enforced breaks from the brouhaha of early motherhood allowed me to put aside laundry and work. Rocking slowly, listening to the little slurps and gulps, I might have been a mother cat, blinking in the sun and purring as she nursed her litter.

But that was long ago. The last time I felt this kind of contentment was in the field in front of my house, in southern Vermont. It is a cliché spring morning. The grass is bright green, and the dandelions are glinting in the sun. Up high on the house roof, against the clear sky, the bluebird sings his wistful little song. And, for the first time in months, I am letting Lizzie and Emma, my goats, out of their yard.

They are twin Nubians, one black, one fawn, with droopy silver ears and Roman profiles. The moment I open the gate they dash out to the field, their long ears flapping, and set to gobbling great handfuls of grass.

The field is not fenced in, so I need to stay with them. In the past I’ve tried bringing a book to read, but the moment I open it Lizzie and Emma rush to look over my shoulder, reaching their long necks to nibble the pages: “What’s this you’re reading?” Another time I brought paper and pencil, intending to draw them. But again, as soon as they spotted me doing something with my hands, they cast aside all thoughts of grass and ran over to see, and taste, my drawings.

Since multitasking is out of the question, I watch my goats eat. They tear off amazing quantities of grass and shove them down their throats with a few mighty chomps. Later, when their stomachs are filled to bursting, they will lie down and regurgitate the contents, give them a proper chew, and re-swallow them. It’s what ruminants do.

I sit on the grass and do nothing. Cleaning out the hen house; getting the garden beds ready for the chard and kale and broccoli seedlings that are waiting on the kitchen windowsills; thinning the baby apples that are starting to swell now that the blooms are gone will all have to wait until the goats have eaten.

For now, I watch and I listen. A lulling rhythm soon establishes itself as the goats move across the pasture: step, yank, chomp; step, yank, chomp. The bluebird has stopped singing. Maybe his mate has arrived and they’re at the back of the house, stuffing old grass and twigs into their nest box.

The sun—surprise!—actually feels warm now, and I discreetly take off my down vest and sit on it, to keep from attracting the attention of Lizzie and Emma, who will want to investigate. I breathe the clean Vermont air, chew on a grass stem.  Is this what they mean by “pastoral peace”? It’s a very ancient human thing I’m doing, sitting in a field, watching goats pasture. I think about the shepherds watching their flocks on Christmas eve two millennia ago, and about the even older psalmist who identified with sheep being led to rest in green pastures.

I think about those other peace-inducing states—being pregnant, nursing babies. Like watching goats graze, they are only seemingly passive. Lying on the sofa, rocking in the chair, sitting on the grass, I am doing nothing, but accomplishing a great deal: growing a fetus, feeding an infant, keeping goats safe while they pluck dandelions.

These are things that nobody ever taught me. For once, I didn’t have to take notes, or memorize lists, or practice techniques. They arose in me naturally, without recourse to the frontal lobes of my brain.

I hope that death is another thing that comes naturally, without conscious effort--something that, along with our animal brothers and sisters, we humans instinctively already know how to do. And I take comfort in the thought that in some future spring the molecules of my body will turn to grass for somebody’s goats or cows or sheep, and I will be part of that pastoral peace forever.

My Last Big Dog

I will miss that long black body that was forever blocking, it seemed, my way around the house.  I would lift my knee and step over him and he would acknowledge me with a brief thwack of that long tail.  (I will not miss the tail, which had been known to knock small children off their feet and would clear wine glasses off the coffee table with a single sweep.)

I will miss his gravitas.  He liked things to be in their place and people and animals to behave  properly.  I got the first hint of this when he was ten weeks old.  At the end of puppy class the instructor threw half a dozen stuffed toys on the ground for the puppies to play with.  Wolfie retrieved them all, piled them up in the middle of the floor, and lay down next to them--not in a guarding, aggressive way, but looking pleased that order had been restored.  Once, when a boisterous puppy came to visit and was annoying Bisou, Wolfie quietly but efficiently, for the entire length of the visit, put himself between them, herding the puppy away from Bisou.  As he got older he became intolerant of even the mildest marital horseplay, and would streak to my side, with high pitched warning yips that clearly said "stop that at once!"

I will miss his gentleness.  He wasn't particularly big for a Shepherd, but he had a huge black head and pointy alert ears and white canines that looked like scimitars.  People who didn't know dogs found him scary.  Yet never once, in the eight years we were together, and no matter what I did to him, did he growl at me.  Whenever one of the hens escaped from the chicken yard he would dash after her looking like death on wheels, and catch and hold her down to the ground with his jaws.  Every time I felt sure that the hen would perish, but she never did, and I never saw so much as a drop of blood.  From earliest infancy Bisou entertained herself by leaping at his face, growling until he opened his mouth wide and yodeled, at which point she would stick her head into that great maw....

For the last four years, an insidious malady that five vets, including two specialists, could not diagnose slowly sapped his strength and made him lame in his front foot.  Our walks got shorter and shorter, and he became a silent presence around the house.  Then two nights ago, in the middle of a spring snow storm, I let him out and he lay down on the white ground.  When I asked him to come inside he didn't seem to know what I meant.  We had a long, uneasy night together.  By morning, I knew that he was dying. 

The vet came and could only guess at a "neurological event" that may or may not have been related to his mysterious illness.  It was clear to both of us what the right thing was to do, and he did it deftly and respectfully.

Now Wolfie is at rest, and so in a way am I.  There is relief in having the constant worry about him  taken away.  I will not miss the endless shedding and brushing (although the birds will feel deprived in the coming nesting season).  I will not miss the special diets, the pills and herbs that never helped.  I will not miss the guilt I felt every time I had to cut short his walk and then continue it with Bisou. 

My life just got a lot simpler.  But there is a palpable absence in the house, a dog-shaped black hole that my heart keeps falling into as I go about my day.

Bisou Loses Three Friends

During the ten minutes or so that it took my spouse and me to decide to move to Wake Robin, we asked the resident couple with whom we were having dinner if they could tell us one thing they did not like about the community.  The woman shook her head--she couldn't think of anything--but her husband said "Yes, there is one thing:  you make friends with people, and then they die."

Now, barely four months into her therapy dog practice in Linden, Wake Robin's nursing care facility, Bisou has lost some of her best friends.

On our weekly visits, not everyone reacts to Bisou with the same degree of enthusiasm.  Some people are too ill to do much more than give her a silent smile and a tentative pat.  Others are more interested in talking to Bisou's human retinue, especially to the young male staff member who accompanies us and on whom they dote with grandparently affection. 

But you can always tell the dog people.  Their faces light up as we come in the room and they pat their knees and invite Bisou up into their laps.  She looks into their eyes and they go into rhapsodies, telling her what a good girl she is, how smart, and what beautiful long red ears she has.  Then they tell her about the dogs they used to have.  Long-dead German Shepherds, Cocker Spaniels, Irish Setters, Labs, and Poodles big and small come back to life in these conversations, walking the kids home from school, retrieving pheasants, wolfing down a stolen box of cookies.... Bred to be a good sport, Bisou listens and lets herself be held.  When it's time to go she hops down and walks out of the room, nose to the ground, hoping for an errant crumb.  The dog lovers keep their eyes on her as she leaves.  "Look at that tail," they exclaim.  "It never stops!"

Over the last few weeks, three of Bisou's most affectionate admirers have died.  One week they were there, frail but dressed and sitting up, asking her for kisses, telling stories, oblivious to the red and gold hairs that she shed on their clothes.  And the next week they were gone, and the doors to their rooms, which used to be decorated with posters and photos and signs saying "Visitors Welcome!"  were closed.

It isn't easy to walk with Bisou past those newly closed doors.  But I'm grateful that I have her to keep me from taking comfort in the veil of secrecy with which our culture surrounds the end of life.  I know that the pleasure that our visits bring to the residents of Linden is only a small and momentary thing.  But while we're there, Bisou sitting on a narrow lap, me kneeling on the floor and trying to keep her from sliding off, we are fully invested in the moment which, in the end, is all that the resident in her wheelchair, Bisou with her wagging tail, and I really have.

Compost And The Monk

A friend sent me a link to an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/zen-master-thich-nhat-hanh-love-climate-change#skiplinks ).  In it the 86-year-old Buddhist monk, one of the world's foremost spiritual leaders, talks, among other things, about his own mortality:

"It is like the tea. When you pour the hot water in the tea, you drink it for the first time, and then you pour again some hot water and you drink, and after that the tea leaves are there in the pot but the flavour has gone into the tea and if you say they die it is not correct because they continue to live on in the tea, so this body is just a residue.  It still can provide some tea flavour but one day there will be no tea flavour left and that is not death. And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve, so we have to look at birth and death like that."

And even the tea leaves, you can put them in the flower pot and they continue to serve... I could just see TNH using and reusing the tea leaves, then carefully dumping the residue into his African violet pot.  And it's true, tea leaves are the nectar of the gods to a houseplant.  I'm sure that TNH has champion African violets, what with all the tea leaves and his equanimous presence.

What I'm wondering is, where did this angelic figure learn about the benefits of tea leaves for houseplants--or do angelic beings automatically know such things?

Apparently this angelic being is deeply into compost.  When he learned that a temple in his native Vietnam was planning to build him a memorial, this was his reaction:

"I said don't waste the land of the temple in order to build me a stupha. Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there. I don't want to continue like that. It is better to put the ash outside to help the trees to grow."

Such a cheering thought:  compost as the means to resurrection.  What better afterlife could any of us aspire to, than to to continue to serve by helping the trees to grow?

A Dog Remembers...

I did not have it in me, when I got back from Lexi's euthanasia, to dispose of her ancient leather collar and leash.  Instead, I hung them on the usual peg in the garage and told myself I'd get rid of them another day.

Today was that day.  I rolled up the collar and the leash in my hand, and was crossing the kitchen on my way to the trash bin when Wolfie intercepted me.  He stuck his big muzzle in my hand, sniffed, put his ears back and slowly wagged his tail.  The look on his face was one of gentle happiness, undiluted, as far as I could tell, by grief or regret.  He stood there a long time, sniffing and wagging his tail.  Bisou also came over and stood on her hind legs to sniff and lick,  jumping the way she used to jump to reach Lexi's muzzle in the eternal puppy greeting.

As I watched them, I remembered Lexi doing something very similar years ago.  My younger daughter, whom she adored, had visited and then gone back home to Montana.  She then mailed me something in one of those padded envelopes--probably a book.  I left the opened envelope on the stairs and later found Lexi with her nose inside it, ears back, tail wagging slowly, and that same gentle, ecstatic look on her face.
I myself was grieving my daughter's departure at the time, and if I had found, say, a sweater that she had left behind, I would have felt sadness, pure and simple, instead of Lexi's smiling reminiscence.

And it was sadness that I was feeling holding Lexi's leash this morning, sadness and the desire to dispose of it quickly so I wouldn't have to feel sad anymore.  Not so my two dogs.  They were remembering Lexi, their stern but kindly mentor, who inexplicably left one day and did not come back.  And they, unlike me, were wholly glad that she had for a moment been with us in the kitchen again.

Last Day

I knew last night that today would be her last day.  I made the call first thing in the morning, to get it over with.  I showered and dressed and didn't dry my hair.  My spouse unfolded the ramp for the last time, and I put on her old leather leash and the collar with the "canine good citizen" tag and led her up the ramp into the back of the station wagon for the last time.

At the vet's they'd worked us in from sheer kindness, and we had to wait in the parking lot a while.  Every few minutes I'd look in the rear-view mirror hoping that she'd fallen asleep, but I could see her German Shepherd ears still sticking straight up, like the bell-towers of Chartres. 

I'd not had time for my morning meditation at home, so sitting behind the wheel I put my hands on my knees, breathed, and watched my thoughts and my heart twist and swirl with sadness, fear for what was soon to come to Lexi and eventually to me and to my loved ones, guilt that I was doing this, more sadness.  Then I tried to visualize a kind of golden glow inside the car, enveloping both Lexi and me.  (Here I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have worked to bring Buddhist meditation to this  frantic land.) What can I say?  It kept me sane.

My dogs never will expire peacefully at home.  For the last four, I have had to make the decision, the appointment, the drive.  I have held them to the last, stayed with them to offer the last comfort I could, but also to expiate my guilt.  Why should I feel guilty about putting an end to the misery of a terminally ill dog?  Because of the immense relief that comes as a result of this action.  Nothing makes you feel free like getting rid of an old, sick dog.  No more calling in vain;  no more endless waiting at the door;  no more struggling to brush coat and file nails;  no more cleaning  up the rug....

The vet came out shivering--it was sleeting--with a needle in her hand.  "I'll give her a sedative first.  It usually takes about ten minutes to work.  Then I'll be back."  I held Lexi while she got the shot.  Then I crawled into the back seat and reached over and rubbed her third eye the way my husband used to rub our babies to put them to sleep.  She kept sitting up, looking more and more crumpled, and I thought maybe I would have to help her lie down.  But she finally did it by herself, and I kept rubbing and stroking and not talking because I didn't want to make myself cry.

When the vet and her assistant returned, I held Lexi's head, and she never felt the needle going into the vein.  Over the next few minutes, very gently, she subsided.   The vet listened to her heart and said, "she's gone."  I closed her eyes and we slipped a pink blanket under Lexi and carried her inside.

You'd be surprised what an empty space a dog leaves who's been mostly asleep for the last three years.  Wolfie--who learned from her how to be a good dog, who never once tried to mount her but kept all other males away from her, who used to wait by the door for her to return from her aimless wanderings in the yard--has been staring out the back door a lot.  When time came for the afternoon feeding ritual, I didn't quite know where to place the two remaining bowls.

Bluebirds

Right outside my window, in the little nest box that in past springs has sheltered families of wrens, a pair of bluebirds are building their nest.  Blue, orange, and white he perches, exuding authority, on the little apple tree whose leaves are barely unfurling, while his paler, browner wife thrusts beakfuls of stuff into the box.

(Photo:  Ed Cobb)


On the other side of the glass, I talk on the phone with my sister.  We are discussing whether to put an IV into the arm of our dying mother, to hydrate her.  I Google "hydration for late-stage dementia patients" in hopes of guidance, but that girl bird keeps stealing pieces of hay from the blueberry mulch and stuffing them into the nest hole, and I keep looking up from the screen to watch her.

I find the following and cut-and-paste it to my sister who, unlike me, is on the scene:

"Patients at this stage often refuse to eat or drink, even though they are offered food. This is due to the patient's sense of hunger and thirst diminishing as dementia advances. Once families realize that the patients with Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) often do not experience hunger or thirst, they may be able to remove the guilt they feel associated with "starving them to death" and accept the natural progression of end-stage AD. It is also important to explain that patients with poor food and fluid intake who become dehydrated typically do not express pain or discomfort. It is generally believed that dehydration in end-stage dementia is not painful."

Old Lexi limps into the room, dragging her hind legs, and laps at the water bowl.  At least she's not  dehydrated.

Bluebird of happiness, you ornithological cliche, could you have picked a worse time to visit?  Those little brown wrens in their modest clothes would have been far more appropriate for this season.

And yet, the breeze is cool, the air is clear, the evening light is bright.  For an instant, the bluebird is happiness. 

Old Ladies

One is ninety-four.  The other will soon be fourteen.  One is my mother;  the other, my dog Lexi.

Every time I step over Lexi's recumbent form on my way to or from the kitchen, I think of my mother.  And often, as I worry about and mourn my  mother, my thoughts return to Lexi, lying on her spot in the middle of the kitchen.  Both my mother and my dog amaze their doctors and vets, respectively.  "Her vitals are better than mine!"  the nurse practitioner at the nursing home exclaims about my mother.  "I can't believe she's still walking around," the vet said the last time she saw Lexi.

Both, at their advanced age, look forward to their next meal, and instead of shrinking are putting on weight.  For a long time I kept Lexi skinny because of her arthritic hips, but for the last several months I've let her have (almost) all the food she wants.  Why deprive her of her one remaining pleasure?  Since her bout of encephalitis almost two years ago, my mother has been immobile.  Lexi too is practically immobile, though she does still manage to get to her outdoor bathroom.  I used to think that lying down for months on end spelled doom for man and beast.  But apparently there are exceptions.

Their minds are fading, along with their sight and hearing.  For a while this meant that they gradually and gently withdrew from reality, my mother into a place that held her long-dead husband and parents, with whom she would have long chats, and Lexi into wherever old dogs go to remember.   For a long while, things were peaceful in our kitchen and in the room in the nursing home in Mobile, Alabama.  But that has changed.  Now we give Lexi Valium at night, so that she won't spend it in anguished, wheezy, endless barking.  My mother has become aggressive towards the people who take care of her, and is having to be sedated.

Sedatives seem to take the edge off mental misery.  They also keep my  mother's caretakers safe from her teeth and, I hope, more disposed to treat her kindly.  But sedatives are not good for the body, and the pace of her deterioration is increasing.  Are we, her family, by condoning the use of these drugs allowing a kind of gradual euthanasia?   If Lexi's dementia were to take an aggressive turn there would be no doubt as to the next step:  we would take her to the vet who would gently and quickly put an end to her distress.  But there is no such clarity where humans are concerned.

Through all this, some shreds of their former selves still cling to my mother and my dog.  In the last photo of my mother, her mouth looks oddly crooked, and I worried that she'd had a stroke.  "No, no," my sister, who took the picture, said.  "She told me that she didn't want to smile because she was afraid she had food between her teeth." 

On her part, Lexi still reigns over an invisible territory that the other dogs dare not cross.  If I call them and they don't immediately appear, or I hear them whining in the kitchen, I know that it's because they're stuck behind Lexi, and I have to go liberate them.  "Lexi, I'm watching you," I say, and they sprint past her.

But lately her domain has been shrinking, and Wolfie and Bisou can get past her almost any time they choose.

Last Words

I must confess that, since stories by survivors of near-death experiences surfaced in the media years ago, I have been fascinated by them.  Those lights, that tunnel, that...joy--what do they mean?  Are they the final flashes of dying neurons, or are they glimpses into what Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns"?

The dying are necessarily brief in their accounts of what is happening to them.  My father was comparatively descriptive when he whispered ecstatically his last words to my mother:  "I feel God so close to me."  My maternal grandmother, who had certainly never heard of near-death experiences, at the very end smiled, exclaimed, "Oh, such light!" and died.

In  the New York Times' recently published eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1 )  Mona Simpson says that his final words were "Oh wow.  Oh wow.  Oh wow."  

I find solace in these stories.  I am consoled when I read that people who have come very close to dying often say that they have lost their fear of death, and live out their lives in serenity and peace.  Is it foolish to find comfort in something that seems to answer our deepest hope, but hasn't been proven by replicable double-blind experiments?

I don't own an Apple, an iPod, an iPhone, or an iPad, and I've never watched Toy Story.  But I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for leaving life's final gate ajar for just a second, before closing it forever.

Weird Blessings

My mother turned 93 last month.  Last spring, after a lifetime of robust health, she became gravely ill.  If someone had told my sister and me then that nine months later she would be in a nursing home, immobile, incontinent, and deeply into dementia, we would have mourned, and despaired, and prayed for a quick, merciful end.

Nine months later, she is indeed in a nursing home--immobile, incontinent and demented.  She is also...happy.  My once hyper-critical mother now loves everybody:  her caregivers, the visitors with whom she cannot communicate unless they speak Spanish (English being a casualty of her decline), the teenage grandchildren who a year ago she thought would come to grief.

When she first became incapacitated, my sister and I most dreaded her loss of dignity.  Would she beg to die when she needed help with...could no longer...?  If, God forbid, she were somehow aware of her dementia, how would her pride, her sense of self tolerate the loss?

In the early days of her illness, my sister and I pored over her advance directive;  speculated about what she would want if things came to "the worst," as in fact they quickly did;  hoped against hope that she would qualify for hospice so we could  benefit from the advice of people knowledgeable about these issues.

But, against all her doctors' predictions, our mother never did qualify for hospice.  To do that--in the absence of intolerable pain--you need to have lost a substantial amount of weight (instead she has gained ten pounds) or have stopped communicating (she talks constantly, to everybody, though never in English).

Strangest of all, she has a sense of humor about her dementia.  On a recent visit, my sister decided to call me so my mother and I could speak.  She handed the phone to my mother. 

"Say Hi to Lali," my sister prompted. 

"Who is this?" I heard my mother ask her. 

"It's Lali.  Tell her who you are," my sister said.

Then my mother said, "Lali, this is your mother.  And I'm calling to wish you a Merry Christmas."  Whereupon she burst into gales of laughter at her mistake.

These days, my mother loves to watch black-and-white Westerns on TV, loves greeting cards (which she has no trouble reading), adores food.  Her religious ties have loosened considerably. On the whole, she has taken a turn towards frivolity.  She is, for the first time in living memory, content.

My sister and I don't quite know what to make of this new mother.  Perhaps we should just enjoy her?

A Time For Listening To Bach

A few years before she died of breast cancer at 52, the mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang Bach's Cantata "Ich habe genug," ("I have enough"). For the performance Lieberson dressed in a hospital gown, with tubes emerging from her body, signifying a sick woman's readiness to die.

I have a recording of that performance, and I've been listening to it these days, along with other music by Bach, as the news about my mother oscillates between "not so bad" and "definitely worse."

I hear from my sister, who is taking care of our mother, almost every night. In between the phone calls my mind endlessly replays the latest information, weighs alternatives, imagines outcomes. It seems that no medication exists that will relieve my mother's post-surgical pain without knocking her out for the better part of a day. But sleep is treacherous, for while she sleeps she is immobile, and immobility brings the danger of stroke, pneumonia, and a host of other ills.

Also, while she sleeps she is not doing physical therapy, which means that she is not improving, which means--and this is what my sister and I dread--that she will not be allowed to stay in the rehab facility where she is presently receiving wonderful care. She will have to go to a nursing home.

The doctor, who seems kind as well as wise, has recommended that my mother receive only palliative care. But how does "palliative" translate when blood sugar levels rise sky high? And does "palliative" mean that we abandon all attempts to keep her moving? Does it mean that she is constantly on pain meds, i.e., unconscious? Then there is the matter of my mother's mind, which runs the full gamut of dementia stages: unable to make any sense on some days, "almost herself" on others.

The doctor tells us that it is time to begin thinking about hospice.

How does one "do" end of life? My sister and I are woefully inexperienced. We've never done this before. We have good will, but no skills.

There is something about the music of Bach that makes me feel that he knew everything there is to know about being human, especially the stuff that cannot be put into words. So I listen to Bach these days, and wait.

Death And Dying

Yesterday, some fifteen friends and neighbors crammed into our living room for the second salon of the season. There was wine, white and red, and cheese and chips and dips and a tray of spicy deviled eggs.

I find deviled eggs laborious (all that peeling and filling) and messy (the filling sticks to my fingers no matter what I do). However, since we were going to talk about death and dying, I decided we needed something cheerful to look at--I think deviled eggs always look cheerful. Also, there's nothing like a mouthful of cayenne to make you feel alive.

The speaker was a friend who has been a nurse for many years, in oncology and cardio wards. She spoke with feeling about sitting with dying patients, about their needs and the needs of the families. She spoke about helping people to let go, about ensuring their comfort, and about the horrific lengths to which modern medicine, if allowed to, will go to prolong a torturous life.

It was a beautiful afternoon, with the sun shining on the snow outside and the chickadees and nuthatches coming and going from the bird feeder. People spoke eagerly about their own experiences around the death of friends and loved ones. Others spoke about their utter lack of experience: after all, it is entirely possible in this country for a person to reach adulthood never having seen a dead body, or stood at the bedside of a dying relative.

From the beginning of the talk, there was a feeling of warmth and relaxation among us. There was also amazement that here we were, on a day that made us all, even though we knew better, think of spring, talking about death--the ultimate taboo as well the only certainty.

There was humor, too. One woman told about a friend, who had always been a controlling type, deciding after a long illness that it was time to die--and being annoyed that she couldn't make it happen by sheer force of will.

After a while the talk meandered to other topics. There was an update on the sheep that had gotten into the grain bin (she's chewing her cud!) and talk about when it's too late to breed a bitch for the first time. Some people had brought puppies in crates in their cars, and went outside to let them out. In other words, life took over. The deviled eggs were all gone.

Next month we're going to talk about bees.