Bisou Gets A Job

No dog-book author would ever classify the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, that ultimate lap-warmer, as a working breed.  But Bisou, who has lived her entire life for pleasure alone--the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of ball-chasing, the pleasure of my company--is now a working dog.

Last Sunday she auditioned for the position of Therapy Dog in the facility (to be known in these pages as "Alder") that houses Wake Robin's assisted-living and skilled-nursing residents.

She was by no means a shoo-in.  As we battled a freezing gale on our way up the hill to Alder, I rehearsed various dire scenarios.  The most worrisome was that she would jump up on people, get tangled up with their walkers, and gouge their shins with her nails.  Have you ever trained a small, friendly dog not to jump up?  I've taught three German Shepherds not to jump up, and it was a relative snap, the main reason being that nobody reinforces a big dog for jumping up.   But when Bisou jumps up on guests at our door they invariably say "Oh, you little sweetheart!" and reward her by ruffling her fur and making kissy noises.

I also worried that, when confronted with persons who appeared ill or disoriented, she might turn away in despair, as a former therapy dog of mine used to do.  She might cower at wheelchairs, run away from walkers and canes, recoil from strange sights and sounds.  She might even, god forbid, poop on the carpet.

But I had underestimated my dog.  When she spotted the first wheelchair, she ambled up to the tiny occupant, sat down, fluffed out her ears and gazed up with her big, liquid eyes.  She waited for the gnarled, trembling hands to reach her head and stayed still for as long as the caresses lasted.

Our next stop was a jolly centenarian who addressed me in perfect Italian and Spanish while she invited Bisou to put her front paws up on the recliner.  I held my breath, envisioning Bisou leaping up and landing on the woman's lap--but my brilliant dog just stood there on her hind legs, making soulful eye contact, enjoying the petting.

And so it went, room after room, with the figures in recliners or on wheelchairs stretching their arms to her, and she trotting up to them, wagging her tail, doing her job.

But for all Bisou's enjoyment, it was work.  When she sensed that we had turned in the direction of the exit, she began to pull on the leash.  She was done.

Back in our cottage, Bisou gave short shrift to Wolfie's concerned greeting ("Where have you been, and what's that smell on you?") and ran to the water bowl, took a good long drink, then jumped into my reading chair, practically patting the seat to say, "come here, you!"  I complied, pulled a blanket over us, and we both fell asleep.

Final Pets

Next to the chapel in the nursing home where my mother died earlier this month stood three large bird cages.  Their doors were open, and on a perch beside each sat a cockatiel.  The birds fixed us with their round eyes and chattered, furling and unfurling their crests.  Periodically, one of them burst into a wheezy, geriatric laugh.  A snow-white dove, looking like a soul of the departed, pecked at seed inside one of the cages.

I stood awkwardly before the cockatiels, wondering if I should somehow make conversation with them, when a magnificent cat, a Siamese/Persian blend with long white hair and blue-gray "points" ambled in, his tail held high.  Unfazed, the cockatiels kept up their chatter, punctuated by the wheezy laugh.  The dove didn't even look up from her seed.

Before disappearing in the direction of the chapel the cat allowed me briefly to scratch its head.  He was not, I was told, the only cat in the building.  There were also two dogs around somewhere, elderly small poodle mixes, whom I did not meet.  And next to the main entrance there was a large aviary where a flock of parakeets flitted among the branches while on the floor beneath them a covey of Chinese button quail scratched for seeds.

Have you ever seen button quail?  I am now obsessed with them.  They are tiny (four inches long), chicken-like birds with elegant feathers.  Watching them I decided that when I get too old to care for my hens I'll switch to button quail, which I will keep in the house.  True, their eggs are ten times smaller than a chicken's, but by then I'll be tiny too, and won't need a lot of food.

My mother spent her nursing home years in the critical-care area, where animals were not allowed.  But on Sundays she was hefted into a wheelchair and wheeled to the chapel for Mass.  I hope that as she went by she caught a glimpse of the cockatiels.  Perhaps their raucous shrieks reminded her of the big red macaw that we had during our years in Ecuador.  He was head over heels in love with her, would have nothing to do with anyone else, and whenever she appeared in the back yard would fly down from his perch, waddle over to her and, with his eyes half closed, rub his enormous beak against her leg.

The Most Off-Putting Blog Topic Ever

No, it's not death, but close.  It's Long Term Care--what we'll all probably need if we aren't cut down in our prime by cancer, cardiac arrest, a drunk driver or someone with a gun.

Have you clicked me into oblivion yet?

Inspired by my mother, whose insurance is saving her descendants from financial ruin now that she's in a nursing home, last fall I researched the average costs long term care in Vermont.  I realized that the insurance my husband and I had signed up for in our carefree forties was woefully inadequate. 

There followed a flurry of phone calls and consultations with agents and financial planners.  Large packets of information, featuring disconcertingly white-haired young people on the covers, arrived in the mail.  My husband and I endless hours over these, comparing apples to oranges and avocados and forcing ourselves to speculate on the vagaries of fate:  how long did we expect to live?  Of what did we think we would die?  Would we, alone or together, stay in our house to the bitter end, and if so, would we need assistance with the "activities of daily living"?  Or would we prefer a nursing home, and would we want a private or a semi-private room?

Who wants to think about this stuff? 

But we gritted our teeth and thought of our descendants and filled out the applications.  Next, the insurance companies told us, they would request our medical records, and then they would send a nurse to our house to look us over for physical and mental flaws.

Yesterday afternoon we had our home visit.  It was conducted by a friendly local nurse who insisted on meeting our dogs.  After a cursory physical exam came the cognitive part.  I must confess that being put on the spot to do simple multiplication and division in my head freaked me out a little, since it reminded me of third grade and my German nuns. 

The other questions were easier, but I found them more disturbing because they gave me insight into the depths of deterioration that the insurance company anticipated of someone of my advanced years.  One question was, where would I store ice cream?  I came close to messing up on this one--we haven't had ice cream in the house in ages, and I almost said "the fridge" instead of "the freezer."  What, the nurse wanted to know next, would I do if I accidentally swallowed poison?  Then she asked me to walk from the dining room into the kitchen and back, while she timed me.

Is it possible that one day I won't know where the ice cream goes?  That I'll swallow bleach by mistake and won't know who to call?  That I'll barely be able to make it from the kitchen to the dining room?  The answer, of course, is yes.

Ash Wednesday is coming soon.  Every year while I was in school the priest would trace a cross of ashes on our childish foreheads while he muttered pulvus eris et pulvus reverteris--dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.  These days one doesn't get many formal reminders of mortality or of the deterioration that will most likely precede it.  I should be grateful to Mutual of Omaha for reminding me of what actuarial tables show with depressing certainty:  that none of us lives forever, that we  cannot count on retaining even the humblest skills--walking to the kitchen, knowing where to put the ice cream--while we are still alive.  And that we'd better strengthen our spiritual and emotional muscles so we'll be able deal with the future, when it comes.

When A Person's Not A Person

This post is about my mother.

In October I visited her in an assisted living facility in Mobile, where she was recovering from encephalitis (which all the doctors thought would kill her) and a broken femur (which is supposed to do 92-year-old ladies in for good).

She was in a wheelchair and having all kinds of troubles, but she looked elegant in her beige jacket and ivory scarf and her white hair with, still, terrific body and wave.  The first thing she said to me was "Look at you!  So young!"  And when my sister, who is sixteen years younger than I, came to pick me up hours later, our mother said, looking at us standing at the foot of her bed, "What beauties!  You look thirty at the most!"

During the hours I spent with my mother in the next couple of days,  she grew progressively vaguer and more tired, but was still vibrating with emotion, and I found myself forcing her to take naps like a recalcitrant child, so I could have a rest. Otherwise, she talked non-stop:  about her mother and father, her sisters and brother, my father, his parents, my sister, my husband, my daughters, my grandchildren. And she recounted again how, toddling beside her on the way to my grandparents' barn, on a summer day long ago, I had asked "When everything was nothing, what was everything like?"

The very day I left she went back to the hospital, and then to a nursing home, chosen because it was run by nuns (who would give her spiritual sustenance) and had a homey atmosphere, with dogs and kittens running around, and a big aviary full of birds.

But my mother is indifferent to spiritual sustenance now, to nuns and dogs and cats and birds, and even to my sister.  "I'm supposed to be the light of her life," my sister says, "but when I walk in, hold her hand, pat her cheek, she stares right through me.  She doesn't care that I'm there.  She has no affect."

No affect?  Our mother was an affect professional, a virtuoso.  Even in the throes of encephalitis last spring, when her five doctors said she wasn't going to make it, she had affect.  Tons of it.
   
For better or worse, my sister and I had, from birth, been the recipients of our mother's torrential affect.  We complained about it--"Does everything have to be so earth-shaking?"  We devised strategies against it--"Just agree with her.  Don't engage.  Say 'M'hm, m'hm.'"  It made us crazy.  But we always expected it

And now it's gone.  So is everything else, except the ability to, very slowly, put food into her mouth...or into her juice glass.  Otherwise, her body is inert.  She cannot sit up or shift herself in bed.  Still, she could go on--her heart beating, gut digesting, lungs pumping--for quite a while.  She is her own life-support system.
But who is she?  If she doesn't recognize the friends who visit.  If she stares right through her own daughter.  If she shows neither pleasure nor distress, who is she?

People say "she's not herself anymore."  But if so, who is that stirring cole slaw into the cranberry juice?

All of which brings me back to the old catechism questions.  What makes a person a person?  What is the soul, and does it depart only when the grosser body apparatus quits?  Doesn't a soul need a mind to anchor it?  And when a person's not a person, what is a person like?