The Dog Doesn’t Die

My dad died last night. He was 87 and had been in poor health for several years, especially since November. On Tuesday, he had his last lucid conversation. From Wednesday on through his death on Saturday, he was semi-conscious at best and gasped for air like a drowning man. We decided to put him into hospice on Thursday, which happened on Friday, and I saw him for the last time on Saturday morning, before I boarded a plane and flew home, over the bumpy air above the Appalachians and into another time zone. An hour after I walked in the door, my mother called to say he had just died.

Although I was prepared for it, this is hard. It was much harder watching him struggle for breath, however, and I’m grateful that he doesn’t have to endure that any longer. Even though it was only a matter of days, the fight to breathe went on far too long. Patrick, the family attorney, was one of my best friends in childhood, and he later formed a close bond with my parents. He went up to see Dad Thursday evening. The next morning, we talked on the phone for a while. He said that Dad had recognized him and tried to say a few things but couldn’t. One thing he did say with clarity, however, was “worn out.” Yes, he was worn out. Very worn out. I also wonder if he held on until he could see me on Tuesday, then let go.

People speak of the death rattle. I don’t know what the death rattle sounds like, but I suspect it’s much like what Dad’s breathing was for those four days. He smoked for 40 years, then quit 27 years ago. Quitting bought him the 27 years, but the 40 years of smoking finally caught up with him.

So now I am making arrangements to fly back. Good friends are staying with my mother, who is managing pretty well. Mom has been a one-woman nursing home for the past few months. So she is experiencing a combination of shock and relief. She says it seems surreal to her. She’s going to need help managing details and making the transition, but ultimately she will be fine. She is bright and realistic, a good combination. I often describe her as “the most competent person in the family.” I’m still going to check in with her a lot. She’s a young 75, but she’s also now a widow.

Interesting, creative people are often difficult, as Dad was. He was frequently demanding and even bullying at times. I stood up to him more than anyone else in the family, and yet he favored me. I think by standing up to him, I somehow bought myself the luxury of appreciating the many wonderful things about him: his endless curiosity, his quirky sense of humor, his innocence, his unparalleled love of animals, his generosity, his openness, his optimism, his love of reading, his liberalism, his horror at the suffering of others, his capacity for affection. He drove me crazy, I drove him crazy, and we loved each other like crazy.

As his dementia ate away at our ability to sustain the depth of our relationship, I had to remind myself of who he had been, but I never forgot. I am proud to have been his daughter, and I’m glad that the last thing I said to him before leaving yesterday morning was “thank you.”

I’m going to have a busy week away from the computer, so I thought I’d go to a small journal I kept and see if there were any books I could review in bumper sticker format. I found four.

First up is The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. This is the true story of Randy Morgenson, a seasonal ranger with the U.S. Park Service, who disappeared one winter in Kings Canyon National Park. This is an excellent book, one of my favorites, and I highly recommend it. However, quite a few rescue dogs were used in the search for Morgenson, and one of them was injured pretty badly. This dog did survive, and the dogs are heroic in general. With that in mind, I’m going to declare this book Mostly Safe for animal lovers.

Next is Murder Unleashed, by Elaine Viets. This is from Viets’ Dead End Job series of mysteries, which are like brain candy — not very demanding, and fun. However, we learn about some of the bad things that can happen in the pet care industry, and one of those things really bothered me. So I am going to declare this book Probably Unsafe for most animal lovers.

Philosophy Made Simple, by Robert Hellenga, was quite frustrating. It started off great, then collapsed in the last third. I had a pretty strong love/hate thing going on with this book. One of the hate issues had to do with animals. This book is also Probably Unsafe for animal lovers.

Finally, Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen is a good book that is Completely Unsafe for animal lovers. I loved so much about this book, but my book group felt horrible for the animal characters in this book. If you can approach this kind of book as a forewarned reader, go for it. Otherwise, it might upset you.

There’s a lot of stuff going on this week that’s keeping me from blogging. However, I didn’t start this site just to abandon it, so I went into my old folders of “stuff” and found this gem sent to me by a friend in 1997. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it sure sounds like it might be!

Anyway… here’s a letter from the Smithsonian Institute when this man  sent them one of his ‘major finds’.

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Paleoanthropology Division, Smithsonian Institute, 207 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20078

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents “conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.” Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the “Malibu Barbie”. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings.

However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin: 1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone. 2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids. 3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that: A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on. B. Clams don’t have teeth. It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results. Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation’s Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name “Australopithecus spiff-arino.” Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the “trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix” that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe

Curator, Antiquities

Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost is told in the form of a hilarious gardening advice column written by the main character, Mertensia Corydalis. Mertensia is opinionated and in possession of a very dry wit. She also has a much softer heart than one might think, but Abbott takes her time in revealing that side of her narrator, as she also takes her time in spooling out a clear plot line. This extremely funny book, one of my favorites, is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers and would be entirely safe but for the preventable demise of a few fish.

Mertensia is wise enough to understand the need to train her dogs, Jasper and Jennelle, while at the same time not expecting them to think like people. When Jennelle does something that is destructive from a human point of view, Mertensia allows that Jennelle, being a dog, was thinking like a dog and was therefore blameless. Mertensia also advocates on behalf of birds, mice, bugs, and butterflies. And it was a rare page where I didn’t laugh out loud. I heartily recommend this book.

Let me start by saying that I love, love, love Christopher Moore. Some of my friends find his writing a bit over the top, but I think he’s great! So needless to say, I enjoyed A Dirty Job immensely. And it is Mostly Safe for animal lovers. Moore’s absurdist style makes it hard to take the occasional cartoonish violence very seriously, though some of his books have a message. Fluke, for example, is about the need to protect marine life, and in Coyote Blue, Moore advocates for Indigenous Peoples’ rights more effectively than any article or white paper I’ve ever encountered. (And given the nature of my job, I encounter a lot of that stuff!)

A Dirty Job is about death and our inability to deal with it. Making that funny is quite a trick. The book starts off with a human death, and it’s rather sad, actually. Most of the remaining casualties are pretty comic, but not that first one. Anyway, in terms of animals, Bummer and Lazarus are dogs loyal to The Emperor of San Francisco (just trust me on this), and one of them is rewarded for intrepidity towards the end of the book. However, another character has trouble keeping pets alive for a while, given certain powers that take a while to sort out. Those pets aren’t really given much discussion, and they are briefly mourned. Then the hellhounds show up. The hellhounds are indestructable and the epitome of canine loyalty. They’ll eat anything. As one character says “Okay, you’re hellish beasts from another dimension, and you like toast.” A named pet dies in the middle of the book, but we don’t learn much about him and, in typical Moore fashion, he is briefly mourned. Past that, I can’t say too much, except that the dogs are prominent among the good guys.

I highly recommend this book.

Last week, I came across three things I wanted to post on this blog. And now I find that two of them are sweeping across the Internet. So there’s no point in waiting, I guess. I also have a brief message of encouragement for those of you who land on this site looking for info about diabetic pets, but that’s at the end.

Have you seen the extremely popular YouTube video, “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats” yet? If you haven’t, you eventually will because it is all over the place. You can watch it now by clicking on this link. You’ll be glad you did, because it’s quite funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

Have you seen the creepy video of the guy stuck in the elevator for 41 hours? No, the video is not 41 hours long, it’s about 2 minutes. It’s worth watching. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators/?yrail

Accompanying the video was a well-written article, which is not being passed around the Internet quite so much. I read the article in a hard copy of The New Yorker, a magazine I dearly love. It explains all about poor, trapped Nicholas, as well as discussing elevators in detail. They’re safe, they’re more complicated than you might imagine, and they generate much of their own power, kind of like a hybrid. Here’s the link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?/yrail

And now we’re all caught up. I had planned on putting up a book review tomorrow and some diabetic cat success stories later on in the week, but I’ll have to revisit that schedule now. In the mean time, if you’re one of the people drifting in to check out my periodic references to diabetic pets, here’s the bumper sticker version: Yes, it can be treated, and no, it’s not hard. You can do this and you’ll be glad you did. Giving 2 shots a day to my diabetic cat, Eddie, takes about 5 minutes total, and for my trouble I have kept him alive and in very good health since Sept. 2004. More on this at the end of the week or beginning of next week.

My community, a close-in and rather urban suburb of a major city, has the usual combination of pros and cons, but one of the best things we do is what I call “Weird Garbage Day.” I think it should be a national holiday celebrated in every community, but it would have to occur in phases. Maybe “Weird Garbage Month”? Anyway, this is the Saturday on which we put out our large, odd-shaped, heavy, and miscellaneous cast-offs that the regular garbagemen can’t and won’t take. The powers that be in my city have divided us into four quadrants, and each quadrant has a designated Saturday in April on which weird garbage will be collected. Hazardous waste and large or complicated electronics aren’t allowed — they must be taken to a central location — but just about everything else is. I love Weird Garbage Day, and so do my neighbors.

In previous years, I’ve unloaded an old lawnmower, a broken vacuum cleaner, and the remnants of an ancient chair. This year, I had a huge amount of stuff: a bicycle I rode religiously for 3 years but not for the last 10, an old bed frame, a mirror that was too heavy to hang, a briefcase that had seen better days, a nonfunctioning phone, and a portable cassette player (remember those?). The great thing is that everything I listed in the previous sentence was gone before the garbagemen arrived. “The scavengers,” as we refer to them on my block, drive around in big trucks the day before and collect anything they think they can refurbish and sell or use. The scavengers include antique-dealers, second-hand store owners, and the very thrifty. It’s a great way of recycling, in other words. All we have to do is get the stuff to the curb, and if anyone with more imagination, time, and skill sees something they can use, they take it. Everyone wins. I love it!

At the same time, I have launched the war of the groundcovers in my front yard. Your living room is probably bigger than my front yard. You may even have a closet that’s bigger. Yet the diminutive size does not solve the problem of ugly grass and weeds that must be mowed, even though they don’t have the decency to cover the entire yard. Yes, I have bare patches. It looks like 20 teenagers spent the weekend playing touch football on it. Which would be difficult, given its size, and anyway, I can assure you this didn’t happen. So why not plant a bunch of groundcovers and see if they do better? Right now I have woolly thyme, something called Majus, variegated vinca, golden clover, and Scottish moss. I bought more plants today, including another short thyme, but they will mostly go in the back yard, which is bigger and not as problematic. Anyway, I am hoping these new groundcovers will take over the yard eventually, although it will take a while. My highest hopes are for the woolly thyme and variegated vinca. I am least optimistic about the Scottish moss and golden clover, but they could surprise me. And the majus is a complete unknown. As long as they eventually fill in the bare spots, I’ll be happy. Wiping out the grass would be a wonderful bonus.

I try not to review books from memory, but I will make the occasional exception.

I like Bruce Wagner as an author, but some of his books are NOT SAFE for animal lovers. Specifically, he does have a character kill a hapless, harmless pug in Still Holding. And one of the Amazon reviews for Memorial, another Wagner book (and the “half” because I didn’t read it myself), indicates that a pet dies. I don’t recall a problem with Chrysanthemum, which was my favorite of the Wagner books I’ve read thus far, but again, I’m doing this from memory. If an animal death really disturbs you, be wary of Wagner. Otherwise, you might like him. Check some of the more in-depth reviews online.

On the other hand e, by Matt Beaumont, is pretty funny and I don’t recall any animals in it. So I will deem it SAFE for animal lovers. The book is told through a series of e-mails, which I thought would be off-putting but actually worked extremely well. I highly recommend it.

If I ever establish an Honor Roll of authors who write books that animal lovers will appreciate, Julia Glass will be the first name on the list. Her second book, The Whole World Over, is not only SAFE for animal lovers, it is recommended. Glass can barely bring herself to imperil an animal, let alone hurt one. Among the many animals mentioned, a  horse sustains a bruise, a placid bulldog gets shuffled around a bit, and a character worries about who will take over feeding some feral cats, but that’s it. There is also one human death that’s reported but not shown.

Glass also proves the point that you don’t need real villains if you can get “good” characters in conflict with each other. This is a long, gentle book told from several perspectives. Is there a plot? Sort of, but it’s mostly a matter of how these good characters work out their differences. Anyway, I loved reading this book, and I recommend it. For anyone who also read Glass’s first book, Three Junes, there are a few recycled characters, including Fenno the Scottish bookstore owner and his bird, Felicity.

This won’t happen very often, but I’m going to tell you about a couple of websites where you can spend money.

When Dave and I were in New Mexico last October, I found this great hand lotion — Cedar and Sage, by Southwestern Soapworks, at www.southwesternsoapworks.com .  Now, I go through more hand lotion than anyone I know, to the point where my friends tease me about it. So this was a significant discovery. When I ran out, I checked the website and found that the online prices are quite low. I also like the story of how one night, the founder had a dream to make soap. And that’s how she and her husband ended up starting their company. I ended up talking over the phone to both of them, and they’re lovely people. So that’s my first cheap thrill.

For the next cheap thrill, check the first comment.