by Paulette Callen
Perhaps it was the implausible drama; the extreme contrast from dark to light, warm to cold, death to life; the inexplicability of it and the impossibility of describing the depth and nature of my experience, but I never told anyone about it — this tiny event that unfolded as a gift from and a glimpse into a universe that is essentially loving. That’s how it felt at the time. And still does.
To understand my enchantment, for that is what it was, one has to understand my feeling for dogs. Unless we hurt them and warp their natures, turning them insane — to either aggression or fearfulness — dogs are possessed of all the goodness and joy and altruism that humans only ever aspire to. I think dogs are the angels among us. I have experienced first-hand their intelligence, compassion, intuition; their living-in-the-moment joy, their loyalty, and devotion.
The place is Bristol, South Dakota; the time, January during the three-day blizzard of 2012. I am staying in the nursing home where my mother is struggling to die. The nurses called me to come back from my home in New York. She is unresponsive, they told me. But she isn’t. She bats their hands away if they so much as try to moisten her lips. She doesn’t want to be touched. I don’t know if she knows I’m here. I do know that she wouldn’t care if she did. Her room is dark and foul with the rankness of her dying breaths. Her eyes are completely black from renal failure. I’ve never seen her so thin. I’ve never seen her without her teeth. The person in the bed looks nothing like my mother.
In my first novel, I wrote a scene where Gustie, after sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one for days, ventures out and loses her way in a blizzard. She is guided home by deer —phantoms, the spirits of deer that no longer exist in that time and place.
The blizzard ends. I go outside for my first walk since I began her deathbed vigil. The sky is sapphire blue over a landscape of brilliant, sparkling white, unbroken snow. I’m numb and feel disconnected from ordinary life.
I blink in the unmitigated brightness of snow and sun and sky, which seem to reflect each other, exponentially intensifying the brilliance of each. Shimmering white, ethereal white, a whiteness not possible in the city, a whiteness that bespeaks beginning-of-the-world purity and cleanness stretches as far as I can see — a considerable distance as there is little to break the view. Bristol is a thriving community, population 341. The nursing home perches on a small rise at the edge of town, and in a town this small, you are never far from wide open spaces. Only the sidewalk around the nursing home has been shoveled, and only a small area in the parking lot has been cleared. Suddenly, as if materializing out of the light itself, in the distance appears a dark spot that, as it gets closer, takes the shape of a brown dog, laughing mouth, flapping tongue, bounding through the snow. Barreling straight toward me. A young Hershey lab. He is warm, as though cold and snow do not touch him. He leaps around me and up, resting his paws on my shoulders and I embrace him; swept into his luminous eyes, I return his smile. And then, out of the same ether appears a black dog, leaping joyously through the snow. He is older, more filled out, but also warm and sleek. His dark eyes are large and lustrous, and I feel seen. My first thought is Are you real?
They clearly are friends and play with each other and with me, and even as I play with them and pet them and allow them to leap up on me, I am not sure that they are real dogs. I’m feeling like the character in the novel of my own creation.
When their exuberance carries them off, bounding through the snow and out of my sight, I realize that my face is near frozen and I should go inside. A lady in a wheelchair parked by the window greets me: “I thought they were going to knock you down!” and then I know they were flesh and blood. When I ask one of the nurses who lives in Bristol about them, she tells me they are strays. Hunters often abandon their dogs here, she says. A woman feeds them and takes them in out of the cold.
They were not spirit dogs but dogs with spirit, the spirit of generous joy and friendship and delight in being alive. I’d never seen them before. I never saw them again. They came to me at just that moment as a gift. Nothing and no one living or dead could have refreshed me, comforted me, as they did.
Not the nursing home chaplain, a kind woman who came into the room the day before, sat down (uninvited) and asked if she could pray with me. The asking was in such a way as to make me believe that she needed it, and I said “You can pray for my mother if you wish.” It is not for me to deny others their prayers, their comfort, but in my mind I screamed, If God answered prayer, do you think my mother would be lying here like this, rasping out every breath, for days and days? (Why does God have to be begged and cajoled into doing the right thing, anyway? And when he doesn’t, why do we let him off the hook?) So, the chaplain prayed. I did not. I fancied that she left, puzzled or pitying.
Had my mother’s death been peaceful, serene, like the deaths described in all the books I’d read on dying, or like I’d heard others describe the last moments of their loved ones (“she saw the Lord,” “he saw the light”), I’d have maybe murmured a prayer, but it wasn’t. Her dying was hard to the last second. She died with a snarl on her lips and black eyes that seemed to see the minions of hell coming for her. The nurse said, “This is often the case with Alzheimer’s patients.” I see. Then dying is wholly dependent on the dying person’s state of mind. There is nothing objective at work here?
The nurses left me as soon as they had pronounced her dead. I tried to close her eyes. They would not close. Even this! I thought. She had never allowed me to do anything for her. Even this. I tried again and then left them for the undertaker or someone with pennies in their pocket.
What did the dogs do that the chaplain could not? They gave me the experience of joy, connection, beauty, fun — not just the wish for the promise of it. They showed me the other side of the nature of things. The sad side, the darker side I’d been living, in that dark, rank, room, and that is the nature of things — everything dies. Even stars. But the flip side is that what lives can live in joy. Asking the question, Where’s God in all this? and trying to answer it, does not increase our happiness. Playing in the snow with a couple of dogs does.
This true story is in a small anthology that no one has heard of, let alone read, called “Epiphany” published in 2015.
Paulette Callen has returned to her home state of South Dakota in retirement, after 30+ years in New York City. Varying degrees of culture shock in both directions — but always, the space she returned to has been made home by a dog.