Chicken Soup for the Cat & Dog Lover's Soul (30 page)

After having it examined by a veterinarian, the Petricones took it home and began calling area shelters and animal agencies to learn if anyone had reported a missing kitten. They took out an ad in the local newspaper, and posted flyers around their small New Hampshire town. Receiving no response, they decided to adopt the white and black tom themselves. They called him Jack.

Jack, Ellen and Alex lived happily in their new home for several years. Then tragedy struck. One rainy March evening, Alex was killed in a traffic accident while driving home from work. He was twenty-nine years old.

As she grieved for her husband, Ellen was also plunged into a financial crisis. She had recently been laid off from her job, and she and Alex had been struggling to make mortgage payments, car payments, furniture payments. Now she had to cope with it all by herself. She began to get depressed and had trouble sleeping.

There was one small consolation. In the weeks and months following Alex’s death, Jack rarely left Ellen’s side. He followed her around the house, waited on the windowsill when she went out, and slept on the pillow next to her at night. Never intrusive, but plainly visible, Jack was always available when Ellen needed consolation of the furry, whiskered variety.

Ellen was amazed at his behavior. He had always been an affectionate little guy, but he liked his independence, too. But now he started showing the type of devotion she had associated with dogs. Ellen would get up, Jack would get up; she’d sit down, he’d sit down. He would even follow her into the bathroom at night, and hop up on the counter beside her while she washed up and brushed her teeth.

In spite of these consolations, however, the deep hurt of losing her husband still remained with Ellen. After one particularly grueling week, she found herself in extremely low spirits as she prepared for bed. She was standing at the bathroom sink with a bottle of sleeping pills in one hand, and her other hand, palm upward, in midair. She stood there for a long time, motionless. She felt defeated, without the strength to go on. Jack jumped up on the counter next to her, but she neither heard nor noticed. All she was thinking was that she could just take the whole bottle of sleeping pills and be done with everything.

At that moment, Jack lifted his paw and swatted at her open palm. Ellen was startled. She turned and saw Jack looking at her with his head cocked to one side. The look in his eyes was a strange mix of curiosity and concern. It was as though he were saying, ‘What are you doing?’ And all of a sudden, Ellen thought,
What
am
I doing?

With a quick movement of her hand, she tossed the sleeping pills into the trash. Then she marched into the kitchen and made some good, old-fashioned warm milk— for her
and
for Jack. When she went to bed, she gave Jack a big hug and promised that she’d never even think about leaving him again.

A small gesture—the insistent tap of a cat’s paw—had pulled her back from the edge of a huge abyss. And that night Ellen slept better than she had done in months.

Eric Swanson

Charity

When I first saw Phaedra, she was standing in a field of daisies, her fluffy white coat dusted with dried flowers and bits of grass. She looked like a tiny fairy, big-eyed, delicate and graceful as a deer on her tapered white legs. She was much smaller than any of the other llamas in the field, and I mistook her for a baby until her owner, a local farmer, told me that something had gone awry in her growth centers and she was dwarfed. To me, her babyish look only added to her unique appeal. Something about her seemed almost magical. Phaedra had a serene and delicate gentleness about her I’d never seen in a llama before or since, and my heart was instantly and hopelessly lost to her.

At the time, my husband Lee and I were still attempting to make our Brightstar Farm a going business concern. Llamas, however, were not in our business plan. So when Phaedra walked up to me, nuzzled my cheek with a nose as soft as feathers, I bit my lip and turned away. Although I left Phaedra standing in the field that day, my heart was with her constantly. A few times, I made excuses to go back to the farm where she lived, just to see her again.

Then time got away from me, and I didn’t see Phaedra again for nearly a year. Late in the following fall, I managed to visit her. As she walked across the pasture to greet me, an alarming sense of urgency boiled up in my throat. I could hardly believe that this was the same animal I’d seen the year before. Her coat was caked with mud and burrs and had matted to a dull, lifeless gray. When I rested my hands on her back, rib and bone moved beneath my fingers. She was a skeleton.

Size and deformity had betrayed her. As the other llamas in the pasture had grown tall and powerful, Phaedra was no match for them at the hay and grain bins. Too small to compete for food, she waited and she starved.

The man who owned her had moved Phaedra away from the herd to her own small pasture, but she had continued to fail.

I attempted to ignore the voices that screamed inside of me to take her. I knew how important it was to stay within the limits Lee and I had set for our farm. Our animal family was enormous. Our financial resources were terribly limited. There was no money left for new animals.

In tears, I told myself to be an adult while my heart cracked inside of me. “Susan, you can’t save them all,” I told myself. “You can’t.”

In the end, my heart won. Phaedra was a filthy, bony bundle of health problems and vet bills, yet I heard myself say, “Please, let me take her home.” The next thing I knew, she was in the back of my van, kneeling quietly on a cushion of straw as we drove home to Brightstar. I imagined Lee would have a fit when I got there. Of course, he didn’t.

Phaedra stumbled out of the van and into our pastures, a frail, unsteady creature with an uncertain future. She took a few hesitant steps toward our barn, and stopped a moment to sniff the branch of an apple tree. Her lips pursed into a Betty-Boop pucker, and she uttered a questioning sort of murmur and looked back at me. The heart performs miracles: Before my eyes I saw a dainty, glittering fairy blessing our pastures with beauty and tranquillity where anyone else would have seen a dirt ball on stick legs.

Phaedra became my summer project. I sang songs to her while I washed the dirt off her ears and eyes and worked the burrs out of her fur. Each day, I treated her sore, swollen eyes with drops and wiped bug repellent on her face and ears. One day, I got industrious and cut off her matted hair with a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. My hands blistered and my wrists ached for days, but the results were worth it. Beneath the old dead coat was a fine white blanket of soft fur.

Weeks passed and I asked myself—as Lee often asked—
what in the world was I doing?
There were countless other projects, other tasks that needed my time and attention. Yet I let them fall by the wayside, focusing my energy on Phaedra, my precious, gentle fairy. For reasons I could never hope to explain to anyone, myself included, Phaedra simply enchanted me. I found myself spending hours of time just watching her walk around the pasture or sprawl luxuriously in the sun. One day, in the soft breeze of a late-summer afternoon, I saw her leap around the pasture like a gazelle, all four legs straight beneath her, springing high up into the air as she tossed her head left and right in rapturous abandon.

Yet, despite all my loving care, Phaedra failed to thrive. She lived in a standstill state of frail health, not gaining much ground, occasionally losing some. Her vet and food bills were hitting the catastrophic mark when I told Lee, out of shame for my lack of more mature and logical behavior, that I wouldn’t spend any more money on her. If she got worse, I would put her to sleep before I ran up any more big bills. Lee saw the pain in my eyes and, trying to spare me and our shrinking wallet, said, “No more charity cases, okay?” I turned away and muttered, “Yes, okay.”

One evening later that week, I sat in the barn with Phaedra and watched as she ate, one small pellet or two at a time. I asked her, out loud, the questions I had only asked myself. I asked her what she was doing at our farm, why she had called so strongly to me and what she needed to teach me. Sitting on a bucket beside her, I closed my eyes and reached out my arms to her, waiting for whatever thoughts might come to me.

No more charity cases.
Visions of a lifetime of hurt and lost animals drifted up before me. I had taken them all home— dogs, kittens, birds, injured toads—and spent my last dime on them. I loved them, found them new homes, sometimes healed them, too often buried them. Yet when I was stricken with cancer in my late thirties, it was my lifetime of experience with animals that offered me a vision of healing. In a very real sense, animals had given me my life.

I heard Phaedra finish the last of her pellets. In the outstretched circle of my arms, she settled down on her knees and began working her cud. I stayed very still, continuing my reverie. Phaedra, for all the effort of her care, had brought me back to a sense of childlike mystery. With Phaedra in the pasture, I could believe in fairies again. I could stop and take time to sit and daydream. Her gentle nature seeped into the cracks of my own daily tension and she calmed me and brought me many moments of quiet and thanksgiving. She shared with me her joy and steadfast companionship. For what I had given her, she had given me back tenfold.

Tenfold.
It struck me then—this is how I tithe. Not with money, but with time and love willingly given to a decades-long chain of animals who have found their way to me, who have chosen me, healed me and empowered me: the charity cases. God grant me a never-ending stream of charity cases.

My eyes flew open and met the quiet brown sea of Phaedra’s kindly gaze. Her face was soft, her eyes clear and bottomless. The banana ears she swiveled toward me were white and clean. She leaned into me and gently sniffed my face. When I rubbed her neck, I realized that her bones were beginning to recede behind a new layer of muscle. There had been improvements, albeit small ones. She would be fine. We would be fine.

When I left the barn that night and returned to the house, it was to tell Lee that I would be cutting off my very arms and legs if there were no place at our farm for charity cases. And of course he understood. It was I who had needed to understand, and it was Phaedra who had chosen to teach me.

Susan Chernak McElroy

Killer Angels

I
cannot avoid compassion for everything that is
called life. That is the beginning and foundation
of morality.

Albert Schweitzer

I had just graduated from veterinary school, and I was volunteering at the local shelter in Twin Falls, Idaho. As I looked down at the dog napping in her run, I knew I was going to have to wake her up to put her “to sleep.” What a cruel euphemism.

She was a Heinz-57 mixed-breed with no name, no home, no hope. She was horrifically malnourished, and her coat was a mass of mats and burrs.

In a way, she was lucky to be here. Found on the side of the road—like living garbage—she’d been left to die in a remote area of our county.

The kind rancher who found her brought her to the local shelter where she joined dozens of other cuties and uglies pressing against the front of the cages hoping to catch the eye of someone who had a heart and home big enough to give them another chance.

Problem was there were too many homeless pets and not enough homes. Day after day for a week the dog waited and waited, her still-wagging tail marking the time.

But on this day, her time was up. No one had adopted her; like many in the shelter, the animals were too big, too small, too hairy, too young, too old. Without enough cages to hold all that came through our doors, we were prepared to end her life quickly and without suffering. “Better than starving to death in the country,” I said, finding little solace in the words.

I was inspired to enter this profession because of a deep love of animals. I had been highly trained and entrusted to save lives and prevent pain and suffering. Yet here I was about to end the life of this innocent creature. I hated this part of the job, but I had to do it. Choking back my emotions, I readied myself to perform the procedure for which I’d been trained.

I set her on the table, and she wiggled her gaunt frame with delight as I spoke some soothing words and patted her head. The tempo of her tail quickened as she looked up at my face. Looking into her eyes, I saw total trust, unconditional love and absolute loyalty. I felt the cruel irony of what was taking place. God’s precious creatures, embodying the kindest virtues on the planet, being killed for the crime of not being wanted. She held out her leg for me to inject and licked my hand. She was ready. I wasn’t.

I collapsed onto the dog and held her tight as I bathed her with tears. Never, ever would I do a convenience euthanasia again. I’d euthanize a pet if it was suffering terribly, or had an incurable disease, but never again because of an uncaring owner’s mere request.

I took the dog back to my veterinary practice and named her G. H.—short for Good Home. I’d observed over the years that people who raised litters of puppies or kittens always said, “I just want to find them a ‘good home.’”

I soon entrusted G. H. to a loving client who had a heart and home big enough to welcome yet another four-legged family member.

Saving G. H. set me on a new path as a veterinarian. Although my hands still held the power of death, my heart didn’t. Now, whenever I look into the dancing liquid eyes of a pet, brimming with love, I realize that looks can save. They did me.