Day: July 13, 2014

It’s been 13 days since my Open Heart Bypass Surgery, I’ve been home for eleven days. I’ve written about the process of recovery, especially my walking through it. How typically male and American to count the process using my fitbitflex – 3.15 miles today, 6,600 steps, 55 miles since I left the hospital. Sometimes I think I’m  just walking my way through the surgery and the trauma of it before I quite understand the meaning of it or the feelings it has provoked and unleashed in me.

I think I’m still afraid to do that, to just acknowledge what happened to me. Generally, I have what some might call a positive attitude about it, I have never felt sorry for myself or been eager to tell my struggle story. I think often of what the doctors told me – I was just a walk or two or strain away from being dead or having a severe heart attack. That will surely alter one’s perspective. I saved Maria from some years of caring from a disabled man. I am grateful that my heart suffered only minor damage. I had this very powerful instinct from the first that I needed to keep moving, keep walking, and that is a healthy thing to do, it is also a good way to hide from the emotional power of the experience.

I lost my life as I knew it 13 days ago, I cannot pick up a can of pickles, my beautiful camera stares at me reproachfully, I cannot touch it for months, I cannot drive or open a door or lift a good – sized novel. My scars and wounds are troubling for me to see and feel, it does not seem like my body, it does not seem or feel like me. I have not recovered from such surgery yet, it will take a good while longer. My wife works day and night to do the things she does and the things I used to do, I don’t want it to be this way. I hate being helpless and feeling helpless. I must spent at least hours a day asleep and recovering from the activity that I undertake, and I am never comfortable sleeping at night, I sleep only an hour or two a night. My diabetes has run amok as the result of the surgery and this causes all kinds of side affects that I am grappling to deal with.

At night the demons appear, they taunt and frighten me, open heart surgery is a video, a reel, that loves to play in the dark, I have nightmare memories and they surface nightly.

Maria says I am quieter, often introspective, even brooding. Not a bad thing in all.  I have not experienced the depression often associated with this surgery in men, but I am not chipper most days either. I do feel a sense of sadness and melancholy, my innocence about life has taken a beating. They call it healing, it is a slow and deliberate process with a mind of it’s own.

What do I feel about all of this? How curious that I don’t really know, I don’t think I’ve allowed myself to feel it and think about. Sometimes I want to cry  about my almost having died, about the brutally invasive nature of the surgery, about my dependence on others and the long recovery. Sometimes I want to shout and dance at my chance for a new and stronger heart and the new and stronger life it will bring to me. Every day I am grateful that it wasn’t worse, that I didn’t have something worse, I saw many worse things in my time in the hospital.

When the wind is right, I love to sit alone with Red outside on the Adirondack chair, I let it all wash over me and think about how close I came to losing my life, and how determined I am to live my new life, my rebirth and renewal, meaningfully and with grace. Tomorrow, Maria will be back in her Studio for the first time in weeks. She will begin her own process of rebirth and renewal, she helped save mine and in many ways is the point of it.

I don’t want to just walk through my surgery and my recovery, I want to feel it and understand it’s meaning for me. I want to be loved and make love again. I want to let the emotions of it all emerge and wash over me, they need to come out. I’m not sure I know how to do that. I do not wish to be defined by my surgery, I am already weary of people approaching me on the street or elsewhere, eager with details of their surgery, or their fathers or brothers or Uncles. It is not who I am, it is over and I am recovering.

As always, friendship reveals itself, I do not keep score of good deeds to me, but yet I am aware of who has vanished and who is here. I have never been so vulnerable, so the truth is that it matters who vanishes and who is here.

I don’t know if I can get my old life back, if people will let me, I suppose that is up to me. Recovery, like grieving, is individual and personal, we all do it in our own way. If my head is right, then people will respond appropriately, if I don’t dwell on it, nobody else will have a reason to.  A man came up to me on the street, I barely know him, and he bragged about the high rate of risk of death – 20 per cent – in his surgery, which was much more complex than mine. “What was your risk?,” he asked.

I said I had no idea, and I guess I do not care to know.  My risk was obliviousness and death.

Who cares, really, and what does it matter? A few weeks ago, I was near death and today am not. A few weeks ago I could not walk up a gentle hill and this morning I could. A few weeks ago, Maria and I wondered how we would be together when real trouble struck, and now we know. Most of the time, we had fun and shared a mountain of love.  Tomorrow I also return to my work with a renewed sense of feeling and emotion and commitment to rebirth and renewal, to honor the chance I have been given to begin my world anew.

I guess that’s as far as I have gotten with feeling and meaning.

I saw this old urn at Jack’s Outback, I called Jack to order it before Maria could order it for me. Jack brought it over on Friday. We are putting in in the blooming Dahlia garden for now, it might end up in my study this winter. I wanted to give Maria a gift in appreciation for the love, support and wonderful care she has given me before, during and after my open heart surgery, I cannot imagine enduring this without her and I am immensely grateful and appreciative of her.

We have always loved one another, but in circumstances like this, one learns what love really means. I have always believed real love is selflessness, and that is what I have been seeing from Maria since I rode that ambulance to the hospital. She is running the farm, paying bills, shopping, cooking, cleaning and playing nurse to a partner who is not allowed to pick anything up, open a door or raise his arms over his head.

This urn has such great character, I knew she would love it. I call it the Gratitude Urn. Maria is a complex person, a true artist, these past few weeks have been hard on her, tougher for her than me, I think. It is always easy to be taken care of than to do the caretaking, I think. She has not been in her Studio for weeks, that Maria’s identity is very much tied up in her work, without it her life is out of balance. She has never been drawn to nursing or being a housewife, now she is both and the artist wants to come out.

At the end of the day I see her exhaustion, impatience and disorientation, and then guilt. Maria needs to get back to work and restore some balance to her life. When I met Maria, I knew from the first that our relationship would be a creative one, that my role was to support that suppressed creativity in her, I did not marry a nurse or a housewife, I do not wish to be taken care of or cleaned up after.

For all that, Maria is a sensitive and powerfully nurturing person, she is a wonderful nurse even if she is not a natural one. She is happy to do anything for me, I am careful not to ask for too much. I see her doing the things I usually do – cooking, cleaning dishes, and I wince. This is not the life she wants.

But still, hard times can be a gift. We have never loved one another more than we do now, or seen our love affirmed in a more profound and meaningful way. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Jack says we can pain the urn if we wish, I doubt it.

Tomorrow is a landmark day for us, I am returning to my book first thing in the morning, she is putting her studio back together, she has some new ideas and of course, we both need to earn some money, just like everyone else. My recovery is far from over, it is, in fact, just beginning, but I think we can carve out time in the morning to make great stuff and send it out into the world. That’s the plan.

I am thrilled to see the Gratitude Urn in the Dahlia Garden, every time I see it I will think of our great love for one another, how she selflessly and completely turned herself over to me and my care when I was helpless and in great pain, how her presence guided me like a shining light through a difficult time. Real life is selfless for sure, and I am a lucky person to have it around me.

I think it

When I was taken to the hospital for heart surgery, my friend and neighbor Jack Macmillan came over and mowed the lawn. Nobody asked him, he didn’t tell us he was doing it. Every week since then, Jack has appeared to take Florence’s old mower out of the garage and mow the lawn. I will not be able to do it until September or October, I wouldn’t presume to make any assumptions, but I have this feeling Jack will be mowing the lawn for a good while.

Maria told Jack she would do it, and he just smiled and then came over and moved the lawn again. Several times, he has had to replace fan belts and other parts on Florence’s cranky old machine. Maria told him she would mow the lawn and he just smiled and mowed it. I have called Jack more times than I can recall – when I ran over the house, ran over a log, needed my rifle cleaned. He would not take any money for this work, and we would not offer any. Today Jack came over to help us move an urn. He has fixed broken faucets, replaced rotting wood, repaired fences.

I doubt I will ever be able to repay Jack for all the things he has done to help us in the past few weeks, I am not as handy as he is, it’s hard to imagine him calling me for help. He is one of those men who has learned  how the world works. I am not easy asking for help, and it’s a good thing, because you don’t ever have to ask Jack for help, he simply helps. We are grateful to, he is not only mowing the lawn he is sparing Maria from a task that, along with everything else, would wear her out.

It was thought by some of the carriage drivers that the mayor, Bill de Blasio,  had decided to leave them alone, he had been silent about the horses for months after his somewhat humiliating public trouncing on the issue earlier this year. This week he said he would try and move the carriage horse ban through the City Council, as he had pledged in January, when he vowed in his inaugural speech that removing the horses was the first and most urgent priority of his administration.

By now it is clear that removing the horses is the urgent priority of no one but the mayor and his supporters among the animal rights movement in New York City, for whom it has become a cultural jihad utterly devoid of truth, reason or rationality. This unnecessary controversy is not worth a minute of the mayor’s time, a single City Council Meeting, or one more taxpayer dollar.

Mayor de Blasio’s war against the carriage trade has been puzzling, he speaks of the horses cryptically and rarely and refuses to explain his position or discuss it with journalists or the carriage owners or drivers, whose lives, livelihood and way of life are very much on the line. He is clearly not an animal person, he has lived in Brooklyn his whole life and never owned a dog or cat.

It is difficult to find another case when a mayor pursued an intensely regulated industry and threatened hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars so blindingly and aggressively without any evidence of a crime, regulatory violation or serious wrongdoing, and in the face of enormous and nearly universal opposition from the city’s residents and almost every equine behaviorist, trainer or veterinarian in the country.

It is believed the mayor is acting in response to campaign contributions from the animal rights group  NYClass, whose millionaire founder is credited with turning deBlasio’s mayoral campaign around with generous contributions and support.

There are many sad, even tragic things about the New York Carriage Horse controversy. One is that it has caused so much anxiety, suffering and hurt to the hard-working people who have been in this trade in New York for 150 years. People deserve better at the hands of their government. The second is that this controversy is almost completely fabricated and unnecessary, a reality that the media in New York City almost myopically refuses to explore or consider.

I have written a dozen books about animals, I have lived with cows, sheep, donkeys, dogs,barn cats, chickens and goats for two decades, I have talked to vets, behaviorists, rescue workers, attachment theorists, animal writers and lovers all over the country. I have talked to many of them about the carriage horse drama and every one says the same thing. There is no crisis here, no controversy, no need of rescue for the carriage horses. The horses are content, well cared for and healthy. There are so many, they all say, who are not.

Everyone who loves animals knows that there are  many in need of rescue – dogs, horses, donkeys, sheep goats, cats. Anyone who knows anything about animals knows that the carriage horses are not in need of rescue. They are intensely supervised and regulated. They live longer than horses in the wild or on rescue farms, they are fed healthy and nutritious food every day, their stables are cleaned every three hours, they get five weeks of vacation, and are covered by hundreds of pages of regulations overseen by five separate city agencies.

If you pore through the statistics on alleged horse abuse in New York City, there is one documented case in the past 150 years, that was a driver who let his horse work with an infected leg last January. He’s lost his license. There are no pending charges of abuse against any carriage driver or owner. No human being has ever been killed by a carriage horse, not in millions of rides. Several horses have died in traffic incidents in the city over the past three decades, a radically safer ratio of rides to injuries than is true of city residents. (More than 200 New Yorkers died in traffic accidents last year alone.)

It is  ludicrous to argue that healthy, cared for and generally loved animals need to be arbitrarily rescued by outside groups and individuals that have never seen the stables, examined the horses, talked to the owners or drivers or in most cases, even been near a horse or other domesticated animal besides a dog or a cat. On the pages of NYClass, the organization that has devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to banning the horses, there are promises that every single carriage horse banned from the city has a home to go to, will be rescued.

But these horses are not their horses, they are the private property of law-abiding people with generations, even centuries of experience working and living with horses. They are not in need of rescue – a score of independent veterinarians have examined the horses in their stables and found their care excellent. These are among the most fortunate horses in the world.

If you live in the country as I do, you can see many small and struggling farms where animals are desperately in need of food, shelter and medical care. There are three horses not far from me that would dearly love to be in New York City, get that fresh hay, exercise and shelter and attention. It is hard to see them huddled under their tin roof in the snow and cold. I know of no respected animal trainer or behaviorists who believes it is abuse for working animals to work, from my border collie to seeing-eye dogs to the carriage horses to the bomb-sniffing dogs of Amtrak, who live at vastly greater risk than any carriage horse.

How tragic that the enormous resources being poured into banishing horses who are in good health and with a vital purpose are not going where they belong. We have lost our grounding and perspective when it comes to understanding the true nature of animals. NYClass has spent more than a half-million dollars developing a prototype “cruelty-free” electric car to replace the horses. I didn’t know cars could be cruel or free of nastiness. Perhaps the group might consider a cruelty-free animal rights organization, they might have more credibility.

Politically, it is tragic that the mayor of the country’s largest and most influential city would condone the long and brutal harassment of people who are mostly just doing their jobs and have done no wrong. This story is a landmark episode in the complex and generally sorry history of animals in America. In a rational world, the horses ought to be celebrated as an example of animals who have been given meaning and purpose in our complex world, who have found a place. We ought to be grateful to an industry that has found a way to keep these animals among us, they remind us that it is possible for animals to remain in our world.

They horses are wildly popular in New York City, an iconic symbol of grace, beauty and history in Central Park. There are many things New York City could do to make the horses good lives even better, if the city government was truly interested in their welfare – special traffic lanes, new stables built by hovering developers, banning cars and trucks from carriage lanes.

To grasp the real importance and impact of the mayor’s proposed ban, I make it a point to stand next to the carriages when I am in New York City and watch the faces of children as they walk past and encounter the horses for the first time. I see the magic and mystery and connection of the animal world in their faces. We need animals in our lives, I asked the mother of a little girl who was kissing one of the horses on the nose how she might feel if the horses are banned.

“It would be horrible,” she told me,”she would never see one of these horses again.”

We live in a world with real problems, crises and challenges. How sad that we have to conjure them up when they are not even real. Are we really going to put hundreds of people out of work and put hundreds of horses at risk because a millionaire real estate developer believes it is cruel for horses to pull carriages – which they have been doing for thousands of years – and because he gave the mayor a lot of money? It seems to come down to that.

As this absurdly unnecessary ban goes forward, we will see months, even years of conflict,  confrontation, millions of dollars in legal fees, accusations, counter charges. The people in the carriage trade will live in limbo for years, an enormous amount of money and attention will go to perhaps the least urgent and pressing social issue in a great and complicated city. If you walk through almost any neighborhood of New York, you can find all sorts of people, as well as animals, who need more and deserve better. The horses remind us every day that we have lost our moral bearing.

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My new e-book, “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World,” will be published online everywhere digital books are sold this coming week.