Ruth and Ken are a happy couple, always together, they spend afternoons sitting in the Great Room soaking up the sun. They go out occasionally to smoke.I asked them if there was anything they needed right now, and Ruth said “no, we have everything we need now.” That was sweet to hear.
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Here’s what’s up at the Mansion:
Our Horse Carriage trek around town is cancelled. The weather wrecked it when we planned it, and the farmer is no longer returning our calls. This summer, we’ll look for somebody else.
Last Friday, St. Patrick’s Day, we paid for a band to come and play Irish music. It cost $400.
On April 6, the RISSE soccer team is coming, at their own suggestion, to help serve lunch at the Mansion. There was a real connection between the refugee children and the Mansion residents, it surprised all of us, but then, everyone knows the experience of being cast out.
In May, I hope to offer the residents another boat ride and lunch on the Lake George Steamship Company. They don’t give discounts, I think the trip will cost around $400 to $500 depending on how many residents come. They had the most wonderful time eating, dancing, looking out on the water, they are still talking about it.
On May 28, I am taking Julie Smith, the Activities Director, and three residents of her choosing, to lunch at the Round House Cafe. On me. This is part of regular take-a-resident out to lunch program the Army Of Good is sponsoring along with me, to get the residents out into the world.
As the weather warms, I’ll be looking for outings to get them into the sun and the countryside and also into the community outside of their walls. I have learned this is important to them, and necessary.
In May, we plan to present a “Night Of Four Skits” at the Mansion. The families are all invited.
I am still distributing your notecards and stamps, they are profoundly grateful for them.
Your gifts and presents and decorations for Easter have begun arriving. Thank you so much.
Here is a list of residents who like to receive mail and photos: Winnie, Jean A., Ellen, Mary, Gerry, Sylvie, Diane, John, Alice, Jean G., Madeline, Joan, Allan, Bill, Helen, Robert (Bob), Alanna, Barbara, Peggie, Dottie, Tim, Debbie, Art, Guerda, Brenda, Wayne, Kenneth, Ruth.
You can write them c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge,N.Y., 12816
I need your help in funding some of the outings I would like to offer to the residents as the winter draws to a close.Also to help with some of their smaller needs like clothes, bras, and shoes. You can contribute to this work by sending your contribution to my Post Office Box, Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. Many thanks. Please mark your check “Mansion.”
I was struck again at the Mansion today, watching the love and care Joan receives there. I saw a young aide take her by the hand, and walk her to room. They watch her closely and always seem to know when she needs them, they are always gentle and patient with her, some of the residents are not.
Then bring her dinner and help her find her seat. Joan is an interior person, a natural artist. I love working on reading and memory with her, I have to get back to it tomorrow.
She has memory problems, but the paints and writes poetry easily and poignantly. She has suffered in her life, but is unfailingly gentle and warm. I will bring a workbook tomorrow and we will read together, I have come to love that. I have a poem and a painting of hers on my study wall.
I told her the refugee children were coming back soon to help serve them lunch, and she smiled, and asked me who they were. Do you remember?, I asked, and she said, sure, sure. What is the dog’s name? He’s so handsome.
And what, she said, taking my hand, is your name?
I watched Joan for a few minutes, she seemed lost in herself, deep in thought. She saw the camera and waved to me.
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On the way out, I said goodbye to Joan found a resident, a woman, that I was looking for. She asked if I could get something personal that she needed, and I went to the Rite-Aid and got it for her. She thanked me and as I turned to go, she grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye.
“Jon,” she said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“I’m so confused.”
I sat down next to her and took her hand.
“What about,” I asked?
“I’m confused about everything,” she said, tears streaming down her face.
I held her hands for a few minutes and watched as Red sidled over and she began to pet him.
“I’m so confused.”
I did not really know what to say.
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You can send Joan a letter c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. You can support my work at the Mansion by sending a contribution to Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816 or via Paypal, [email protected].
As promised, the Socrates potholders are ready, they will go on sale tomorrow on Maria’s Etsy page. They cost $25 plus shipping, and are signed. Maria loves Socrates and talks about him all day, much more often then she talks about her aging husband, the author.
Maria opened her Etsy page a couple of weeks ago, it is a big success. She’s adding a whole bunch of potholders there tomorrow, including the Socrates series.
If you are interested, you can look for them tomorrow on Etsy, or if you prefer, you can e-mail the Snail Lover herself – [email protected]. And yes, I am a bit jealous of a snail. It’s come to this. You can also read about all of this on her blog, fullmoonfiberart.com.
This is why I hate nostalgia, I remember when I was the star, not a dancing snail.
I am surprised and delighted to tell you that one of the Army Of Good, a longtime reader of the blog, just wrote me to say she is sending me a check for $500 to cover the purchase of one of the longest-running items on the RISSE Amazon Wish List, the $522 Coated Outdoor 32-gallon Trash Can.
The can is expensive, and not glamorous, but important. This is where the RISSE kids play, and the can is essential to keeping the playground clean, and as the RISSE description said, “teaching the kids stewardship” over the land.
The RISSE staff was delighted, and I am grateful and quite proud. The donor has not given me permission to use her name, she usually wants to be anonymous. She has been generous before, and I sent her one of my photographs to thank her and told her she can have any photograph of mine any time.
She has a great heart and generous spirit.
There is only one item left now on the current wish list, some black toner cartridge for $59. Cheryl Lasher of RISSE told me this morning, that as of last week, nearly $5,000 of items for RISSE and the immigrant and refugee school children have been purchased from the Wish List on Amazon.
Now boxes arrive every day.
This is a wonderful way to give. They get to tell us what they need, we get to buy what we wish, and every penny goes where it ought to go. I am very proud to be associated with you in this way. I hope we can keep on going as able. I’m going to RISSE on Wednesday or Thursday to take more photos.
Before the Army Of Good got on board, they didn’t have lamps, games toys, puzzles and learning software, or trash cans or bins. Good for you. I never thought an outdoor trash can would generate so much joy or mean so much. We live in a wondrous world, for all of its flaws.
This work reminds me that there are good people in the world and always gives me hope. Today, I’m off to the Mansion to give a pipe and tobacco to a woman who loves to smoke outside.
If you wish to support my work with the refugees and immigrants at RISSE, you can send a contribution to me c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. Thanks.
Stewardship: “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care; as in animals, children, our natural resources.” – Merriam-Webster.
I got up in the dark this morning thinking about stewardship – the careful and very moral responsibility to do whatever is necessary in the interest of the people and animals and money or other things entrusted to our care.
Stewardship is not a simple idea, and I take it very seriously.
There are two things I have always disliked, and can barely tolerate, to my regret – hypocrisy and coyness, especially in my writing and personal life. I promised to be honest when I started this blog, I promised myself I would no longer have secrets, I chose an open life with all of its consequences.
I know many of my dogs are not only mine, they are yours as well, and I am always mindful of that. I know from my messages that so many of you are waiting for news of Gus, and wondering if he is even still alive.
First, I wish to thank the many hundreds of people who have contacted us, put up messages on my blog and Maria’s and Facebook and other places to wish us well and give us strength and support and trust us to make the right decision for Gus. You are the bright side of the human world. You have given us strength.
We have reached no final decision about Gus and his life and future, this is the most difficult decision regarding animals that I have ever made, and that is also true of Maria.
Because Gus is so young, and so full of life, and means so much to us, it is almost unimaginable to think of killing him, or of letting him wither. We are also seeing him struggling with a downward trajectory, he is literally starving and getting sicker and more ravenous by the day. It is never natural when the young die prematurely, i have never confronted that before.
Gus deserves every consideration and we are talking, thinking, searching for any good options. I will not lie to you, we are still considering euthanasia as the best option for him, and yes, for us. But we are not there yet.
Maria and I have clear understandings about decisions like this. No argument, no coercion, we either get to the same place by free will or no decision is made.
I believe strongly in an open life, yet that is also difficult to be open in this world were people seem to free to think they know more than we do about what should happen to Gus. There are many people who would be horrified to get some of the messages I get every day, and they prefer to hide their feelings and decisions. I will never do that, to me, a writer, it is a form of slavery.
To the people who say I am asking for it, my best reply is that we lose countless voices and points of view because few people can bear unwanted intrusion into people’s lives. Social Media teaches rudeness and presumption as well as compassion and connection.
On the one side are the thoughtful and bounded people who leave us to our struggle and wish us strength, on the other are the many people who don’t know us, have never seen Gus, have no idea what his medication condition, symptoms or various issues are, and yet feel entitled to tell us in absolute terms what we should be doing.
One women begged me to pursue a treatment that we discovered would not work with Gus, and I wondered why she thought I needed her pleas to care for Gus. This loss of empathy is sometimes difficult.
I can’t imagine doing that, and will never understand it, but it is a reality of all of our lives, and it has sometimes caused me to censor myself and be less open that I wish to be and want to be. I hate that. I am a free man in a free country and I believe we all should be free to say what we believe.
I will never give into that hoary idea.
A friend recently lost his mother and requested that people not send flowers, but donate to charity instead. I cannot imagine sending him flowers with a note saying “I know you don’t want flowers, but here are some anyway.I think the dead deserve flowers.”
People who pay no need to what people want are not being helpful, they are thinking of themselves, they do what makes them feel good. It seems a selfish impulse to me, not a generous one.
This kind of immorality applies to the animal world.
Dogs are not equal to us in many ways, they are dependent on us. They have no money or language to speak for themselves or feed themselves. They can’t hire lawyers to represent them.
I believe we are their stewards, we must represent them in the most compassionate and honest and faithful of ways. We must be strong on their behalf, and make the hard decisions they cannot make for themselves. if we don’t, who will?
There is this idea in the dog world that dogs must never die, they must be kept alive by any means at all costs, no matter their suffering. In this world, there are always alternatives, new ideas, experiments, research, miraculous stories to support the premise, online gurus and amateur physicians and vets, there are always ways to prolong life and confuse the people who have tough decisions to make.
Vets have so many horror stories about dogs who suffer great pain because people cannot let them go.
The cruelest program I have seen in the name of helping dogs – and other animals – is the no-kill shelter movement.
There is no more unnatural or disorienting life for a dog than to be closeted in a crate for years or a lifetime so people can feel good about themselves, and believe they have “rescued” an animal, and are thus morally superior. That is not stewardship to me, it is moral confusion, a kind of avoidance and cowardice.
Sometimes you love a dog by letting go. And yes, sometimes you love a dog by killing him.
The true steward of animals cannot rule out death or an end to suffering, or eternal and often expensive efforts to prolong life.
That not only takes money away from dogs who need assistance and can be adopted and lead normal lives, and have health issues than can be cured, it promotes great suffering and emotional torment and reduces the idea of true compassion to bathos and knee-jerk political positions.
If you have no choice, then you have no need to think or reason, and if you have no need to think or reason, you cannot be a faithful steward to anything.
Some of the saddest things I have seen in my life and work with dogs are dogs who live in crates, and become passive and disconnected creatures. Just look at their eyes. I would much prefer for my dogs to die than to suffer that fate.
The idea that dogs must never die is, in my mind, a sign of weakness, not strength or empathy. We all must die, we all suffer, there are no exceptions in the material world.
Having said that, I am well aware many good people feel differently, I do respect that. We all have to find our own way.
Stewardship is a moral responsibility. People have suggested I hand Gus over to someone else to care for, rather than see him euthanized. Passing a chronically ill dog off to someone else is a violation of my idea of stewardship, he is my responsibility, and Maria’s, and we will do our jobs.
It reminds me that it is not about what I want, it is about what is best for Gus.
The idea that we can never accept the idea that a dog should ever die is the abrogation of moral responsibility. It causes great guilt and suffering in people.
A man wrote me the other day – this is why people hide their decisions and scold me for being so foolish as to be open – and asked if I would have euthanized my daughter if she had a chronic and fatal disease. The fact that he even asked me such a question told me so much about the confused moral state that sometimes permeates the animal world now.
When we fail to discern the difference between a human child and a dog, we are lost. I should say that if my daughter ever had a fatal illness and lived in endless agony and suffering, I would hope her life might be ended in a legal way, if that was what she wanted, and there were every such a thing in our country. Humans and dogs are entitled to be protected from extreme suffering.
In the course of Gus’s disease – and yes, suffering – I have talked to veterinarians, consultants, been on many online sites, studied X-rays and case histories, talked to many people who have endured megaesophagus with their dogs, spend days on nutrition mixes and experiments. I am comfortable I know what I need to know and have done everything that could be done.
I plead guilty to hubris and delusion, for a few days there, I thought I could find a way to beat it by mixing the right foods. I have suffered from delusions before, it does not ever turn out well.
In this arena, I am also mindful that I am not alone. Maria is a very strong woman, but she is not a veteran Internet warrior, as I have been for decades. She is struggling enough with the emotional impact of this decision, she does not need amateur diagnosticians and insensitive and self-righteous people telling her what to do, or criticizing her for what she might do.
She is an intensely emotional creature, and she is hurting, she will know what to do. I told her this morning that we would not be alive if we were not strong.
People often tell me that intrusive people pushing advice – often grossly inaccurate and useless – are only trying to help. That is not my belief. They are trying to feel good about themselves. If they cared about me, that would respect my wishes. No flowers, please, give the money to the refugee kids.
So here we are, and the truth is this. We are not yet sure. We just aren’t.
The process is chewing us and our emotions up, and we both know we need some resolution. I’m sorry I can’t say more, I just don’t know more. And I will share what news there is, and I will be honest and open about it.
Thanks again for listening to me and sharing my life. I can’t thank you enough for the support and understanding you have shown us. There are so many good people in the world, and they are eager to do good.
