I was visiting Ed and Carol Gulley this afternoon, talking with Carol at the kitchen table, when she looked up suddenly and said. “the cows are out!”, something no farmer every wants to hear.
It was hot and humid and muddy and raining, Carol went tearing out the door and asked me to sit with Ed. Neighbors showed up, and Jesse, one of her sons. A contractor in a truck pulled over, and a neighbor who was bringing food.
The big cows had pushed open a gate and were wandering across the road. It took about a half hour for them all to get rounded up, the cows do not grasp how big and powerful they are, a human waving his or her arms can usually get them to stop.
One or two rebels broke away and ran up the road. When all of these sweating and exhausted people showed up after the cows were all in, I said I was never happier to be a writer than when I was visiting a farm.
When we last had one of our lunches, a week or so before his brain cancer began to take over his mind and body, Ed and I agreed to do a video together in which he would talk about how lucky he was, even after his diagnosis.
After all, he said, he got pretty much everything he wanted in life: a wife he still loved dearly after 47 years, four wonderful children that he loves and who love him back, his own dairy farm, a household full of animals he cares about, and a small Army of grandchildren who are devoted to him and to Carol.
He also, he said. had a brother and cousins and nephews and nieces and too many friends to count. Really, he said, he had no complaints. He got everything he ever wanted, he lived a full and happy life.
I remember sitting with Jack, a retired lumberjack up in the Adirondacks, I was a hospice volunteer and Jack was dying, his brother-in-law and sister were living with him in his final days because there was no one else, they were rarely there. The town highway department brought him his medicine, the hospice workers got no overtime and could not drive so far up into the woods.
As he began to gasp for breathe and die, his brother-in-law and sister ran out of the house and disappeared, leaving me along with Jack and Izzy, watching him die as he breathed his last in great pain.
A half hour later, they came back, out of breath, and checked on Jack. “Where did you go?,” I asked.
“We had to rush to the bank,” they said, “to sign over his title and transfer his money before he passed. We had power of attorney, we didn’t want to go to probate.”
Most people don’t die in the way Ed has chosen to die, and his rock of a family has helped him to die. I told him he was very fortunate a few days ago, and he said he knew it, it was truth.
Today, I sat with Ed for awhile and thought about his good fortune in death, if such a thing is possible. I know it sounds strange.
No one with aggressive brain cancer can be called lucky, but as a hospice volunteer for some years, I was thinking a lot today about how Ed is also getting what he wanted in terms of how he is dying, and that is fortunate and worthy of noting.
We all know how to be sad, and we learn only to think of death in that way, but Ed and I talked more than once about how hard it is to be grateful for what we have, and I know he would want me to write this as his body continues to fail.
Ed gets to be at home and die at home, as he wished. Most Americans who die – 83 per cent – pass away in nursing homes and hospices and hospitals, many of them die alone.
Ed receives daily nursing care of the kind that is no longer possible in hospitals and nursing homes or assisted care, the overwhelmed nurses of our time do not have time.
Hospice aides and nurses are extraordinary, loving and present and skilled.
Hospice nurses say they choose hospice because they can spend time with their patients, touch them, talk to them, comfort them and help them. This, they say, is the way nurses used to care for people, not forced to just rush from one to another.
Ed is surrounded day and night by people he knows and loves.
They hear his calls, soothe his fear, wet his dry mouth, wipe his brow, answer his confused and troubled questions, bring him his beloved chocolate ice cream. He doesn’t have to push a buzzer and wait or lie alone in a room full of strangers, hoping for help. Ed’s grandchildren sit with him, his children visit him throughout the day, Carol is always listening and nearby, she sits by his side all night.
Ed has suffered in the least possible way. He and Carol decided that he would forego the horrific side effects of the treatment offered to patients with his kind of aggressive brain cancer, it is said by almost everyone that this is a horrible way to die, chemotherapy after chemotherapy, surgery after surgery. Doctors cannot seem to spare their patients the awful part of modern medicine. Ed knew instinctively.
Ed suffered in many ways, but not in that way. He has been guided into a deep and comfortable sleep, from which he is unlikely to completely awaken. He has not been in what the nurses call “hard pain.”
Ed lived a good and meaningful life, as he told me 100 times. He did what he loved, every single day. he said his cows were his best friends.
He found his creative spark in his last years, the artist in him came out and shined. That meant the world to him.
His great love is by his side. Ed has loved Carol for 47 years, they were – are – often sparky together, but also devoted. No one has ever had so loyal and attentive a companion to share his or her final days. She is making certain that Ed gets the death he chose.
This kind of death is not possible in a hospital or nursing home, it is something most of us will never know. A good death is sad, but also beautiful. This one is beautiful, it lifts the heart.
Ed is surrounded by friends. Ed has countless friends, farmers and cousins and neighbors. He is a much-loved man. They parade through the farmhouse every day.
Because he chose to die in the small room he built adjoining his house a year or so ago, his friends can come and see him talk to him, touch him, love him. He sees them everyday, has been pleased to see them, this is also something few people in hospitals or nursing homes get to do.
His family are a rock. Most of the people I saw in my hospice work rarely saw their immediate family, mostly, they gathered at the end, if they knew when it would be. They lived far away, or were busy, or found it hard to see a loved one die. Ed’s family all live nearby. They have gathered together to keep the farm going for as long as possible.
They do not run from Ed’s impending death, they all wish to be a part of it.
Ed’s family are a rock, they visit him, talk to him, love him, pray for him, comfort him talk to him.
Ed is leaving in a cloud of love, I can feel it, see it, almost touch it. It seems like such a strange thing to say, but I know it to be the truth. Ed is having a good and fortunate death, few people get to die this way. He thought about his death, talked about his death, and is having the death he wanted, as comfortably and quickly as could be expected.
He is loved every minute, it is all around him. Everyone who comes near him loves him in a different way. There is nothing lonely about this death, as is the case for so many people. I saw few people in my hospice work enveloped in this kind of love.
He hasn’t missed a single Yankees game. For more than 50 years, even from childhood, Ed has listened to every Yankees game on an old radio out in the barns where he worked day and night. The old radio is next to his hospital bed, and every afternoon or evening, the Yankees game can be heard, the old timeless sounds of summer, for almost all of his life. It comforts and grounds him, this sound of baseball.
Ed is still listening to the Yankees, every day.
That is, by any accounting, a good death.
His animals are all around him, with him every minute. When most people prepared to leave the world, they must leave their animals behind, a cruelty and suffering that seems heartless to me.
Ed has his cats, Shivers and Ophelia, his Cockatiel Ozzie, and his big sweet dumb lumbering dogs Minnie, Grissom, Miss Putz and Lovey. One or another or all of them is by his side or on his bed every minute of the day and night.
His favorite Peacock is just outside the door, Ethel the Sleep Walking Hen came in every evening to visit, and Oz chirps and sings and dances to him, he only went silent a few days ago. Sadie the goat can’t come in the house, but Ed, who loves the grumpy and impertinent goat very much, can hear her making noise outside, he can hear his very beloved cows as well, they are only a few feet away.
That is fortunate.
One day, Ed even told me he was lucky to have me visit him so often. He can’t say that anymore, I’m not sure he even knows me any more. But it did mean something to me. I was lucky to be there, I told him, and that was and is the truth.
Carol, good and strong person, is coming to terms with this new and awesome reality.
She said on her blog today that she now answers Ed honestly when he asks her why this is happening to him: “I answer as honestly as I can…’you are going to see Jesus and never have any more pain…the cancer will go away and it is the most beautiful place..’
Carol said she asked Ed if he asked Jesus into his heart to forgive his sins and to guide his journey. He said “he loved Jesus and He makes his heart feel better…for me that means he is destined for a heaven and all it’s glory,” she wrote.
This was something Carol and the family wanted very much, I am grateful she got it. She believes they will meet again now.
I am not a Christian, Ed and I never once spoke of religion, but I have no doubt that if there is a heaven, he will go there and will be lucky once again, he will meet Carol and everyone he loves again. Carol has taken Jesus into her heart as well, she will see him there, he will be impatiently waiting for her.
We don’t want death to come to anyone we love, unless it is a true mercy. People often say it was or is too soon. But I don’t say that. Death comes when it comes, and life lasts as long as it lasts. It is not for me to say what is too soon or too late.
That part is up to Ed’s God and Jesus. We don’t get to choose.
I am grateful for the way Ed chose to die, that is perhaps his great lesson and inspiration, the reason he wanted it to be so open. In life as in death, Ed knew what he wanted and was granted what he wanted.
That seems like good fortune to me, even today. Especially today.
Carol Johnson of the Friends Of Homeless Animals/RI rescue group sent me this photo of Bud as he was leaving the veterinary clinic in Arkansas this morning after his first laborious and dangerous treatment for heartworm. He will be in Arkansas for two more months before he can come and live with us.
SInce this very dedicated and competent rescue group adopted Bud, I’m deciding to adopt them. We raise a lot of money her for good causes – the refugees, the Mansion residents. Wouldn’t it make sense to support a group that saves heartworm infected dogs from all over the country and takes care of them and pays for their medical bills and transports them to the people who adopt them?
There are legions of dog lovers here, and this group seems very worthy to me. If you agree, think about sending them a donation, it has been an honor and inspiration to work with them, they have opened me up and got me thinking about a lot of things.
People have always abandoned dogs and mistreated them, but heartworm has only recently spread to the whole country, to a dog near you. I’d like to help this group. FOHA doesn’t only help heartworm dogs, but that is a focus of their work.
I think they would make a natural and worthy addition to our work. This idea has been growing in my head for a week or so.
It takes a long time and a lot of money to save these dogs. You can learn more about heartworm and it’s devastating consequences here, through the American Heartworm Association.
I am confident Bud is in good hands and will be here at the end of the summer. From what I hear, he is well worth waiting for. It seems he is a sweet and good-hearted creature.
And I see that he is almost the exact color of Red. Hmm….
One of my long and faithful readers was upset the other day when I rushed to the defense of Maria and her Flying Vulva potholders. I was also called to defend myself, for writing about them.
I somewhat playfully suggested that some of Maria’s critics were stuffpots and prudes, a sincere statement of truth in my mind.
In my world, and by social media standards,, that’s pretty lame stuff, but some people got huffy and Hazel and others were upset. They thought I shouldn’t be responding to people who called me and Maria disgusting and gross and immoral.
One woman said that as a Christian, she could no longer read my blog at all she thought it was about farms and animals.
“Maria’s art comes from a bold and creative place and that’s wonderful,” said Hazel. “What upsets me is your judgmental name calling of those readers who may have different values or upbringing or yes, hang-ups, or who may have religious reasons for being shocked. You write that you are trying to do good and be kind but it seems to me that your words are not kind and may hurt. Maybe just ignore them, let it go, and just celebrate Maria’s imagination.”
I appreciate Hazel’s thoughts, well and carefully expressed, but anyone who thinks I won’t support Maria or won’t defend her are getting some of that new legal marijuana and ingesting it.
I very much celebrate her art and imagination, especially in the face people who label it disgusting or an offense to Christianity.
They would not have liked Jesus, who really went after religious authority, and not with potholders.
I am in the midst of a great desire to do good, and I have, with much help, done more good in the past two years than in all of my life before. I wish this meant that I am pure and only good and without sin, but if I ever fall into that hole of belief, it will be the end of me, and of the good I hope to do in a time when good is struggling to be felt and heard.
Good is separate from me, it exists on another plane.
Hazel’s message was interesting and it did get me considering a much more important subject than the moral – or immoral – underpinning of the Flying Vulva potholders.
Hazel was really suggesting that if I wanted to be seen as good and kind, I should overlook the people who choose to argue with me and speak softly or not at all.
Good advice, but please, let’s be real.
That is not me, and being someone else is not my idea of good.
Apart from Maria’s art, I also celebrate my right and obligation to speak my mind, for better or worse. Isn’t that the point? And I hope I will always be willing to do that, not become some strained version St. Jon or St. Francis.
When I talk about trying to do good and being compassionate – and Hazel is correct, I do write about those things a great deal – it is not because I want or need to be seen as good and kind. I’m not looking for tombstone inscriptions. I don’t want to give up my lifelong crusade against hypocrisy.
It is because I want to do things that are good and compassionate, and there is a huge difference between the two.
I am not running for Congress or mayor or seeking sainthood or campaigning for nicest guy of the month. I don’t poll my readers to see what it is I should say every day.
I know myself well enough now to know that I am not always good and kind, and I will feely admit that, I will never be so saintly as to suppress my own intense and sometimes emotional and judgmental self. And I don’t define being a good person so narrowly.
I believe we are all good and bad and we all do good and bad, I have heard of very few humans who all evil or all good. Even Attila The Hun loved his horse.
I have little patience for people who define honesty as agreement only with the things they believe, or live in the narrow troughs of dogma. Or who embrace hypocrisy, the lowest form of life to me. I absolutely detest the closing of the American Mind, the left and the right. A pox on them both.
“Don’t you know how small it makes you when you criticize the President (as I occasionally do)?” asked one woman on my comments page?
No, I don’t. Criticizing Presidents is as American a pastime as baseball, it doesn’t make me small or large, it just makes me me.
And I am in good company, along with countless citizens throughout our history. Me is not always sweet, it is not in my genetic makeup, and if it were, I’d be long dead. How wonderful to live in one of the few remaining countries where we can criticize our President? And I can write what I like.
That is something to celebrate.
Giving myself to others in my mind – doing good – means giving without expecting anything in return. Or needing praise and thanks or acknowledgement.
I know a wonderful woman – she is a saint – who does good deeds day after day, who brings people pies, sits by their bedsides, writes checks, brings food and clothes to the needy, comforts the devastated. No one knows how much she does and if I ever mentioned all that she does, she would strangle me. Virtue really is its own reward.
She knows how to give.
Giving to others without expecting any return can only happen when I have fully accepted myself for who I am, good and bad. I have to love myself, that has to be enough. And I do not need to be good to do good.
There is no spiritual person on the earth, from Thomas Merton to the Dalai Lama, who would claim that they are always good and kind, that they are saintly and perfect. The spiritual life is about tilting the balance to good, not eliminating all bad. Its about the search for good.
The truly spiritual people of the earth, from the Pope to Gandhi talk quite openly about their sins and their shortcomings, that is the very definition of spirituality. You will rarely see a more humble person than Pope Francis.
That is how one grows, from the darkness, not the light.
Why do I talk about doing good and try to do good and ask others to help me?
I do it for me. Because I am selfish. Because it makes me feel good. It makes me feel grounded in these bumpy times. Because something in me loves to help people. It gives my life focus and meaning. It brings me into contact with good and needy people who permit me to help them and feel good about myself.
It teaches me patience and perspective and gratitude. It honors my ancestors and also my country. It gives rebirth to my life, my writing, my photography. It gives me the life I want.
What do I get back? It feels good.
For me, faith is not about being silent in the great dialogue raging around me, it is about trusting that I will give gratuitously and do good and I will receive gratuitously, but not from the people to whom I give.
I remember when a good person in California sent Ali $80 and then sent him an angry letter a week letter scolding him for not writing him a thank you note. I remember an angry man who donated $100 to the Mansion for some picnic chairs, he was furious that I hadn’t yet put up a photo of the chairs two weeks after his donation.
I remember a woman who asked for a $100 refund because the RISSE women’s basketball team has not yet gotten itself organized and into regular league play.
I urged Ali to return the $80, I gave the man his money back for the chairs and posted the photos of them in time, I gave the woman her refund instantly because it was the right thing to do and because I don’t wish to take the money of people who expect anything in return, or who give with conditions.
I don’t want money from people who want something back, and thankfully, not many do.
Sometimes, people get upset with the Mansion residents because they can’t answer the letters they get or even answer them at all. Sometimes, these people contact me wanting to know what’s wrong. I don’t tell them what’s wrong because it’s not my business to do that and because the letters, like everything else, are offered without strings.
People come and go, live and die, I can’t ever say.
Ali and I could never possibly answer all the letters or acknowledge all of the wonderful gifts or take photos right away of every thing we do. There are just not enough of us.
But besides that, there is great danger in pouring ourselves out to others in the hope that they will thank us or acknowledge us or give something in return. It leads to the feeling that people are taking parts of us. You cannot give to others if you do not own yourself, and you can only own yourself when you have mastered the idea of unconditional love and giving.
When I know myself, I am able to give according to the receiver’s need and their ability to receive, and nothing else.
I seek to be grateful for what I can give without clinging to it, or expecting anything in return, and joyful for what I can give without bragging about it or calling attention to it.
I will one day be a free person in this way, free to love and to give from my heart.
But there is an important codicil to this. Giving does not make me good, or better than you or anyone else, or kinder than anyone else. I don’t need to be a saint to do good, I will never be so kind and good and noble that I am no longer human, and will no longer do the dumb and mindless things that humans do.
I am sorry to disappoint you, Hazel, but unlike St. Francis, no one will ever canonize me when I am gone. I am no saint, I am just me.
“Once you have grace,” wrote Thomas Merton, “you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don’t really want to do.”
“He’s A Good One..”: Bud And Dr. Jonathan Bradshaw: Photo By Carol Johnson
I am excited by all the very good things I am hearing about Bud, the dog I’ve adopted from Arkansas who is currently in a clinic being treated for heartworm, a runaway disease in the South that is now spreading rapidly across the entire country.
I used to balk at heartworm tests and treatment, but I was wrong and know better.
It is a lot cheaper and easier to prevent heartworm than to treat it. Heartworm was once confined almost entirely to the South and Southwest, but since rescue dogs have begun being adopted all over the country, often from Southern states, heartworm is now in all 50 states.
When I started my life with dogs in New York and New Jersey, heartworm was almost unheard of. Every vet everywhere knows about it now.
It is now illegal to transport a dog with heartworm, so Bud has to be treated in Arkadelphia, Arkansas by his vet, Dr. Jonathan Bradshaw (above.) This week he had his first treatment, he has been on a course of antibiotics, heartworm preventatives and steroids before beginning the actual worm treatment.
This is a complex, dangerous and months-long process, Bud will not be coming to us for about two months. Bud was on doxycycline, increasingly in use for dogs infected with heartworms, which is spread easily and quickly by mosquitoes.
This week Bud began the treatment, a series of injections that kills the worms, and if not done carefully, can kill the dog as well. There is only one drug approved by the Food and Drug administration to kill adult heartworms in dogs, an organic arsenal compound that is injected into the dog’s lumbar, or back muscles.
On the days injections are given, and in Bud’s case for a couple of days later, the dog is required to stay in the hospital for observation to make sure doesn’t have any serious reactions to the treatment. He may also be on steroids for a while.
Canine heartworm survivors are retested after treatment and six months later to ensure that all of the larvae, micrfiliariae and adult worms are dead.
At the end of August, But will get another injection and will rest and be monitored for another 60 days. If he is cleared by Dr. Bradshaw, he can come to live with us, the rescue group Friends Of Homeless Animals/RI will being him up to the Northeast where we can go pick him up.
A dog like Bud – abandoned in the Arkansas woods and initially terrified of men – would have been unlikely to be alive a dozen years ago, before the rise of the rescue movement.
Bud would probably have been put down right away. I sent another donation to FOHA/RI, they spent an enormous amount of time and money saving and treated homeless and heartworm-infected dogs.
I am impressed by them.
If you want or need more information on canine heartworm, I’d highly recommend the American Heartworm Society, they have all the information you might need.
You can check out their available dogs at FOHA/RI here, most, but not all of them, are small dogs. They are pretty appealing.
The group put me through a lot of hoops, but they are warm-hearted, available and empathetic, both to people and dogs. That is a bit unusual in my experience. They never made me feel uncomfortable or unworthy. Bu expect a good workout.
If you wish to help the treatment of abandoned and heartworm dogs, you can see the dogs and also donate here.
It is expensive to treat these dogs and transport them all over the country, I think this group might be a good match for the Army Of Good. I’m thinking of adopting this rescue group on my blog, they have opened my heart a bit, they have some intriguing dogs from all over the country.
I am hearing the nicest things about Bud, from the vet techs and Dr. Bradshaw and from Carole Johnson, the conscientious and big-hearted member of FOHA/RI who has been fostering Bud. “He is really a good one,” said Dr. Bradshaw, “a sweetheart.” Carole Johnson, who has nursed Bud back from the edge, says the same thing.
At first, Bud was terrified of men, but Dr. Bradshaw says he has seen no signs of that.
A vet tech told me Bud was a sweetheart, “a really calm and sweet dog.” He sounds a bit more laid back than Gus was, but Fate will take care of that. Me too.
I am much looking forward to having him live here, we will take good care of him, Bedlam Farm seems to be a healing place all of itself. Feels like a good match.
