Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "mourning"
Nine lives is a lot -- but not forever
My wife and I don’t have a lot of yard; our house sits on three-quarters of an acre. Moreover, a lot of that partial acre is taken up by the old horse barn that now serves as our garage and woodshed. But somehow we have found the space in our yard to bury eight cats: Merlin, Clinton, Cassandra, Dorset, Dalvay, BK, BK2, and – a couple of weeks ago – Ella.
That might sound like we’ve had bad luck with cats. On the contrary, we’ve had great luck. It’s simply that we’ve always had a large pride. During most of our quarter-century in Lincoln, we’ve had at least four cats, and sometimes we’ve had as many as six.
But, alas, on a Saturday last month, the pride fell by one: Ella. She was a black cat who, at her largest, looked like a very plush throw pillow. According to an animal communicator who once interviewed her, she aspired to be a dancer – like my wife’s and my daughter. I am not making that up.
Ella lived to be 16 and change, and the last year and four months of her life we brought her to the Bristol Animal Hospital every three or four days, where Heather or Nancy or Jen or two different women who share the name Kathy would hydrate her. Her kidneys were in renal failure and this was the treatment. They would squeeze a bag of water into her side and her kidneys would work like a charm for another three or four days, and she would chow down like she’d been entered into a competitive eating competition at Coney Island.
I remember that when she was diagnosed with renal failure in February 2013, my wife and I were hoping the hydration would give her a happy, comfortable four or five months. She’d get to spend a few warm summer days lounging in the sun on the front porch. Well, she got that. She also got an autumn sniffing at the mole holes beside the blueberry bushes and the birdbath. She got another winter beside the woodstove. And she was given the gift of another full spring – which meant we did, too.
What got her in the end? A stroke, which just might be the way to go. I took a break from yard work on a Saturday afternoon and wandered inside for a glass of water. There I heard Ella yowling. She was facing a corner in the den, apparently believing that she was trapped. When I lifted her up and brought her to the center of the room, she was dragging her left leg and stumbling in a circle. Immediately my wife and I brought her to the Burlington Emergency and Veterinary Services in Williston, which is open on Saturday afternoons. There we learned that Ella was most likely blind and deaf now. She also seemed to be losing control of her left front leg.
Two days earlier, she had had her annual physical, and she was doing great. Sure, her kidneys needed a little help. But otherwise she happy and healthy. She was always a trooper of a traveler and patient.
But now we knew it was time for her to join the other members of the pride who had come – and gone – before her. We buried her at dusk in a spot not far from Merlin and Clinton.
I have friends who think the size of my family’s pride is excessive, but not because of the hairballs, the turd hockey, or (most recently) the hydration. They think we’re crazy because the size invariably means mourning.
And, yes, that loss is hard. I wrote literally tens of thousands of words with Ella purring in my lap. Barely a week after we said good-bye to her, we learned that another of our cats, Horton, has a heart murmur, and even with treatment her time with us will be abridged.
But that pain is a small price to pay for all the pleasure we derive from caring for a large and eccentric pride. So we live with loss – and savor the time we have together.
Godspeed, Ella. See you on the other side.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 1, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives next month.)
That might sound like we’ve had bad luck with cats. On the contrary, we’ve had great luck. It’s simply that we’ve always had a large pride. During most of our quarter-century in Lincoln, we’ve had at least four cats, and sometimes we’ve had as many as six.
But, alas, on a Saturday last month, the pride fell by one: Ella. She was a black cat who, at her largest, looked like a very plush throw pillow. According to an animal communicator who once interviewed her, she aspired to be a dancer – like my wife’s and my daughter. I am not making that up.
Ella lived to be 16 and change, and the last year and four months of her life we brought her to the Bristol Animal Hospital every three or four days, where Heather or Nancy or Jen or two different women who share the name Kathy would hydrate her. Her kidneys were in renal failure and this was the treatment. They would squeeze a bag of water into her side and her kidneys would work like a charm for another three or four days, and she would chow down like she’d been entered into a competitive eating competition at Coney Island.
I remember that when she was diagnosed with renal failure in February 2013, my wife and I were hoping the hydration would give her a happy, comfortable four or five months. She’d get to spend a few warm summer days lounging in the sun on the front porch. Well, she got that. She also got an autumn sniffing at the mole holes beside the blueberry bushes and the birdbath. She got another winter beside the woodstove. And she was given the gift of another full spring – which meant we did, too.
What got her in the end? A stroke, which just might be the way to go. I took a break from yard work on a Saturday afternoon and wandered inside for a glass of water. There I heard Ella yowling. She was facing a corner in the den, apparently believing that she was trapped. When I lifted her up and brought her to the center of the room, she was dragging her left leg and stumbling in a circle. Immediately my wife and I brought her to the Burlington Emergency and Veterinary Services in Williston, which is open on Saturday afternoons. There we learned that Ella was most likely blind and deaf now. She also seemed to be losing control of her left front leg.
Two days earlier, she had had her annual physical, and she was doing great. Sure, her kidneys needed a little help. But otherwise she happy and healthy. She was always a trooper of a traveler and patient.
But now we knew it was time for her to join the other members of the pride who had come – and gone – before her. We buried her at dusk in a spot not far from Merlin and Clinton.
I have friends who think the size of my family’s pride is excessive, but not because of the hairballs, the turd hockey, or (most recently) the hydration. They think we’re crazy because the size invariably means mourning.
And, yes, that loss is hard. I wrote literally tens of thousands of words with Ella purring in my lap. Barely a week after we said good-bye to her, we learned that another of our cats, Horton, has a heart murmur, and even with treatment her time with us will be abridged.
But that pain is a small price to pay for all the pleasure we derive from caring for a large and eccentric pride. So we live with loss – and savor the time we have together.
Godspeed, Ella. See you on the other side.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 1, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives next month.)
You don't forget a friend like John Vautier
Lincoln, Vermont’s Andrew Furtsch works out at the gym in Bristol in a pair of ratty Converse high tops. On the white toecap of one he has written in permanent black marker, “J.H.V.” On the other he has penned “2.8.11.”
It was four years ago today that our friend John Henry Vautier passed away: February 8, 2011. A man who survived two battles with cancer and a National Guard deployment in Bosnia died when he fell clearing snow off his roof in New Haven. Andrew and I worked out with him two and sometimes three times a week at Bristol Fitness. Andrew and John used to dead-lift together, squatting and hoisting refrigerators off the floor. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration. They weren’t really lifting refrigerators. They were lifting golf carts.)
Andrew will never forget his last conversation with John. They had finished working out for the day and were walking down the alley that leads to the gym, and John said, “I gotta get a big tub of gum for the kids. See you next time.” John used to teach Sunday School at the United Church of Lincoln, and a big part of the curriculum he improvised for the four- and five-year-olds in his care involved giving them chunks of Dubble Bubble. It worked. The kids adored the hulk of a man that was John Vautier and knew they were loved in return.
But, of course, there wouldn’t be a next time for Andrew and John. It snowed and John climbed a ladder, and his story ended a lot sooner than any of us expected.
It’s still hard for me to believe that John has been gone four years now. I was on a book tour the day he died, but I know right where I was when I learned what had happened. I know the precise spot in the hotel lobby in Austin, Texas where I was standing when Andrew called me with the news. Andrew said – because, it seems, people really do say this when we are breaking unbelievably bad news – “Are you sitting down?” I was about to check in, but I went to a leather couch and sat down, just as Andrew had instructed. I ended the book tour early and came home.
Obviously a big part of living is dying. Not simply the reality that all our stories end there. I am referring to the fact that sometimes our friends and family leave us much earlier in the journey than we anticipate. And in most ways, we move on. We have to.
Yet even four years after John died, I don’t enter the gym without thinking of him. Clearly Andrew doesn’t either: he can’t put on his sneakers without recalling the man. “I always think of that booming voice of his,” Andrew said to me the other day. “I think of that big smile on his face. Not a lot of people have that demeanor.”
Lord, I can’t even change the halogen bulb in my desk lamp without thinking of John, because he was an electrician and used to make the bulbs magically appear whenever I needed one. Now that finding the bulb is my responsibility, it’s a scavenger hunt to hardware stores in two counties before I find the right one.
Last month I heard Tony Dokoupil, author of the memoir, “The Last Pirate,” on “Fresh Air.” While answering one of Terry Gross’s questions, he said something that has stayed with me: “Memory is like surveillance footage. Everything gets picked up, but you don’t really review it unless there’s an incident.”
Indeed. And for those of us who knew John from the gym or the church or from Cubber’s Restaurant in Bristol, that surveillance footage is a gift. There was an incident: a cataclysmically awful incident. But thank God for the memories we have of John. Even though he has been gone four years, we still have inside us those reminders of his laughter, his exuberance, and – best of all – his friendship.
We still miss you, buddy. I hope you’re lifting some crazy weights in heaven.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on February 8, 2015. The paperback of Chris’s most recent novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives in May.)
It was four years ago today that our friend John Henry Vautier passed away: February 8, 2011. A man who survived two battles with cancer and a National Guard deployment in Bosnia died when he fell clearing snow off his roof in New Haven. Andrew and I worked out with him two and sometimes three times a week at Bristol Fitness. Andrew and John used to dead-lift together, squatting and hoisting refrigerators off the floor. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration. They weren’t really lifting refrigerators. They were lifting golf carts.)
Andrew will never forget his last conversation with John. They had finished working out for the day and were walking down the alley that leads to the gym, and John said, “I gotta get a big tub of gum for the kids. See you next time.” John used to teach Sunday School at the United Church of Lincoln, and a big part of the curriculum he improvised for the four- and five-year-olds in his care involved giving them chunks of Dubble Bubble. It worked. The kids adored the hulk of a man that was John Vautier and knew they were loved in return.
But, of course, there wouldn’t be a next time for Andrew and John. It snowed and John climbed a ladder, and his story ended a lot sooner than any of us expected.
It’s still hard for me to believe that John has been gone four years now. I was on a book tour the day he died, but I know right where I was when I learned what had happened. I know the precise spot in the hotel lobby in Austin, Texas where I was standing when Andrew called me with the news. Andrew said – because, it seems, people really do say this when we are breaking unbelievably bad news – “Are you sitting down?” I was about to check in, but I went to a leather couch and sat down, just as Andrew had instructed. I ended the book tour early and came home.
Obviously a big part of living is dying. Not simply the reality that all our stories end there. I am referring to the fact that sometimes our friends and family leave us much earlier in the journey than we anticipate. And in most ways, we move on. We have to.
Yet even four years after John died, I don’t enter the gym without thinking of him. Clearly Andrew doesn’t either: he can’t put on his sneakers without recalling the man. “I always think of that booming voice of his,” Andrew said to me the other day. “I think of that big smile on his face. Not a lot of people have that demeanor.”
Lord, I can’t even change the halogen bulb in my desk lamp without thinking of John, because he was an electrician and used to make the bulbs magically appear whenever I needed one. Now that finding the bulb is my responsibility, it’s a scavenger hunt to hardware stores in two counties before I find the right one.
Last month I heard Tony Dokoupil, author of the memoir, “The Last Pirate,” on “Fresh Air.” While answering one of Terry Gross’s questions, he said something that has stayed with me: “Memory is like surveillance footage. Everything gets picked up, but you don’t really review it unless there’s an incident.”
Indeed. And for those of us who knew John from the gym or the church or from Cubber’s Restaurant in Bristol, that surveillance footage is a gift. There was an incident: a cataclysmically awful incident. But thank God for the memories we have of John. Even though he has been gone four years, we still have inside us those reminders of his laughter, his exuberance, and – best of all – his friendship.
We still miss you, buddy. I hope you’re lifting some crazy weights in heaven.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on February 8, 2015. The paperback of Chris’s most recent novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives in May.)
