Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs - Couverture rigide

Sakson, Sharon

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1593500386 ISBN 13 : 9781593500382

Editeur : Alyson Publications Inc, 2008

Synopsis

Paws and Effect Stories that explore how the bond between dog and human works healing miracles in human lives. Full description

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One
Living with Healing Dogs


When I trace back my interest in the healing power of dogs, I have to start at the beginning, which takes me back to age twelve. In that year, my mother took to bed with an unexplained illness. Because I was in seventh grade, breezy, confident, and wise, I assumed she had a lingering case of flu and sighed with annoyance whenever she asked me to look after my three younger siblings.

Our relatives and friends said, "Your mother will be better soon," and I believed them, the way a child would. Instead, over the next months, the situation deteriorated. There were fewer and fewer days when my mother felt well enough to get up and help us with homework. Finally, one warm May afternoon, we arrived home to the sight of an ambulance in the driveway, and just beyond it, parked askew, our father's car.

My brother, Johnny, and I ran into our house, where we saw the even stranger sight of our father descending the staircase, carrying our mother.

He had never carried her before. He often complained that she was too heavy, that her clothes were too tight, that if firemen ever came to our house to rescue us, they wouldn't be able to get her out. It wasn't true; she was a petite 5 foot, 1 inch and 105 pounds. He amused himself by playing on her anxieties about how she looked. Yet now here he was, carrying her in his arms. She looked frail and small. He laid her on the gurney and the ambulance workers strapped her in.

Our father told us she was going to the hospital because she needed more treatment and it would be better for her to get it there. She would get better in the hospital, and then she would come home. He sounded very certain, so we were reassured.

It was a confusing time. In an excess of sympathy and caring, no one wanted her children to know that she was dying. Instead, they continuously tried to cheer us up. Their strategies worked because we had been trained to believe what adults said.

The next day, our maternal grandmother, Kay, took us to Robert's Pet Shop, on a corner of Warren Avenue near her apartment in Trenton, New Jersey. We needed food for Johnny's two turtles and some pebbles and a fancy castle for Sandy's goldfish. My pet had been a dog, a mutt named Shadow who resembled a black Golden Retriever. He was born in the stable where I took riding lessons, and while we loved him, he developed a troubling habit of attacking the men who did the gardening for the homes on our block. Our yard was not fenced. Shadow stayed near us, watching baseball or jump rope or hide-and-seek with one eye while he warmed himself in the sun. But the minute a gardener appeared in any of the adjoining yards, he flew off the property and not only barked but sank his teeth into the legs of any of the men he could get near.

We knew why. When he was only a year old, he had followed us across the Robinettes' lawn and onto the Mersons' property, where we took a path toward the back alley and planned to proceed to the home of the Hughes' children. We were a long stream of neighborhood kids. A gardener appeared in the door of the Mersons' garage, a hoe in his hand. With no provocation at all, he stepped out and smacked Shadow in the head. Shadow fell to the ground, unconscious. I was hysterical; Johnny thought he was dead; one of the Hughes boys, Brian, picked up Shadow and carried him back to our house. Shadow recovered, but he never forgot. From that moment on, he hated all gardeners. This event changed him from a calm, compliant dog to a dog who became a threatening monster on the several days a week gardeners were present. We were supposed to keep him in the house in the afternoon. We never remembered. Eventually, Mommy explained to us that Shadow was going to have to go out to the country and live at our grandparents' farm, where hopefully he would never see another gardener again.

In the cool glow from Robert's lighted aquariums, I exhumed a copy of Dog World magazine from a book rack. A Wire Fox Terrier graced the cover, and his beauty and stature took my breath away. Turning the pages, I fell totally under the spell of purebred dogs. Pointers and Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, Greyhounds and Bassets, Bernese Mountain Dogs and Great Danes and Chihuahuas and Collies and Corgis. All these dogs amazed and enchanted me. With this magazine in hand, I was able to put aside the thought of our mother, hooked to oxygen and intravenous fluids in the hospital, and think about something else. In that split second in the pet shop, a future opened before me that I had not contemplated, a future filled with beautiful dogs. I would be the one holding the well-groomed Standard Poodle on the thin show lead, smiling as we accepted the Best in Show trophy.

My father was cold, distant, and preoccupied, but he was roused by my insistent prodding to drive us to Merrybrook Kennels in Long Valley, New Jersey, where I chose a Wire Fox terrier with the guidance of the great breeder Mrs. Franklin Koehler. I didn't know it at the time, but she was a pillar in the breed and would become my first mentor. It was amazing that my father, so cheap in many ways, agreed to shell out the whopping $350 price of a purebred dog. He was not inclined to be so generous when it came to Dolly's housing arrangements. He put up a makeshift fence that he assumed would hold an active, eager terrier puppy during the hours I was at school. He was wrong. Dolly escaped, and only two weeks into our partnership, she was struck and killed by a car.

While I was interviewing men for my book Paws & Reflect, several of them mentioned that they saw the deaths of their childhood dogs as lessons in the impermanence of physical life and the permeating quality of love. If Dolly's death was supposed to be a lesson for me, I missed it. I was already depressed about my mother's absence. When Dolly died, I took to bed and was unable to get up. My father returned to Mrs. Koehler for a second puppy, Bonnie, who was granted permission to stay in the house when I wasn't with her in order to avoid the fate of her predecessor.

If someone asked me now which breed would be best at consoling a child over the loss of her mother, a Wire Fox Terrier would be low on my list. Bonnie did not like to sit still. She would absorb only a few minutes of hugs and kisses before demanding to be set free. She was always busy chasing small animals or barking at passersby. Like most terriers, she abstained from making direct eye contact. But when my mother died, Bonnie was the only physical being who offered me any kind of comfort. She didn't lower her standards because of my grief and allow me more cuddle time. She just made it clear that she didn't see the point. There was a big world out there to explore. When the leash was snapped to her collar, we walked endlessly through Cadwalder Park. Down to the freezing cold creek where she lapped a drink while I hopped from rock to rock. Across to the playground, where she refused to ride the swings or the wheel but let me push her down the sliding board. Into the bushes behind Kathy McCormack's house, where we spied on my best friend and her family.

In the weeks after my mother's death, no one noticed us passing through the house like ghosts. Everyone was consumed inside by his or her own grief. I wanted to shut the door of my bedroom and never come out again, but I couldn't do that because of Bonnie. She felt like my heart, the only part of me that carried on. She was unfailingly lively, cute, sweet, and beautiful in my eyes. I had to carry on with my life because she did.

The black depression of my mother's death settled over me like a cloud and many, many nights I decided that the only way out was to die. I spent a lot of time considering various methods of suicide. Would the gun in my father's bedroom closet go off if I put it to my head? How many Valium pills would you have to consume to make sure you died and didn't just turn into a vegetable? What about jumping off the roof of the house? The problem with all the methods was the absence of a guarantee that they would work. And there was one lingering detail: There would be no one to take care of Bonnie. No one in the family felt about her the way I did. There is a dose of genetic material that separates a dog lover from a non-dog lover and no amount of explaining can ever cross the divide. Bonnie was the sole reason I never pressed the razor blade to my wrists or dropped in front of a speeding train. She needed me when no one else did.

It was not apparent to me then that I was witnessing the healing power that a dog can bring to a person's life. If I thought about it at all, it was the other way around. I was devoting my life to make her happy. It took the distance of adulthood to see the truth; Bonnie kept me on this earth. She didn't heal me, but she provided the possibility that I would still be alive to be healed some day. Her presence was the antidote that defused the pain of petty insults from other children and all the times I was forgotten by my father. She comforted me with her wild spirit, but often it was her physical nearness I craved. My father was proud of his German heritage. He aligned himself with the concept of Prussian military toughness. When people feel sympathy, they like to take your hand, squeeze your shoulder, and stroke your arm. My father despised all of those things. His co-workers, the doctors and nurses and physical therapists and lab technicians, even the telephone operators and television repairmen and girls who delivered the flowers; all of them would have known about the death of his wife and want to offer sympathy. It was probably hard enough to say 'Thank you' and push the grief away all day. He did not want to be confronted with it in the evenings, in his own home. He rebuffed any attempt to touch or hug me. The healing power of another being pressed against your skin came only from Bonnie.

We moved to a sterile new home in Pennsylvania, and I enrolled in a strange new school where sports stars and cheerleaders were the only honored students....

Revue de presse

“A heartwarming and informative account of the astonishing ways dogs heal humans.”
—Ted Kerasote, author of Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog
“In a series of interesting, informative, and often poignant stories about real people, Sharon Sakson tells you about how dogs help to heal the mind and the body. After reading this book you may well start feeling that having a dog in home is like having a special kind of doctor in your house.”
—Stanley Coren, author of How Dogs Think and The Intelligence of Dogs

“So meaningful and straight to the heart, Paws & Effect sheds a whole new light on our communication with animals of which many people are unaware. You may listen more closely the next time your dog tries to tell you something!”
—Betty White, actress and author

“The reader will find much that is fascinating and much that is deeply moving in Paws & Effect. There is abundant evidence herein on the marvel of our relationship with dogs.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Alyson Publications Inc
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1593500386
• ISBN 13: 9781593500382
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible