Christie's Mountain

2011-11-25T21:17:00.001-07:00

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD:

I pray and I pray and I often write my prayers, and when I am moved to hear an answer, I write that too. Here is the answer I got to my sorrow over this almost-40-year-old-body which is increasingly... well...almost 40.

GOD SPEAKS:

This is beauty. How can you not know that? Every dip and every valley in that skin you stare at so sadly. Those wrinkles, those scars, the bends and kinks in your swelling joints, the fleshy curves at your hips and waist. These are a map, every line and every shading a testament to all the places we have been, you and I together, as I led you on this journey that is your life.

Did you not know? Do you not see? I am a painter! I paint with oils, thick and deep, mixing, pitting, brushing onto your canvas in colors brilliant and subdued. But it is the textures, the texture which is the key. My medium is not a simple color, flat and 2-dimensional. It encompasses height and weight, the oils thick or thin or sporadic from my brush. This is the beauty of my work. You are an oil painting. How can you long to be flat and smooth and shinny as you were?

I am a painter. Is a blank canvas the beauty that you crave?

I created you long ago, a blank canvas, as I create many whom I love. As any painter, I love a canvas, blank and white. To see it there fills me with excitement, with joy. It fills me with love.

Do you think that this love comes from the whiteness of the canvas? Should I hang it then, on my wall as it is, unmarred, untouched, smooth and sleek? Would I love it if I did? No. What I love is not not the canvas. It is the potential, the excitement of the creation which is to come. Do you think this love, this joy would exist if I did not paint? If I did not intend, anticipate something better that is to come, something better than the smooth surface and bright, perfect face?

Upon you, once a blank canvas, I have created. I have practiced the glory of creation. Each brushstroke has added texture, color, form. I have added, every day for forty years, another layer, another dip and valley, here and there, and your body has changed with my brush, colored and deepened, textured and shaded.

Your wrinkles are deeper, the lines in your skin are longer and more pronounced. Your hands are rough and calloused. There is a scar bellow your right wrist. Smaller scars and transient cuts mar your arms. There are freckles here and there. Is that a sun spot beginning to appear?

Your face is rounder, fleshy. That slim jaw has gone. Under your eyes the skin is puffy. Your hair is cut short in deference to ease, though a longer style gave it more lift and grace. You no longer spend your money or your time on complex styles. You leave it straight and fine, the way I made it, though you do not think this suits your face as well. Your stomach isn’t flat, your hips bulge and your waist line is thick. Your skin is pitted and dimply where once it was smooth as silk. Your feet have bunions and your toes have gone crooked with arthritis and hard walking over the years.

You look in the mirror, standing naked before God, and your eyes tear up and your shoulders slump. You turn this way and that. You look hopefully for something you don’t see. You sigh and turn away. You resolve to accept that your beauty is gone, to settle for a lesser standard and be happy with what you’ve got.

But don’t you know? This is my masterpiece. Not that twenty-year-old in high heals and a size six dress. Not that perfect doll with the make-up and the blow-dried hair. She was just a canvas, half created, exciting and beautiful not for her own sake, but for all the potential of what she would become.

How can you compare yourself to her and find yourself lacking? You with all the richness and texture of age. You whom my brushstrokes, my artist’s eye has created. You are the painting with all its texture and depth, its shades and complexities that a true painter can rejoice in. How can you long to be again that blank canvas, void of creation, without my genius upon you? How can you reject the true work of my artist’s self, calling instead for the shallow outline of a mere idea? A half-formed sketch.

You are my masterpiece. My work of art with depth and color and texture to claim. You are a woman, and your every curve and dent and flaw serve only to richen the painting that I am creating out of you.

Stand again, naked before me. Know that every curve and every sag comes from my artist’s brush, every scar is my tone and texture upon you. Stand naked before me, someday, without those tears, without that sigh. And see my masterpiece for what it is - glory and beauty and genius and creation, all wrapped into one. Not lacking, never less. So much more than you were before.

2011-11-21T13:51:00.001-07:00

What do you say to someone who has just disclosed to you that their life is a constant struggle with pain and illness?

You are talking with a casual friend; you just met someone and are hearing about their life; you ask a question of an acquaintance and it leads to raw details you didn’t expect. You are uncomfortable and wish you could get away. or you are moved to really care and want to say something that will make their pain less.

What do you say?

How do you respond?

COMMON ANSWER ONE: “It’s going to be alright.” “Everything will get better.” “You’ll be doing better soon.”

Assurance that everything is going to be alright is okay for close friends and family who have lived this illness with me day after day and changed their lives to help me through. It is not an appropriate response from a new acquaintance or a friend whom I don’t regularly share the intimate parts of my life with. And with this kind of response, even the intimate friends probably need to watch out.

In most situations and from most people, such a response is designed to make you (the speaker) feel better, not me. You may think that your desire to reassure me that everything will be alright comes out of the burning compassion and love you feel for me when you hear how difficult things are in my life. But most of the time, those words actually come from your desire to alleviate the discomfort you feel at my pain. It is uncomfortable, even intolerable, for you to think of me suffering, day after day with no reprieve. You want to force all the loss and pain that makes up my life not to be true, or, at the least, not to be true much longer. You grope around for some way to do that, and what you come up with is, “Its not that bad, it will be okay.”

The truth is, it probably will be okay. Because I am a strong person who can find a way to love my life no matter how painful the path I am given. But that doesn’t mean it is not “that” bad. It is every bit “that” bad. I’m just every bit that strong.

And no matter whether I’m okay or not, the fact is, you have no way of knowing whether I will be okay or not. You have no way of knowing whether I will break under the pain of things or whether my body will continue to deteriorate until I cannot walk or go to the bathroom by myself or speak clearly anymore. You have no way of knowing whether my pain will increase until I am unable to bear it, or I will become too weak to lift my head off my pillow, whether I will gain weight uncontrollably, become ugly and develop neurological twitches which people will stare at in public. All of these things are possible and the reality of my life is that I have to consider them, worry about them, be aware of them, every day.

Assuring me that these things wont happen (“Things will get better.”) is offensive, infuriating, and a slap in the face to me.

The most offensive thing about this response is that I know it isn’t true and I wonder if you think I am nieve enough to consider believing these words just because you said them. The next most offensive things is that you would presume to assume that you could know such a complex answer as how this illness will progress better than I do when I have lived with it every day of my life.

The truth is, I know that you have less ability than me to predict what will happen with this illness. Deciding to blindly believe it will all be alright is a way for you to decide not to have to live with any part of one of the hardest aspects of such an illness - uncertainty about the future. I am certainly not going to be saved from this torturous concern abut what direction my health will take as I age. But here you are, asking me to participate in a lie to help make you more comfortable with this unknown - to help you sleep better at night. And I am offended to be used this way. I am not sure why I have to lie about my life to make it easier for you to be comfortable.

If you are a doctor and you have tested me and done research and found reason to believe that I wont get any worse, then by all means, tell me. I’ll be relieved to hear it. But if you are not, don’t you dare tell me that everything is going to be alright. Don’t you dare tell me I will get better, that the worst wont happen. You are only convincing yourself. Convincing yourself that I feel better (that I believe you) makes you feel better, eases the horrible feelings your caring for me causes when you see what I am having to deal with in my life.

Its a betrayal of me.

Its a betrayal because it shuts down my right to be honest about my life. It is the same as telling me that what I experience isn’t true. I know that the reality of my situation is that my future is much more uncertain than most, that this illness could and often does get much worse. I have to deal with that every day. Denying that this is true, telling me that somehow you know the future (when you don’t) and that I am not in danger (when I am) not only makes me feel alone in my (very real) fears, it also makes me feel crazy. Because I have learned enough about this illness, known enough other people who have had it, lived with its changes over enough years, that I know the risk is real. This fear is a part of my every day. And here you are, telling me that it isn’t necessary, when I know that it is. Am I crazy, or are you?

If you can’t bear to know what my life is like, if you just need to get away from hearing about it, have the guts to own your own weakness and tell me so. Say, “I really don’t want to hear any more about this. This is too uncomfortable for me to deal with.” I’ll probably loose respect for you. But I’ll recognize that the problem is in you. I wont have to doubt my own judgments, my own competence, because something you said (which sounded so reasonable and positive) clashed at a basic level with what I know to be true (that this illness could get worse, that my life may not get better).

Unless you come offering me a cure - a medical cure - you have no place predicting how this illness will progress. And no matter who you are and what you’ve lived with, you have no right to discount the pain that living with this illness entails for me.

It is not your place to tell me everything will be alright.

So - what can you say?

You’ve just gotten to know someone who revealed to you that their life is a constant struggle with pain and illness every day. What is the appropriate thing to say?

Try, “Wow. I’m really sorry you have to deal with that.”

Try, “That’s terrible.”

Try, “I really hope things get better for you.”

Try, “I had no idea.” or “I can’t imagine how hard that must be.” or “You are clearly a strong person to have gotten this far with all of that to deal with.”

Don’t add, “And so I know you’ll be alright.”

Don’t add, “I am sure things will get better.”

You can say, “I hope tomorrow’s better.” or “Is there anything I can do?” or just, “I’m sorry.”

Just don’t try to change it (because you can’t). And don’t try to deny it (because I can’t). Acknowledge it and let it be.

You would be surprised what a powerful difference it makes in my life to have someone look my pain in the eye, acknowledge it, and not try to brush it away.

Flying

2011-11-15T22:46:00.001-07:00

I almost got kicked off of a United flight today. I didn’t - I’m still on that flight as I write this, somewhere over Kansas, I believe.

I arrived at the airport, traveling alone after visiting my husband who is working out of state. I hate traveling alone because this illness makes a day with that kind of energy output miserable, and because, if I begin to have problems, I am very much alone in dealing with them. We’d ordered me a wheel chair, but I didn’t go get it because a) I wasn’t sure where to go for that and b) I thought I could get by without it. I began to question that decision at the first long line I had to stand in. Standing for very long is difficult for me. But my gate wasn’t far away, and, while I was feeling ill and shaking a bit by the time I got there, I made it to the gate. I told the woman at the desk that I would need to pre-bored, as I didn’t think I could handle standing in another line, and she got me on the plane first thing.

Since there were no other people boarding right then, and I was starting to see signs of my temperature skyrocketing (which can lead to a host of problems if left unchecked) I asked the flight attendant for some ice, mumbling something about why I needed it. He was very concerned and brought me a bag of ice, a cup of ice, and a jug of water. He sat down next to me to ask me to explain what was wrong and repeatably ask what he could do to help.

I was flattered. Usually plane rides are miserable for me, as I am fighting off being sick most of the way and the things which could be done to help me (such as giving me ice to bring my temperature down) seem to annoy the flight attendants, so I rarely ask. I had certainly never had anyone seem so concerned and helpful before. It made me feel rather warm and fuzzy. Given that, and because, until the ice started working, I was experiencing one of the symptoms of higher temperature (having trouble thinking clearly) I was neither very organized, nor very careful, about what I said. I told him I had chronic fatigue syndrome and it had done some damage to my nervous system, so I couldn’t regulate my temperature quite right anymore. I needed to get my temperature down or I could pass out. I told him it wasn’t life threatening, but that if I didn’t get my temperature down I would likely progress to the point of being unable to think clearly or remain conscious. I took his bag of ice and held it against me cheeks, my neck, my chest, and it quickly began to help.

He returned multiple times to check on me as other passengers boarded the flight, and at some point he went and talked to the other flight attendants and gestured back to me. A few minutes later, another flight attendant came over. She said, “The captain is not comfortable with you being on this flight, given the health conditions you described.” And proceeded to try and convinced me to get up and exit the airplane.

I was more than a little thrown by this. I told her I really was likely to be okay, the ice was helping a great deal. She insisted for some time that they were really uncomfortable having me on the flight if it was possible that I might pass out. I insisted for some time that I really would be fine. She eventually stopped short of ordering me off the flight when I eventually lied and said that the ice had taken care of the problem and there was nothing wrong anymore. She finally went away.

I am not sure what to make of that.

Certainly, I can see that they would not want someone to get on a flight who might have a medical emergency in the air. But I have these problems every time I fly. And how else did she expect me to get home? And if she was worried about the liability of it, I would have to say that kicking me off a flight because of an illness I can’t do anything about would not have been the way to avoid a lawsuit.

I hate flying. I hate it because the mix of standing in lines, stuffy, warm air, and long days without rest conspire to trigger some of the worst aspects of my illness. I can normally expect a flying day to consist of exhaustion, nausea and a lot of pain. But worse than that is the, a constant fight to keep any of my symptoms from getting from getting out of control enough that I become incapacitated in some strange airport all by myself. I have flown dozens of times in my life and, while most of them have been miserable enough to bring me to tears, only twice have I failed to keep my symptoms under control enough that anyone else had to become involved. But, because of this same illness, I am unable to handle driving long distances, and taking the bus or the train is often worse. My family lives half way across the country, my husband works in a different state, and sometimes travel cannot be avoided.

And now I sit here and I have thrown the bag of ice away because my temperature is stabilized and I don’t think I will need it anymore. And I am in pain and exhausted and my hands shake almost too much to type. But I don’t know if I should rest my head against my seat or let the smile off my face. Not that they can do anything now - we’re half way to Denver, 10,000 feet up. But I have to get on a connecting flight in Denver and if I really let myself collapse, would they let me on that flight? I’m not in danger of passing out anymore, just too exhausted to hold up my own head. But will they recognize the difference? Or is there a difference to them?

Should I not even have ordered a wheelchair?

But of course, that is ridiculous. I really need that wheelchair if I am going to make it through the next flight without being in danger of experiencing anything but my own private misery, and I can’t really imagine them making an issue of it now. Not unless I really do seem to have trouble functioning, anyway. She just... she really was very insistent that I get off the flight. I thought for a while that she was not going to back down.

I’m just not sure how I should feel about this situation. I think I’m angry. But should I be? Was it reasonable of them to be concerned, given what they did and did not understand? Or is it reasonable for me to feel I should be able to fly, even if I do become sick mid-flight, even if I am in some danger of passing out?

This Is What Living With A Chronic Illness Is Like (Installment One):

2011-11-08T22:10:00.002-07:00

[The following is one piece of a collection I am working on both to help people understand the experience of living with a Chronic Illness, and to explore (creatively) my own life experiences. This is being written in bits and pieces, and I will share them as they come.]

This is What Life With A Chronic Illness Is Like:

“One day you feel relatively great...the next day you can hardly move or get out of bed...One minute you’re straightening up the house or garage and the next instant you’re exhausted.”

Coping with Chronic Illness by H. Norman Wright and Lynn Ellis

Note the word “relatively” before the word “great.” That right there shows that this was written by someone who understands what this kind of illness is like.

I regularly find myself so pleased that I am in less pain today than I was yesterday or so much less exhausted than I have been, that when someone asks how I am doing today, I tell them, “great!” And they say, “Good! You’re not in pain today!” And I’m thrown for a loop by that, and stutter, “Well, no..I mean...some...I mean the pain in my legs is bad enough that I’m having a little trouble walking, and it hurts to breath, and my hands burn and my head aches, but...you, know, its not that bad...”

Its all about “relatively.” My standards for a good day are drastically different than anyone else I know.

This is What Life With A Chronic Illness Is Like:

Once you’ve lived with an illness long enough, a number of things happen.

First: You toughen up. Simply feeling sick is not enough to slow you down. A moderate level of pain is hardly noticed anymore. You may be laughing and bustling around and you look like you’re fine. But 90% of the population would be moaning and in bed if they felt like you do right now.

Second: You smarten up, and this enables your illness to hit a slightly more even keel than it once did. You know how to balance your energy, eat the right foods, and you have found a treatment or two that helps. So, unlike the beginning, you now have some days when the illness is not as sever as it can be, when you can, for a short time at least, live some of your life.

Third: You do neither of these things. Sometimes. Some days. You’ll go months toughing your way through pain and exhaustion, at peace with how many of your dreams you have lost, loving each day simply because the sun is shinning or your cat loves you. Feeling somewhat proud of how well you deal with such a hard life. Feeling spiritually enlightened and strong. And then, suddenly, you are undone by the smallest little pain in your hands (not nearly as sever as usual, not even enough to prevent you from picking things up). You cry, and you huddle on the couch and feel miserable and sorry for yourself beyond all description. And you want pity and you want everyone around you to know how hard it is - the pain, the exhaustion, the loss of everything. And you’re petulant and childish and overwhelmed with sadness, with anger, with grief.

It builds up, you see, the pain. Putting up with it, day after day, hour after hour, pushing it back in your awareness so that you can live your life (at least a little bit) and its always there, and its always wearing away at you, at the wall you put up to block it out that never really does. And eventually the shear weight of it is too much and you crumble, if only for a little while, you crumble beneath it and you curl in a ball and quiver because you cannot handle one more minute of being in pain. And the thing that tipped the scale was a small thing, compared to most of your pain: A straw added to the camel’s back.

And exhaustion is exhausting, you know, over time, as much as any pain. It wears away at your reserves, gets heavier and heavier every day until it crashes down, all at once, and what you handled for weeks with a smile suddenly leaves you sobbing in bed and throwing things. You don’t know why your family can’t understand how wrong this is, how miserable your life, how hopeless all that you are facing. You want them to feel it, to recognize the horror of it, and never mind that yesterday was ten times worse but didn’t bother you half this much.

The reality of chronic illness is that, no matter how well you usually deal with your struggles, the constant stress of dealing with such a difficult life, day after day, periodically catches up to you, and you find, at least for a little while, that all of a sudden you are not strong, you are not smart, you are nothing but angry and sad and incapable of dealing with this life one moment longer. But, of course, you don’t actually have a choice in the matter, so eventually you finish your tantrum and go back to being strong, smart and spiritually enlightened, at least for a little while.

This is What Life With A Chronic Illness Is Like:

“Sometimes you feel almost well, while other days you’re incapacitated.”

Coping with Chronic Illness by H. Norman Wright and Lynn Ellis

One of the biggest problems of life with a Chronic Illness is how variable it is. I tell people that I am too sick to work and unable to take care of myself. Then they see me shopping at the Sat. market, zipping down a hiking trail or re-organizing my garage. How are they suppose to make sense of that?

They don’t know that this is the first hike I have been on in three years and that I will likely be unable to handle this kind of activity again for another three. They don’t know that I am shopping my heart out now because it feels so good to do something, but that in five minutes I am going to crash and will be unable to drive or even get myself back to my car.

Its the same with using my handicap parking flag. I get out of the car and I find myself affecting a limp, or exaggerating any aches and pains in my body. I’m embarrassed to be seen using it unless it looks like I need it.

But looks or not, I do need it, even though, most of the time, I’m not using the flag because there is anything wrong with my legs. Most of the time, I use my flag because my energy is so limited that I know I’m likely to crash and be unable to drive home without a moment’s notice, and every little savings of energy may make the difference between my getting home or having to sleep in my car. Or because my energy is so limited that searching for a parking spot or walking an extra 30 feet, is likely to tip the balance between me being able to run an errand on my own or having to wait (again) for someone to do it for me. In the city, where finding parking is a real challenge, that parking flag is the deciding factor on whether or not I can ever leave the house on my own. It is my independence.

But I am use to pain and I am use to exhaustion. And by now, I have trained myself to smile and hold up my head and look normal unless things get really bad. This isn’t because I am trying to hide from reality. Its because moping around, limping and looking miserable makes you miserable. It makes you feel needy and pitiful and weak. And I can’t live like that. Oh, don’t get me wrong, looking like hell has its place, and its important to honor the way you feel. Its important not to insist on hiding it all the time. But sometimes you have to smile and put on a good face because when you are sick all the time, too many days of looking the way you feel just perpetuates depression. And I can’t live like that.

So, I smile and hold up my head and put a spring in my step for as long as I can, not for anyone else’s comfort, but because it is essential to my own self esteem. And it helps me get through the day. But then I use my parking flag, and I don’t look like I need it. And people glare at me, or shake their heads and make a pointed comment to their neighbor, or even walk up to me and say, “Some people really need those spaces and its disgusting that people like you would take advantage of that.” And, while part of me thinks that I ought to feel grateful to those people for being so committed to protecting the rights of people who (like me) desperately need such help to get by. But really I’m just so furious I can’t see straight. And its so upsetting that the next time I use the flag I find myself limping or putting on my most pitiful, sick-person persona and I cary a cane or lean heavily against the side of the car, not because I need to, but because I can’t bear to deal with another person who is convinced I am taking advantage of easy parking because I am lazy, self-centered and dishonest.

Love and Death at the Ranch

2011-11-08T21:49:00.001-07:00

[WARNING: This story is upsetting and raw. If you are not up for that, skip this one for now.]

I killed a horse today. Held a 45 to her skull and shot her through the head. She fell so fast I hardly computed that she was dead - but there was the hole in her head as proof, pulsing out blood like a broken pipe, thick and red and pulsing. She was dead before she had time to notice the gun. The hole was simple and neat and clean. There was no splash, no mess, not even any dust on my shirt. I just reached up and pulled the trigger, heard a pop, and she was down.

I had expected the killing part to be harder than it was. That somehow the gun would be heavy, the trigger would take strength to pull. I thought I’d have to hold her head and struggle to keep her still. But I didn’t. The gun was light in my hand. It rested exactly where it was suppose to go. The trigger was easy to pull. I squeezed and it was done. She pitched sideways as her legs collapsed and hit the ground while I was still standing there, expecting to have something more to do.

I had ear protection - good, professional grade shooting headphones that cancel the sound so well it is hard to hear the voice of a person standing two feet away. They dull the sound of a gunshot (even a 45) from a thundering explosion to a remote pop. I had known that the sound - the percussion of the explosion - would make the killing all the more abrasive, painful, lasting. Would exacerbate the violence of the act. So I thought ahead and brought my headphones. My good ones. And the sound, even standing right there, less than a foot away, was nothing. Remote.

I talked to her before loading her into the trailer, and after unloading her, and before walking her into the woods. She struggled to walk those first few steps, hobbling on legs that shook and stuck in place with pain. I stood for a minute, my face resting against her forehand and called her, dear child, in a quiet, gentle voice. I told her it was almost over. She had only a little way to go. I just need you to walk a few more steps and then I’ll take care of everything. That’s all you need to do.

Come baby-doll. Come my dear one. A few more steps. That’s all.

She followed me, trusting, into the woods, no longer hesitating despite the pain in her legs. She walked willingly through the trees, over the downed branches and the undergrowth and down the overgrown remnants of a trail. When we reached the place that I had chosen, I stood for a minute and thanked her again, told her she was done, told her I was going to take care of things and the pain would be over soon. It was like she’d been in a trance, these last few hours, her big eyes fixed on me, calm and trusting. Trusting me to do what she needed to have done.

I floundered for a moment, looking for the right words, the right ritual to send her on her way. And I sensed right away her trance begin to slip. Her eyes left my face and she began to look around. She shifted uneasily and lifted her heard. In a second of clarity it was clear to me that the ritual, the something more, was something I needed. She didn’t need it. She needed me to act quickly and decisively and do what had to be done. She needed me to continue with confidence while she still rested in her trust in me, before my hesitation and emotions brought her back to fear.

I stopped talking and lifted the gun. I placed the barrel against her skull, against the perfect white star in the center of her forehead. And I pulled the trigger, just like that. No stopping to reposition, no rehearsing the lifting of the gun. No careful evaluating of the angle or position of my arm. Before she could register what I was doing, I pulled the trigger just like that. And she was down.

I had thought out the method, picked out the place, been talking to Stormy for weeks, asking her to tell me when it was time for her to go. I had known for most of a year that her time was coming soon. I knew that I wanted her body to give back to the world - feed the wild animals, fertilize the ground. I thought this would feel beautiful to me, that the killing itself would be hard but once her spirit was gone I would be at peace to let her body take its place in the circle of life. But the killing was too easy and I stood over her body, and she did not look at peace in the wilderness, she did not look like a natural part of the beauty of the land. She looked like a beautiful body that I had loved, brushed, smelled, laying twisted on a hill.

She had fallen almost on her back, her leg splayed over her face. I moved her leg aside to look into her eyes. I needed to be sure she was truly dead and gone. The glossy, empty eyes felt of peace and death, but when I looked away from them again, at her body, awkward and tangled, it did not feel of peace at all. It felt like one I had loved, dead violently in a pile at my feet.

I found myself wanting to lay her out so that her legs rested gently on the ground and her head lay peacefully, as though asleep. I was quite sure that this did not matter one bit to her. But it mattered to me, and I wished that the last picture of her with which I was left was of a peaceful, sleeping death - not this mangled, strangled, picture of violence and stress.

Her coat still shown a glossy black and her muscles still gleamed, and I wanted to run my hands over her hips and legs and back. But her lips were pulled back and her tung lulled out and her legs stuck up at an awkward angle and she didn’t look like part of the wilderness at all. No hiker, stumbling into our thicket in the woods, would find her a peaceful sight and be comforted by the beauty of her body’s journey as it returned to the earth. She looked dead and there was a hole in her head and blood pooled beneath her face and gushed out of the hole as though it would never stop. And soon the bear would come and the coyotes and the wolves, maybe a mountain lion or two, and the flies and the worms, and none of this would be the graceful, gentle merging with nature that I imagined it to be.

The fact is, there is nothing graceful about a bullet in the head.

Nobody taught me how to do this kind of thing. Killing, in the city world from which I come, is a cruel thing, evil, to be shunned at all costs. Nobody told me that sometimes killing is is a kindness, or that even so, the killing itself is never kind.

Who, in my city world, prepared me for dealing out death? Who told me that being responsible for the lives in my care would eventually mean arranging for their deaths? Who warned me that a gun, bought for protection, would be used to kill a thing I loved because it was my job to see that she could die?

Stormy was in pain. She had rallied and recovered many times. It was clear to me that she would not recover again. My horse, the dear, quiet girl with the long face and sleek black body, who never refused a person’s request but ruled the other horses without a second thought, was at the end of the life she was meant to live. For years she graced my pastures, raised my weanling foals, and ate the food that I provided. Now she couldn’t walk without pain. She had stopped leaving the barn to find food. She wouldn’t graze, she was hardly willing to walk twenty feet to drink water anymore. In the wild she would have been left behind long ago, taken down by an animal that was younger, stronger, at the beginning of its time to live. But this old girl was not in the wild. She was in my care. She had long ago made the deal with my kind that she would obey and serve, in return, would provide for her that which she needed but could not provide for herself. And today the thing she needed but could not provide for herself was death.

She stared at me when I came into her stall, big eyes calm and deep, looked right into me, and waited for me to do for her what she couldn’t do for herself. And so I did the thing that was mine to do. I slipped the halter over her head and whispered to her quietly while I stroked her neck and scratched her ears. Then I led her to a trailer and drove her to the woods and I shot her in the head. I left her body for the wolves and bears to eat and I went home and cleaned my gun.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrom, ADD and Cortisol

2011-09-15T02:03:00.002-06:00

(An exert from a letter to my doctor as we work with a new treatment which is proving effective for CFS)

I have spent much time over the past two decades trying to understand the various forms which energy takes in the human body. One thing that is clear to me is that there are many different things which we refer to as “energy” which are actually quite separate from each-other. It has always been a challenge with this illness to explain to doctors how my “energy” is doing, as these different types of energy can often be doing very different things. Coming to understand the role Cortisol plays in the body has helped me to refine my understanding of these different types of energy lately, and this is giving me some new insight into some of what is going on in my body.

There are two kinds of energy which I am often see acting very differently in my body. One is a passion and mind based energy, possibly adrenaline or something closely tied to it. The other is a much more basic, physically based energy which seems to be some sort of a basic fuel for the running of my cells and muscles, or simply my physical body.

Let me start with the adrenaline based energy. Are you very familiar with ADD? Most people know ADD as a way in which the brain is wired to make it hard to concentrate and focus on things. However, there is a flip side of ADD which can do quite the opposite. In the right situation, the particular way in which the ADD brain is wired allows the person to go into a hiper-focus mode which fills them with unusual amounts of creative energy, allowing them to accomplish things most people can’t in very little time. (I have heard that most real geniuses in science or art have been people with ADD who go into this hyper-focus, superhuman mode when their particular interest is triggered and get unusual amounts of creativity and ability to accomplish things.)

The thing is, if you have ADD, you can’t control when you are sent spinning into this hyper-focus mode. Its like a trigger. When its tripped (generally by your mind coming across something it is passionate about) and you are sent spinning into this mode, your physiology actually changes. The way your brain perceives and processes information and time and the brain’s ability to connect concepts is measurably different once this trigger is tripped in the brain of someone with ADD. And when you’re in that mode, until the trigger resets itself and your brain goes back to normal, you can’t escape being gripped and controlled by the passion and intensity of your interest with (obsession for) the thing that tripped the trigger in the first place. From my own experience as a person whose brain works this way, I know of only two ways to be released from the intense focus, passion and obsession the ADD focus causes. One is to follow the interest to its conclusion, sometimes working for days and nights straight to complete a project, at which point the brain just naturally lets go of the obsession and goes back to normal. The other is to force my brain to reset by shutting my system down in some way, something which I have rarely managed to find any way to do other than taking a double dose of sleeping pills. Sleep usually resets my mind to its normal state, in any case. The problem is that there is often no natural way to sleep when I am in this ADD state, and knocking myself out with drugs is often the only way to get my brain to let my body get the rest it needs.

(One side thing before I go on. Most people with ADD find that it makes them less able to accomplish things in their life. It shuts them down and makes them unable to accomplish and focus. But some of us find the opposite. While it certainly makes it excruciating or even impossible to focus on things which don’t trip that trigger, we have some interests which we are so passionate about that they always trip that trigger. And when we do, our abilities are heightened, so we can accomplish things most people can’t, if only in that field. I don’t know why most people with ADD seem to find that their primary effects are dulling and slowing down, rather than this speeding up. It may be that some people’s ADD is more likely to trip the hyper-focus trigger than others, or it may simply be that most people don’t have things they care enough about in their everyday lives to trip their passion-sensitive ADD triggers and make use of that side of this brain type.)

Here is why all this is relevant to treating my illness:

I think that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and ADD are a particularly destructive mix of problems to have together.

Most people with the kind of ADD which tends to trip this trigger a lot and really propel them into this extra ability state probably don’t notice one aspect of this brain state which has become quite apparent to me over the years. Being in this state takes (maybe consists of?) a great deal of extra energy, above and beyond what our bodies usually produce or need. When this trigger is tripped, I get hit by a stream of energy which my body produces and pours into my system above and beyond anything it would usually produce in any other situation but one.

Over the years I have come to notice that this ADD brain state produces the same energy, and I suspect, the same brain state, which pours into the body in a sudden and extreme emergency situation. I have been in truly life threatening situations a handful of times in my life and I can say that at those times, I have experienced the same slowing of my perception of time, heightening of my senses, and sudden access to an intense and powerful rush of mental, emotional and physical energy in these emergency situations as I feel when my ADD trigger is tripped. It is the same experience. I assume, then, that the ADD state, like the emergency state, is tied to and fueled by Adrenaline.

I believe that when most people’s bodies produce a rush of Adrenaline in response to some situation, their bodies draw the resources for the production of that extra energy from their general body’s reserves, and probably deplete those a bit so that they need extra rest for a few days after the adrenaline rush has left their system. But most bodies have those reserves to give and can recover, assuming the adrenaline process isn't tripped too often or sustained for too long. But I think that with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the body has such low basic reserves and resources to draw from that the consequences of this kind of adrenaline rush (the extra energy it takes to produce it) are much more noticeable and destructive.

That might still be okay if it only happened every once in a while in response to an emergency. I would need more time to recover than most people, but I would still have the sudden burst of energy and altered brain state I needed to deal with an emergency and I would replenish it over time. Except that, having ADD the way that I do, this kind of hyper adrenaline state is triggered far too often. In fact, I think that in me, perhaps because I get so excited and passionate about so many different things in life, if it weren’t for the chronic fatigue syndrome, I would probably live most of my life in some form of this kind of ADD triggered, passionate, hyper adrenaline state. And I think that my default mode, whenever my body begins to righten itself and become strong again and I begin to have any extra energy at all, is to go regularly into this kind of ADD mind-state which requires and produces tons of extra adrenaline energy.

I sometimes think that it is this complication - the mix of ADD and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome together - which is responsible for my never having recovered from this illness in all these years. And if I am right about that, then this same interaction is likely to keep me from recovering now.

I identified this pattern decades ago and have repeatably seen it derail what looked like a promising chance at recovery.

My experience is that there is a second kind of energy which our bodies use, not so much tied to adrenaline, which is much more physically based and much more basic to our existence. This energy runs everything our bodies do, from the involuntary processes like cell division, and keeping our heart beating, to the production of what we actually experience as energy when we play sports or go on a walk or just generally feel good. When we are tired or if we are not in good shape and exercise is miserable, we are depleted of this basic energy. However, even at their most worn out, most people never get so depleted that this reservoir of energy is actually empty. If we did, our bodies would no longer be able to keep our heart beating or our lungs breathing.

It is like we have a tank with different levels. When our energy drops below a certain level, we feel tired. When it drops bellow another level, maybe our body doesn’t have quite enough resources to fuel our immune system at full bore, so we get sick more easily. But if it drops bellow the next level (which for most people it never does), our body actually has to start short changing basic bodily processes or basic organ functions. The nervous system mis-fires, the digestive system can't balance, different organ systems get short changed and can’t do everything they are suppose to be doing. At this point, I think the body actually starts shutting down non-essential resource distribution to protect it from dropping bellow the next level, at which the most vital functions such as heart beating and breathing are threatened. I don’t think most people’s energy reserves ever come close enough to dropping bellow these last few levels for them even to think of things like their heart beating or their breathing as taking energy at all. But its something I am very aware of.

My understanding of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is that something in my body has broken down such that my body can no longer effectively turn resources into this basic kind of body energy anymore. I eat good food, get exercise and sunshine, but my body can’t turn these things into energy the way it is suppose to. Maybe only 10% of the resources I put into my body are able to be turned into energy, and that is not enough to keep up with my basic involuntary needs, much less have anything left over to function on. Thus, over time, my tank has become much more drastically depleted than most people ever experience. By now, my levels are so low to begin with that what should be a simple expenditure of energy can push my body into barely being able to function. An hour of shopping and I can suddenly drop bellow a critical level. Not only do I suddenly experience extreme exhaustion as though I have just run a marathon, but I begin to have facial ticks, my feet don’t land where I expect them to, my hands jerk. A stressful horse back ride which pulls even more energy and pushes my reserves even further into the red can cause me to collapse in such a way that I can not stand, speak or (at times) even open my eyes, though I am not unconscious. In these cases, it is as though my body has shut down all non-essential processes to reserve what it needs just to keep me alive. At such times, my heartbeat seems to stutter and it takes concentration to breath.

When my reserves are low enough that I am exhausted and weak most of the time, have trouble with basic thinking and basic nervous system function and a couple hours of activity leaves me unable to function, that ADD trigger state I started out this letter talking about is rarely tripped. That state seems to require a certain amount of passion about whatever subject trips it to take effect, and when I am that worn down, I can’t normally muster that much passion about anything. Of late I have gone months or even years without experiencing that ADD state. However, every time in the past twenty years that I find a treatment which really seems to be building up my basic energy reserves such that I am beginning to lift out of the really critical deficits and have a decent basic foundation of energy again, the frequent tripping of the ADD state has kicked in again. And every time that has happened, I have (within weeks or months) so overdrawn my basic energy reserves that I have emptied out my tank again and I experience a major crash.

This often results in my collapsing and being unable to function for some time, and can take months or years to recover from even enough for me to be able to take care of my basic needs such as being able to make meals for myself every day or drive a car. Each time this has happened, it has taken years for me to be able to build my body back up to a state at which I begin to feel strong again on a regular basis. And each time I have felt like my body has been noticeably weaker, even once I recover, as though this kind of crash does some sort of permanent damage that I never quite fully repair.

I have never found a way to de-rail this pattern. Every time in twenty years that I have begun to feel like I was really starting to get good energy back, really starting to feel healthy again, my ADD states have increased and sucked the energy out of me faster than I can produce it so that I have a serious crash. It is as if the foundation I am standing on is not yet strong enough to support the energy that starts pouring out of me and it crumbles.

I think the Cortisol is tied more to the adrenaline, ADD type energy than to the basic body energy. I don’t think t is completely tied to it, however. When I take Ritalin, it gives me the kind of adrenaline burst that ADD gives me, allowing me to hyper focus and accomplish extensive things in a single day. But it leaves me so depleted that I am often weak and shaking for weeks to recover from a single day of Ritalin use. In fact, the consequences of my taking Ritalin have gotten so extreme that I have not used it in over a year. I don’t think my body could sustain the creation of the energy it gives me and I am afraid that a single day’s use might send me into a major crash. It feels as though Ritalin pulls all of its energy from adrenaline and forces my body to convert large amounts of energy at a high rate of waste, and I don’t have the reserves to sustain that without damage anymore.

The Cortisol does not quite do that. It does not pull and pull without giving anything back. As though it is not completely tied to adrenaline, but is balanced somewhat with the other, basic energy as well. But I have no doubt, given what I experience, that Cortisol is more tied to adrenaline than the other kind of energy. Its defiantly weighted on that side of things.

The Cortisol gives me energy and helps me build up my strength. And sometimes that is a very balanced, whole person energy which sustains both my mental and emotional energy and my physical needs. But other times, generally when it feels as though my basic body energy is too low and has dropped bellow one of those critical lower levels again, the Cortisol effects me differently. At those times, not taking it leaves me barely able to function, so I am not at all saying that it is not an improvement to take it. However, when my basic energy levels are too low, the Cortisol is likely to trigger the ADD energy state without leaving me the basic foundation energy to sustain it. The result is nights like tonight, where I can’t get my mind to stop racing into exciting projects enough to sleep. And if this keeps up, that can lead to a major crash.

One night of this is not a big concern. But it has made me aware of this pattern I have experienced so often, which always begins like this.

Something - maybe resting or some treatment or new way of eating - finally begins to build up my strength again. This time, I think it is the Cortisol that begins to give me back some of my basic energy again. But it propels me into a place at which my energy is now good enough to allow that which I think would otherwise be my natural state of frequent ADD trigger states. And I am not strong enough to sustain them yet, so they crash me. And it takes years to build back up again to be strong enough to do the whole cycle again.

I realized tonight that these past weeks and months as we have been working with the Cortisol and I have been having many more days of effective energy, I have been right on the edge of tripping this ADD state almost every day. I have kept it from really triggering, or stopped it when it did so that I could rest, by taking sleeping pills (at double the normal dose) almost every night and sometimes even for a nap mid-day.

What seems important to me is this: Whether it is the Cortisol or some other treatment that is working, eventually all improvements lead me to a place at which my ADD trigger starts to happen more than my present state of recovery can support and my recover is reversed again. I need some way to get through this stage of the healing without my ADD state triggering and derailing it (which I am not sure is possible except with heavy use of drugs, which I worry may be damaging in the long run as well). Or else I need to find a way to build up my basic energy reserves at the same time we build up my adrenaline system energy. The Cortisol, seems to get my adrenaline system up and moving and ready to really give me good emotional and mental energy bursts, but it doesn’t provide the same boost for my basic physical energy foundation. I think the Cortisol is a good step in the right direction, a definite improvement, but we need something else supporting it. Something that works on my other energy system at the same time so that it doesn’t overbalance and knock my feet out from under me. In fact, I feel like the discovery of Cortisol as a treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a huge breakthrough and a great step forward. But there is another breakthrough that needs to be found at the same time, to go to work on the other system of energy in the body, in order for any of it to really work.

kittens

2011-09-03T21:38:00.000-06:00

Don't ever let anyone tell you that baby kittens are cute little darlings. I mean, they're cute and all, and they are, of course, darling, but...well, okay, let me start again.

Hungry, that's what they are. And good lord, frantic - one might say viscous, if one wanted to put a judgement on it. You try to cuddle them and they try to eat you alive. And once they grow teeth, that isn't such a harmless thing...

I'm covered in little tiny scratches all over my arms and little bite marks on my face. I don't like how thin they are - a healthy kitten is fat and plump, with plenty of fuel for growing. But they don't like the canned food nearly as much as the milk replacer I mixed with egg and yogurt for their first month of life. And they don't like sticking their faces into a bowl nearly as much as being cuddled close in my arms as they eat. Its hard not to pull out the milk replacer again, as I worry about the weight they've lost and the lack of glossiness to their fur. But they have to learn to eat this way - even if I could feed them 8 hours a day, they would not get the nutrition they need from the bottle anymore. And we'd have to mortgage the ranch to afford the amount of formula they would go through as big as they are these days.

I know what they need more than anything is contact with their mother figure - me - buts its hard to hold them and stroke them when they bite and scratch me all the time. So far they associate me with food. they don't even know that what they crave from me isn't the bottle anymore, its my touch and my voice and the up and down of my breath as they sleep against my chest. They are frantic for something and they think it is food, so they swarm me whenever I come near, bitting, scratching - and I put them away in the cage which I have built into half the living room to house them, but which doesn't give them the one thing they need the most - me.

I made a bag that I can wear, something they can sleep in so they can have contact with me as I go about my day. But they don't want to sleep in the bag. They climb out and claw and bite and fall to the floor under my feet and tangle in my hair.

If I were a mother cat, I would take care of the biting and the clawing with a hiss and a screech and a swipe of my paw. A few well placed swats and they would learn to cuddle without causing pain. I suppose I'm going to have to do that. Picking them up and moving them off me three hundred times in the space of a minute doesn't teach them anything, and it only makes me angry. If they don't learn these boundaries from me, they will not be very adoptable once they start looking for their forever homes.

No kitten much likes weaning time, and they were thriving before. I have no reason to think they wont thrive again. Its just an adjustment. But I do feel I that what they really need right now is more contact, more time out of their crate. The problem with that is the poop, of course. They have learned to use a little box when they are in their crate, but I don't know that they will be that reliable about it yet, if I keep them out for long periods. And I do hate the constant need to clean up, the constant wear-and-tear on the carpet or, worse, the couch. But their coats aren't shinny and they aren't eating nearly enough. What's a little poop compared to that?

Three more weeks, that is what they have before they go in for adoption. Three weeks to get them strong, healthy and confident in the world. Three weeks to thrive. Glossy coats and round, plump bellies. A few lessons on manners with those claws and teeth. I can always put some extra towels on the bed in case there are messes in the night. After all, they've only got three weeks to thrive.

2011-09-03T18:48:00.000-06:00

I think this poem is about me...

Making the House Ready for the Lord

by Mary Oliver in Thirst

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice—it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances—but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, come in.

Spring?

2007-02-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

Usually spring reaches Montana rather late in the year. Sometimes May qualifies, and usually June. Certainly not February. But this has been a strange winter, with more warm weather than anyone can remember. And I think its confusing the animals just a bit.

At a ranch, spring is a time for birthing (with the big animals) and for mating (with the small). Well, I soon learned the folly of that and this year I finagled the birthing to come in July and August (when the pastures and the barns WONT all be under water from the spring floods). But there is not much I can do about the small animals and their mating rituals. Usually that sort of thing just takes care of itself. At some point the geese all start renewing their bonds of matrimony (they often stick with one partner their whole lives), the ducks start pairing up (they change partners every year) and, well, the chickens breed year round so nothing unusual really happens there. This year we added turkeys and as a whole, the mating season for birds is active, loud and quite amusing. Its like a big, multi-week cocktail party and everybody has to go home with someone at the end of the night.

Of course, none of this should start until April or May. Out here we can easily have cold spells down to negative 30 in February and March can be almost as bad. If the pairing up starts too early, then the eggs, which quickly follow, are likely to freeze before they’re hatched. And normally the birds seem to know that. Except this year.

It started with the geese, of course, the trouble-makers of the bird world, and it quickly spread to everyone else. Now the turkeys are puffing out their feathers, dragging their wings in the snow, and strutting around in front of everything (I mean everything - one of them has been trying desperately to impress our truck, for instance). The young, unpaired geese are fighting and squabbling over mates as the older, stately pairs watch on indulgently. The peacocks are fanning their tail feathers in a brilliant display of blues, greens and purples. Even the Great Blue Heron who flies up our valley every spring to nest showed up here last week. Only the ducks, who are mostly trying to keep out of everybody’s way, seem to realize that its really a bit to early for so much fuss.

The problem is that its not just their timing that is screwy. If it were just that, I might write it off to them knowing something I don’t know and plan for an early spring. But its more than that. Their sense of species seems to be just a bit off too.

It started with the turkey flirting with the truck. Then, when he got no response there, he turned his attention to me. With one big Tom and two females, his normal courting behavior should be puffing out his feathers and dragging his wings on the ground, then strutting in front of his girls trying to impress them with everything he’s got. Well, he’s got the strutting, the puffing and the dragging down, but he seems to be aiming it just a little bit wrong. At this point, he mostly just follows me around all day, gobbling seductively in my direction, trying to show me what an impressive specimen he would be (something I already know, since I had his twin on my Thanksgiving table...). God forbid I kneel down on the ground to work on some fencing or dig something out of the snow. He never misses a chance to drag his 50 lb. body up into my lap to show me just how truly sexy a globby blue and red face can be, up close.

Then the geese started doing the same. Or rather, their version of it. One day one of the males actually cozied up to me, letting me stroke his neck and back while he rubbed his beak around my hands. At first I thought he was just being friendly - finally showing his appreciation for the endless work I do all winter to feed him every day. But it turned out he was trying to attract a mate. Now, every time I step outside the one of the female geese rushes to my side (its a different one each time - they take turns, it seems). For as long as I’m in the yard one of them is there, following glaringly at my back, driving me aggressively away from their men. I now know where the term “to goose someone” comes from. If the female believes I am getting too close to her men, she charges me and pellets me with a series of bites on my behind that have me running across the ranch, yelping as I try to get away. Occasionally I turn around and try to scold her (reasoning that I am the human, after all, surely I don’t have to be herded by a 30 lb. goose). At that point she generally leaps for the collar of my coat and hangs there, right next to my face, flapping her wings and screaming curses at my man-stealing ways.

The male peacocks so far don’t seem to have quite the attraction to me, I am pleased to say, but whether or not they have actually figured out who they are suppose to be attracted to, I am not sure. I’ve seen them strutting around, showing their feathers to chickens, turkeys and, occasionally, to a very unimpressed rabbit. They seem to leave the female peacocks alone (which suits them just fine, as far as I can tell). And the poor chickens pretty much just stay out of everybody’s way, though the roosters have occasionally tried their hand at the new specimens which suddenly seem to be fair game around them. I saw one rooster flirting with a goose this morning - something which he probably wont do again after two very large male geese saw him and grabbed him, one by the tail feathers and one by the head, and ran around in a circle with him screaming their furry and pulling out most of his feathers.

I keep telling myself that certainly all this activity is a sign - the great wisdom of nature coming through to tell the birds that spring is early this year and it is safe to begin their noble work of raising happy bird families on the ranch. But...yeah. I think I’ll wait to see just what he babies look like before I decide for sure.

Energy

2007-01-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

One thing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome does is make a person very aware of energy. I’ve had this illness for 15 years and I’ve made a study of the stuff. In all that time, I’ve learned a number of things that my doctor doesn’t know.

Always they’re asking me, my doctors, How’s your energy? and Does this give you energy? and for years I never understood why those questions seemed so much more complicated to me than they did to them. But now I know why - its because of the eskimos.

You have heard, I imagine, that some Eskimo languages have 100 words for “snow?” Well, when I first heard that fact I didn’t truly understand it. I thought it was because Eskimos were poetic people, who had a deep love affair with snow. Their relationship with snow was so meaningful to them that they had created 100 names to call their love - out of honor or passion, or even fear, perhaps. Now I know that I missed the point entirely.

The fact that Eskimos have 100 words that correspond to the one thing we call “snow” is not a reflection of their poetic nature. It is a reflection of their superior experience with the stuff. It is a reflection of a need in that culture, which differs from our own.

Here’s the thing: There are 100 different kinds of snow. Each is different and distinct. The eskimo life is so governed by and effected by snow that these differences are obvious, vital and significant. They need 100 different words to express the differences which, to us are so insignificant as to not be noticed, but to them are so substantial that they can’t see how you could even function if you couldn’t differentiate between them.

Think of it like this. Suppose an alien came to our planet and studied us, then went home and told his people that we were such a quaint culture that we had thousands of words for “animal.” We had the words, “dog,” “cat,” “sheep,” “horse,” - thousands of them and they all meant animal.

Now, to us it is obvious that these words denote different things - things that are distinct from each-other. We need all these words to communicate. We can hardly think of the confusion it would cause if he called all these things, “animals” and nothing else. Well, snow (to an Eskimo) is the same. Each of the 100 words denotes something significantly different from the others, which needs its own name to be talked about effectively. We look on, like the aliens who see all animals as the same, and say, How poetic. They have 100 words for snow. And they look at us and say, How can you talk about dogs and horses and sheep with the same word? How confusing would it be if you didn’t have different words for all these different things?

Well, (to get back to my original subject) energy is just like that. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the ultimate fight for energy. Few people spend their lives so aware of what brings energy, what takes energy, and what is energy than those of us for whom energy is in constant low supply. 15 years and this fight has taught me a lot about energy. And what I have found is that there are 100 distinct and separate things which fall under the single word we call energy.

Actually, I’ve never counted them. I doubt there are 100. But there are many. And the reason my doctors’ questions always seem so much more complicated to me than they understand them to be is that each one (each type of energy) effects me - and is effected by me - differently.

They are asking, Does the animal live in your house? But I don’t know if they mean the dog or the horse. So how do I answer?

They are asking, Do you eat the animal? And I eat sheep and cows, but I don’t eat dogs and cats. So how do I answer?

Occasionally I have tried to sit down and map out the different kinds of energy I have identified. I have tried to define them. That’s not entirely simple. Each kind of energy, while distinctive, interacts with others. They effect each-other. So it is sometimes hard to isolate them. But it is interesting to try. And here is what I have so far...

There is mental energy. This is the energy to think clearly and in an organized manner. It is the energy it takes to learn or to do academic things like mathematics and writing. And there is emotional energy. This is partly the energy that comes with feelings of happiness or anger, but more specifically (because some of the energy that comes from intense emotions is actually adrenaline energy) it is the energy that comes from the more mellow emotional states of contentedness or is depleted by the more mellow emotional states of depression. There is adrenaline energy, which is a very physical kind of energy but which has an emotional component. (In-fact, I have often wondered about this kind of energy, if it is actually a kind of energy at all. It may be its own kind of energy, or it may simply be a catalyst which intensifies certain kinds of physical, mental and emotional energies all at once.)

There are a number of kinds of physical energy. There is a deep energy that is almost cellular. When you’re out of this, you can’t function, can’t speak. You can’t open your eyes or life your head. There is surface physical energy that gets used up when you work hard and then comes back after a little bit of rest. And there is the true, baseline energy. The energy that you never feel or see, that is used only by those automatic body parts to keep you going. This is your last line of defense. When this is gone, so are you.

These are all body energies. There are other energies as well. There are world energies - the kind that can be seen in auras and traced in body meridians. These may be only the physical, visible manifestations of different aspects of body energies, but I’m not sure. So I will call them something different until I am.

There is chemical energy, such as is found in gasoline and electricity. But then, that distinction can also be confusing because its all chemical energy, on some level. The body’s energy is all tied to chemicals, just as all aspects of the body is. We can talk about energy or we can talk about ATP. On some level its all the same.

I have tried every treatment there is for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. And my doctors always ask, Did this give you energy? Well sometimes it did - but it hurt things all the same. They never understand. Science likes to simplify things, I know. And I don’t mean to make it complicated. But the thing is, its not my fault that it is.

Some things give me mental energy. Or emotional energy. But these only serve to keep my mind awake, straining at the tether, refusing to sleep. And if they don’t replenish my physical energy - my deep-down, cellular energy - then they don’t help. They hurt. Because no matter how much my mind wants to jump off of tall buildings and sore, if my body cannot I can’t.

Its hard to describe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to others. You say, I’m tired all the time. And they say, Lord, I know. We all are. If only life would just slow down! Or they say, I know, I stayed up till 2am last night and I’m exhausted. Or they say, You’ve got to take time out to get the rest you need. We all just do too much. You have to slow it down.

But that’s not what “tired” is about. Not for me. For me tired is about pain - a deep pain that feels like it comes from my organs or my cells, all the time and never lets up. And its about the feeling (and sometimes the reality) that if I don’t do something to ease that pain, my body will stop working, I wont have the energy to breath. Its about a kind of tired that is not touched by rest - at least not in any regular way (sometimes if I sleep for 18 hours a day for six months, I begin to repair).

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not about the surface energy. Its about the deep stuff - the cellular level of energy that most people never deplete, and so never even feel. The closest most people get to it is when they get the flue. You know that day or two when you can barely lift your head? When your body aches from the inside out? That is the kind of tired I mean. On a normal day. Every day.

Or do you remember, in college, during finals week, when you pulled two all-nighters in a row, how you reached a point where every part of you hurt and you cared about nothing but lying down? It was hard to breath and the world seemed unreal? That’s also close. On a normal day. Every day.

It is this deep, cellular energy that chronic Fatigue Syndrome depletes. And just giving back some other kind of energy wont necessarily fix it. In fact, it may hurt.

The thing is, normally, if your physical energy is so deeply depleted that you can’t breath without pain, most of your other kinds of energy are pretty low too. Its hard to be mentally alert if you’re that far gone. Same with emotions - they are probably not jumping around doing gymnastics either. For most people, as you replenish this deep energy, the other kinds come back too. But its different if the deep energy can’t be replenished normally.

If you are low on deep physical energy for months, or even years, it is possible to replenish all the other kinds of energy and leave that one in the dust. It is possible to get back your mental energy - your mind races, thinking and planning and dreaming your life into being. It is possible to get back your emotional energy - the excitement of your thoughts, the euphoria of structured thinking, all of it shoots you up into happiness that is physical and courses through you.

Even your surface physical energy gets into the game, telling you to get up and jump around, do something, live! And for the thousandth time, you do - you jump out of bed, ready to start a new day, elated to be alive - and you fall to the floor, gasping. And once again you are shocked. As you are every day. Because you are energized, you are alive, you are passion incarnate - and how could this body be falling to the floor, unable to stand, unable to hold you up at all?

And you forget, every day. And you wake up expecting to be well, ever day. And you grab for your life. And you fall. And you remember, every day. That your body can’t keep up. That the energy you feel does you no good - because it is not enough. And after 10 years, its still that same. You’d think you would learn. But every day is the same. You wake up and forget that you are sick. You wake up believing you are well. And you are shocked - again, after doing this every day for ten years - to find that you are not.

When I was a child, and I got excited, I use to jump. Just jump. I would bounce around a room, shouting and talking or just jumping, because I couldn’t contain my excitement any other way. For years, as I became an adult, I did the same thing. But then there was this illness. And my body no longer had the energy to jump. But I would forget and I would jump and jump, and suddenly I would be gasping for breath and collapse against a wall, shaking and unable to stand. And my family would look on with a mix of frustration and fondness and it was clear they wanted to ask, Why do you DO that? Why do you DO that to yourself? Just moderate. Just smile and be happy. Now you’ll spend the day in bed, unable to lift your head. Why can’t you conserve that energy and sit on the couch and let it be?

But I couldn’t. Because the emotional energy I had was so strong that I forgot. I forgot that my body couldn’t hold it. I forgot that my body couldn’t jump. Every time. For ten years. And so I jumped.

My mother has a collection of cards with beautiful watercolor paintings and equally beautiful sayings. They’re popular - you may have seen them. One Christmas, she gave me one that was so apropos that when my sister saw it, she laughed out loud. Oh, that’s you! she said, That is so perfect for you. It says, “I get up, I walk, I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”

The dancing comes from a different kind of energy - it comes from the emotions, the mind, the sprit. These things are full, they are bursting. They are not depleted at all. But the body. The body. That is a different story. That energy is gone, way gone. That energy is down, way, way down.

Ritilin give you mental energy (which for me, who loves thought and learning always brings along some emotional energy as well). I can sit at my desk and write for hours on rittilan. But it doesn’t help my body energy at all. And over time, it runs it down. Too much sitting up when my body needed me to be resting. So does ritian help? Well yes. And no.

With this illness, when its bad, I can easily sleep for 24 hours or more. When it is moderate, I usually wake myself up at around 12 - my body craves more, but that doesn’t leave much of a life for me, does it? It is not uncommon for me to need 18 hours of sleep per day to keep going well. That is, in order to have a few hours of good, physical energy available to me at all. Many people have tried to tell me that getting too much sleep is the problem in the first place. That anyone that sleeps that much is going to be out of whack. Its not good for you.

We all know that our bodies can get to a point where laying around the house us not helping us feel better. We need the physical activity now more than we need the rest. But we feel tired and its hard to get up and get moving. When you say you sleep for 18 hours a day, that’s what people think is going on. But it isn’t. The truth is - after 15 years of trying to force my life into every pattern I could imagine to find one that would help, what I have to admit is that my body just really needs that much sleep.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not as well understood as some illnesses. But it is better understood now than it was ten years ago. Ten years ago, congress gave the CDC a grant to study Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the head of the CDC was so convinced that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome didn’t exist (that it was depression or laziness and al those people just needed to go out and get a hobby) that he gave the money to other projects instead. It was a big scandal when it was discovered and finally the money was returned and the research funded. And what do you know, they found out that there is a physical basis for the thing. It really exists.

So there has been research now. And we understand it a bit. The way I explain it is this: Somehow, toxins build up. They might be environmental. They might be internal - the result of the poisons we all produce when we go through an emotional trauma, for instance. In some people it happens all at once, due to some sort of poisoning. In others it happens over time, building up with little effect until one major event (an exposure to a toxin, an emotional shock) topples the whole system. In any case, a person’s body hits a certain point at which the cells are so bogged down with toxins that they cannot deal with them all any more. Things begin to break down. Normal process are slowed or blocked. The body begins to loose its ability to make, ATP, the chemical which it turns into all of our various kinds of energy. You get sunshine, you eat good food, you exercise. But your body can no longer turn those things into energy. And so you get sick. And you get tired. And nothing seems to help.

In most people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the fatigue is the first major symptom. But once that’s lasted some years, other things begin to go wrong. To me that only makes sense. The body doesn’t have the energy it needs to function. Not just in the ways we see, but in every way. It is cutting corners. Organ processes are getting short changed. Over time they break down. There just isn’t enough energy to go around.

So the stomach stops working right. It becomes hard to eat, hard to keep anything down. The nervous system wigs out - you get facial twitches and body jerks, increasing the more tired you get. You shake. Your brain doesn’t work right - sometimes you think clearly enough to complete a simple sentence. Your heart beats too fast or speeds and slows at the wrong times.

Healthy food helps. Putting good food into your body without adding a lot of toxic chemicals along with it is essential to keeping yourself going. Being out of cities helps. I don’t know if its the toxins in the air or just the exhaustion involved in having to be aware of so many things at once. Maybe its both. Exercise helps, sometimes. And it doesn’t. I mean, you need it, if you can get it. But it depends. It always depends.

Some days exercise will do what its suppose to - struggling through will suddenly allow your energy to shoot up and energize you in the end. But some days that doesn’t work. No matter what you do, no matter what you try. Some days it just leaves you weak and shaking, no matter what you do. And it takes days to recover and get yourself back to a place where you can try it again.

Its hard to say why the exercise works sometimes and not others. You obviously can’t never exercise. Your body will fall apart (you know, more than it already has). You will go crazy with the feeling of weakness. A person needs movement in their life.

But when the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is bad, something in it stops the exercise from working. So you sleep all day just to be able to get up and walk once around the block. And then you collapse and sleep all day again. And you keep doing that forever until something changes and finally (finally) the exercise begins to work. And you find that, when you come home from walking around the block, you feel ok. You’re tired but not in pain. You sit on the couch and read a book. And after a month or two of that, you actually feel good. You go two times around the block. And a year later, you’re back on your feet and living again.

Of course, my life is not always like that anymore. I have had years - many years - when that perfectly described my days. But I have also had years - such as this one - when I can do much, much more. I still sleep at least 12 hours per day. I need more on a regular basis. But when I get up, I do hard physical labor. I feed horses and ducks and chickens and goats. I walk around the mountains and I repair fences and play with my horses and my dogs. Last year I had almost 9 months of feeling so good (almost normal) that I had days at a time of working 10 and 12 hour days of hard, physical labor, outside every day. It was amazing. I thought I was healed.

That didn’t last. My energy went back down. Now I’m back to 4-5 hours of work per day and 12 - 15 hours of sleep. Some days I can work hard during my 4-5 hours, pushing myself physically and doing things many people are never able to do. Other days I am hard put to be able to sit at my desk and keep up with my paperwork or write. Some days I really can’t sit up at all - I take my book and read on the couch. If I have to feed the animals, do am gasping and shaking, needing to sit down in between every one. I worry that I will collapse and not make it back to the house - that has happened before.

I am able to force myself into a “normal” day once in a while, if I try. I get 8 hours of sleep and then go to town. I babysit my nieces or grocery shop, or meet with clients. Usually by the end of a day like this, I am shaking and in pain. And sometimes I find that I gambled a bit too high - I can’t make it through at all. I get sick (bronchitis or a bad cold - my immune system crashes and everything rushes in) or I am just too weak to think - I can’t drive, or see or (sometimes) even remember where I am or where I live.

But usually I make it through a long day - I push my way and hide the way I feel. And I pay for it the next day (or, more likely, the next three days). I sleep and am too weak to feed or work or do anything. And then I build back up again. Its a trade-off I make. And it works, usually. It gives me options for how I live my life.

In any case, I do with my life, more in the few hours I have than most people do with all the time in the world. So maybe I shouldn’t complain. Why am I able to make so much of the little time I have, when other people struggle for meaning amidst all the time in the world? It all comes back to energy, perhaps.

My physical energy is blocked. I eat good food, I get sunshine, I exercise. But my body can’t turn those things into energy as it should. Into physical energy, at least. But I have another kind of energy in abundance - its mental, emotional or spiritual. Its the essence of me. And it doesn’t take food and sunshine and exercise to replenish it (though, without these, it begins to ebb as well). So what does it take? That’s the question that intrigues me. Where does it come from? Why doesn’t it fail?

100 different kinds of energy. And all do different things. And, while they effect each-other, they are separate and unique. And they are built from different blocks.

Physical energy is almost all built from food, sunshine, exercise and rest. But what of the others? They are effected by these things, for sure. Or rather, they are connected enough to physical energy, that if that energy is too low, they are likely to be as well. But at their core, they come from something else. They are built from different blocks. My body can barely move, but my mind and my emotions sore. Why? What feeds those energies? Some people are prone to depression - I am not. Rarely in my life has anything depleted my emotional energies for long. Is that just chemical? Or is the chemical a result of something more? What is the food, the sunshine and the exercise for my mind, my heart and my sprit? What supplies those energies in abundance, even when my body is barely scraping by?

This I would like to know. As I would like my doctors to know the differences between each kind of energy I have. And as I would like my fellow human beings to know what it means when I say “tired” - why I use a handicapped flag one day when I was running up mountains the day before. But that is not a luxury that most of us ever have - to be known, to be understood by all. So I will not expect it. And I will keep trying to answer complex questions which the asker sees as simple. And I will keep using my handicap flag, when I need it, despite the pursed lips and shaking heads from those who don’t understand. Because Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a difficult illness. But it is what I have. It is part of what I am. And so, in the end, there’s really nothing else to do except keep dancing.

Dave

2006-12-15T01:30:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I could not see why marriage would ever appeal to me. I had dated through my life, and I enjoyed the fun, the excitement, the romance of that. But never once had I been tempted to make the dating something more. Dating was fun, but in the long run, it would surely get in the way of the dreams I had. Tying my life so closely to someone else always meant that I had to pull myself back, reign myself in, to fit myself into a life someone else would want to live. In the long-run, dating made my life less than I wanted it to be. Until I met Dave.

It wasn’t a sudden thing. We dated for five years, living a thousand miles apart and breaking up every few months because I was convinced that it would never work between us, we were too different, this just wasn’t meant to be. But always we ended up again, at eachother’s door. And always, when I left, Dave sighed and clenched his teeth, and said, “Ok, if this is what you have to do. But this is you who does it - i do not agree.”

Finally, I got tired of this back and forth and decided that I had had enough - either I would break it off for real this time or I would give it a real try, not holding back, not convinced from the start that it would never work. I came to Dave then without restraint, not holding some part of me back, not making up my mind how things would go before they had even begun. And I fell completely - and logically - in love.

I say logically because that was always the stopping point for me - I was always convinced that we were too different to make it. Logic dictated - were I to choose a mate at all - that at least I needed one more like me than Dave. Surely it was clear that I could never find a passionate, exciting life with someone who was so controlled, and so restrained.

But how wrong I was, and in the moment that I let my eyes be open to what was there (rather than seeing only what I thought would be there) I realized that Dave was made for me. There was no more perfect match in all the world than the one I found in him.

Dave is quiet where I am loud, careful where I am careless. He is slow where I am fast, mellow where I am intense. I thought at first that I could never find passion or meaning in a man like that. But what I found instead was that his very calmness, his very reservedness taught me to measure and control my own passions so that I was able to hold onto them longer and go into them deeper than I ever could before.

His stable side did not hold back my dreams, instead it helped anchor them and forced me to build them more carefully so that I would no longer burn my dreams out in a sudden flash of light or loose them on too shaky a base. For the first time, the things I wanted in my life were thought carefully through and created with strength. For the first time I didn’t loose the things I achieved in the first crisis that arose, but was able to hold on to them and build on them forever.

And I think this worked because Dave never tried to force me to change myself, slow down, or proceed carefully towards my goals. I did it naturally because the things I built into my life were no longer only mine. I looked at myself, about to jump into a mistake that excited me and tempted me to the bone, and I thought - this would not be fair to Dave. I can’t do this now because he would pay for this in the end. What I could not do for myself I could do for love of him. And so I proceeded more carefully, made choices more cautiously and took the time to work for what I wanted, instead of grabbing at the first possibility that came along. Not wanting to hurt Dave, I finally learned to make choices that didn’t hurt me either.

From the start, Dave has been one of the few people I dated who made me more able to achieve my dreams, rather than less. He was one of the few people I dated who gave me more freedom than I would have without him. But that isn’t all. That wouldn’t have done it by itself.

In part it is that Dave, for all his calm, gentle reserve, is also quite passionate in his way. I remember when I first met him, asking why he liked being a computer programer. I assumed it was the predictability and control that such an (obviously) boring ability brought to his life. But what he answered took me completely by surprise.

For the first time since I’d met him, Dave’s calm, reserved demeanor slipped away. He got a glint in his eye and excitement in his face. He hunched his shoulders just a bit and leaned in, as though he were about to tell me an exciting secret. He rubbed is hands together and bit his lip and said, “Its like this! I’ve always thought programing was like magic! You do all this stuff, write all this code and you create this whole world. You go to school for years to learn it, but no one really understands how it happens - its just suddenly there. I just love it! I always feel like somehow I’m working magic!”

And I was blown away. Who knew that this serious, reserved computer programer was a poet at heart? Since then I’ve found many such surprises in this man. Dave is a man and has a man’s demeanor - he works mainly in logic and the physical world. That is his primary way. But that is not all there is in him. If you look deep enough, you will find a great variety to who he is - a great depth of humor and wit within him and a great ability to let emotions into his life. And there is something else you will find - one of the things I love the most in him. At his center, Dave has a magnificent lack of fear.

Dave is not afraid of things. I don’t mean physically - in that way he has fears just like everybody else. He is terrified of bees and when we lived in Chicago, he use to sleep with a tire iron by his pillow out of fear that the house would be broken into and we would be harmed. The first time he shot a gun he shook like a leaf (though he is quite comfortable with them now). And once when I was living in a tee-pee and he came to visit, he spent the whole night pacing the small floor beside my bed because there was a bear outside and he was sure it was going to come through the cloth to reach us in the night. In that way, Dave has as many fears as anyone, I suppose. But what has always struck me is that in another way, Dave is the most fearless person I know.

Dave has never been afraid to risk his heart, his emotions or his pride. In the start of our relationship, when we would fight, I would do what I had always done - get quiet and say nothing, inside thinking, “Forget it, I don’t care. So what if I loose this anyway.” But Dave would never leave a thing like that. Always he would push ahead and force us to talk things out, no-matter what we might turn out to say. Always he refused to leave things in anger - if it took all night, he would continue to push until we both understood the other and ourselves. He’s never been afraid to say he’s wrong (not one of my strong suits, that’s for sure) and he’s never hesitated to compliment and tell me what he loves, respects and enjoys the most about who I am. And he’s never been afraid (or unwilling) to grow.

When we first met, he was not a particularly introspective man by nature. That was always my big thing - know how you feel, understand why you do the things you do. Drove him crazy, but it was essential to me. And so he learned. He grew and changed. He didn’t like that much - found it very uncomfortable and liked the old way better. But he never questioned that each person in a relationship has to grow to meet the other. So he worked, and he changed to meet me along the way. And he never acted as though this were something unpleasant he was doing just for me. Instead he looked at himself and said, “Ok, I would be better off if I were more aware of how I felt about things and why I did the things I did. I may not care enough to make these changes by myself, but since it is important to you, I can recognize that it is something I should do anyway.”

Dave’s a big man, with a Russian build, legs like tree trunks and a beard. When we lived in Chicago, I use to tease him that he looks like a lumberjack, and its even more true today. He holds up a big part of our life here on this ranch, in off-grid Montana. He’s learned enough about electricity to wire the house himself and do most of the repairs when our electrical system needs work. He is exceptionally good with wood and can build anything we need. He uses a chain-saw well, has every power tool under the sun, he splits our wood with an ax. He has learned to butcher the animals we raise for meat and can shoot a gun - occasionally killing a coyote that threatens our flocks.

He’s also a computer programer of exceptional talent, writing software for a big firm in Chicago. He’s brilliant in his way - something I didn’t recognize at first. He can see patterns in things that no-one else sees. I am the philosopher between us, loving long, complex conversations about thoughts and ideas. This is not Dave’s thing, most of the time, but over the years I have discovered that he is every bit as capable of keeping up with this kind of thought as I. He’s smarter than you’d think. He never draws attention to his intelligence, so many people don’t realize its there.
In a very typical-guy manner, Dave likes to be comfortable. If he had his way he would spend every evening watching TV and playing video games. He likes electronics and big trucks. He drools over tractors and four-wheelers and jokes about the day when we can afford to put tank treads on our pick-up truck so he can take it anywhere. He doesn’t like conflict and he doesn’t get angry easily.

Dave always holds the door for me. He gives me his arm when he knows that I’m tired and does his best to hold me up. When he’s feeling alright and we’re doing a project together, he always takes the harder work for himself to do, knowing that it will save my energy just a bit. He lifts the heavy things or does the last couple trips to the car for groceries. He does the running up and down the stairs. Or he helps me feed after he is done with work.

When we work together, he tends to take take the harder jobs for himself, saving me what energy and effort he can. But he never assumes that he has to do this, and he wont hesitate to tell me that I’m not holding up my end of things, if he feels it needs to be said. He works all day on his computers while I work all day on the ranch. My job is raising horses and, while he helps with what I can, the majority of the everyday ranch work falls to me. He often jokes that I am the rancher and he is the rancher’s husband and he never seems threatened by that.

The other night, we were driving home, both sitting quietly, when Dave reached out and took my hand. “I am so proud that you’re my wife,” he said.

“You are?” I asked, quite surprised. “Why?”

“We were sitting there at the table tonight,” he told me, “and I was listening to you talk to your clients and everything you said was interesting. I love that, when I just sit back and watch you talk to people. I don’t have to say anything - you carry the conversation so well. I love hearing how impressed people are with your life and with you. And how much people like to know you. It just makes me really proud that you’re my wife.”

He says things like whenever he thinks them. And that’s what I mean when I say he is not afraid. My strength, my success never threatens him. He is proud of it instead. I think this is because he has confidence in himself that is not subjective in any way. His perception of his own strength does not depend on anyone else being weak.

Dave doesn’t seem to me to spend much time trying to show me how he feels. He doesn’t seem to ever think, “Oh, maybe I need to make an effort here.” It seems to come naturally. He doesn’t get sappy or fluttery. He just says what is real for him when it comes along to be said.

We’ll be walking through a parking lot, or a store in town, and Dave will reach out and take my hand. Just to hold it. He doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t have anything he needs to say. Just reaches out and takes my hand as we shop or work or walk. Usually he doesn’t even stop his speaking. Just continues discussing whatever business we had to discuss. But he holds my hand while we do it.

Its not uncommon for Dave to turn to me these days, out of the blue, and say, “I sure do love you.” I’ll be walking past him in the house, or we’ll be rushing around town running errands together. He catches me distracted, hurrying about my day, and reaches to touch my face as I walk by. And it always stops me in my tracks, my heart suddenly full as I turn to face him, a smile blooming unbidden on my lips. At those times, when I look him in the eye, I can see that his words were spontaneous, forced out because of the feelings that hit him at that moment. And he looks at me with a look that says even more than the words: It says, “I love you and I am so lucky to be married to you and I would not give it up for all the world.” My smile gets wider and I say, “I love you to,” and then we go about whatever it was we were doing, just like that.

This is just matter-of-fact for Dave. Just a part of who he is. I don’t know many people like that - completely unafraid to show appreciation, love or pride in the person closest to him. Not needing acknowledgment for it. Just fitting those moments - just fitting those words - into the everyday life that we live minute to minute.

I think sometimes what a fool I was when I was young. To have dismissed this marriage thing as though it would hold nothing for me. To think that what I saw on the surface of other people’s lives was all that this could be. What a treasure I would have missed if I had stuck to that, if I had not finally seen.

To have found a true partner in this life, in this building and growing and living - this is the ultimate adventure of them all. Now I find that this partnership is the foundation of my life. It is the source of my strength, my growth and my excitement. It is the source of all the successes I have built in my career and my home. It is the best thing I have ever found. Or Dave is the best thing I have ever found. And I am moved, often, by not only how much I love my life and how lucky I am not have it, but by the depth of meaning that is added to it because I am building everything I have, not by my self, but side-by-side with Dave.

He tells me about his thoughts, or makes dinner for us both, or reaches over and takes my hand as he drives. And I find myself astounded that I could have missed for so long so much of the meaning in such a common word as “marriage.” I had no idea, when I was young, the depth of what this word could mean. And likewise, “husband” and likewise “wife.” It was like I saw the tip of these words above the water and had no idea that there was so much more to them, submerged bellow the sea. And now I’ve discovered how large they are and how deep they go, and I am humbled that I misjudged them for so long. And I wake up every morning, excited to see what adventure Dave and I will face together that day. And I go to sleep every night, comforted by the way he reaches out to lay his hand upon my hip as he sleeps, barely aware that he does it, but seeking me all the same.

Doing Better and Thanks

2006-11-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to thank everyone who sent Rajah and I their love. We're doing better. Writing my last post helped me work things through and I've managed to let go of the anger and disappointment I felt at first. Watching him more closely these past few days, I've realized that Rajah really has been in a lot of pain lately. His stomach is sick most of the time and I think his back hurts. We'll talk to the vet on Monday and see what we can do for him. And we'll be changing some things around here to make sure that everyone's safe. But mostly I'm just going to spend as much time as I can with him while I still have him. Right now, every time I look at him I just feel thankful to have such a companion in my life. We'll face whatever changes come together - me and Rajah B - as we always have before.

A True Companion - part 2

2006-11-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

(This is part two of a two-part story. The first part of the story is posted bellow this one.)

In recent months Rajah's behavior has started to change. Nothing sudden or overt. Annoying, a little disturbing, but mostly easy to ignore. My business is booming - taking off much more quickly than I expected. My health is on the downswing - I'm struggling to keep up. The ranch is hard - fencing, feeding, animals that always need something - I work all day when I can, and hold things together by a shoe string. I love my life, and it is exhausting, and it takes everything I've got. I haven't paid a lot of attention to Rajah lately. He is always there - while I sleep, while I work, while I eat, while I play (if there's any time for that anymore). He's a part of me. In everything I do my hand brushes the top of his head, my eyes meet his and I smile, whispering, "How's my good dog? My lovely Rajah-B." I click my tong without thinking when I get ready to leave one task for another - he always comes running at the sound. He follows me all over the ranch, playing and working and protecting in his turn.

Rajah is 10, though save for a little gray around his muzzle, he could easily be mistaken for a pup. We've recently started joking that in his old age he's "accessed his inner shepherd." He's started franticly throwing himself into herding. He herds the goats, he herds the sheep, he herds the horses. He watches me desperately for any sign that I want an animal to move, then rushes in, barking franticly, trying to get the job done - my ever faithful partner. The problem is, he isn't very good at it. Likely as not, he sends the animals right back at me or gets them running full bore in completely the wrong direction. Its exasperating and we are forever scolding him, but its touching too. He so clearly wants to help. He hangs on my every move, waiting for that moment when I indicate with my eyes, my voice, my body, that I want some poor unsuspecting animal to move, and he franticly rushes in to "help." When I ride horses, he rushes around me in circles, trying to figure out how to get the horse (already doing exactly what I wanted in the first place) to move. He does the same thing when someone brings over a four-wheeler or a snow-mobile or when I get on the tractor to move around some hay.

Until recently Rajah's herding behavior was just a mixture of exasperating and endearing. He wants so much to help, you can hardly hold it against him. But he is annoying, and at times even dangerous - riding a young horse for the first time is not the best place for a frantic, barking dog to be doing laps. Not to mention the many times I've had to throw myself out of the way of a stampeding herd of horses because Rajah's "help" sent them all thundering right at me. So we have taken to disciplining him some, but we’ve also just done a lot of rolling our eyes and letting it go.

Thinking back now I can see that something had changed, even in his herding, over the past few weeks. But Rajah is Rajah - faithful and dependable forever. And I have been so busy - struggling every day to make headway on the endless list of things I have to do before winter settles in. I saw the change, but I never really took the time to stop and think about it. I set it aside to look at later, or dismissed it, because after all, Rajah is Rajah. Faithful and dependable forever.

His play with the other dogs was one place I saw the problem, If I'd cared to pay it any heed. He has always played rough, hurling himself at his companions with teeth and body, intimidating smaller dogs and freaking out their owners. But our dogs are large and confident and they love the way Rajah plays. He would shoot towards them, and they would roll and wrestle and tackle each-other, going for necks and legs with teeth bared. But it was always clear to me that (despite the outward appearances) what they were doing was play. Their was joy and laughter in their feel and because of that, I never worried about the outward appearance that could look so intimidating. But lately I had seem something that played at the back of my mind. Rajah would run up and tackle the other dogs and very quickly his teeth would be bared, his lips pulled back far too much for play, and pure aggression would emanate from his body and face. The other dogs, all dominant to Rajah and all easily able to put him in his place, also seemed to noticed the difference right away. Lately, instead of returning his play, they would whirl on him, hackles up, teeth bared and lunge, an angry bark stopping him in his tracks. They would force him away. This always stopped it and soon I would turn around and see him playing normally again. I never stopped to consider this change, but it stuck in the back of my mind.

There were other differences as well, but these too I didn't dwell on much. Rajah’s always loved to torment the goats and my half-grown lamb, whom I had raised form a baby. The lamb, and sometimes the goats, follow me about my work all day, even going on hikes with me or following me up the trail when I ride my horses around the mountain. When I go inside, they press their faces against my windows and blatt out their obnoxious cries - starring intently at me with betrayal as I sit in my warm house without them. I love my goats, they make me laugh. And I especially love my lamb. I call him Lambie, and I've watched him grow from a tiny baby to a big, chubby animal that follows me everywhere I go. Every morning when I let him out of his pen, he races joyfully down the hill to greet me. In his excitement, unable to contain his joy, he kicks up his hind legs so far that he flips himself over backwards, then lands and does it all again. He makes me laugh every day, and I love the feel of his soft wool as I go about my day, often resting my hand on his head or scratching him behind the ears. Lambie, like the goats and the birds and the horses, is mine. He is part of my family. And Rajah knows that. He has always known what was mine - and lived to protect it all. Until last week.

Last week, the day things changed, I was outside, moving hay around the ranch. The goats and Lambie were racing around my tractor and Rajah was racing around them, barking, as usual. Mostly I wasn't watching, but I remember glancing over at one point and catching a glimpse of him that stuck in the back of my mind. He was running around the goats, barking as he always did, but for just a moment, his teeth were bared, his lips pulled back in a way that looked as vicious as I had ever seen an animal look. It looked like aggression, not like play. It stuck with me, as I went about my work, but for the most part, I didn't think much about it. This was Rajah after all. There was nothing aggressive about him.

My neighbor Jarred was at the ranch that day, borrowing our garage to fix his car. I looked over to see him running up the driveway from the barn. I was walking towards him towards him and I heard him calling franticly, but what he said didn’t make much sense to me. "Christie,” he shouted, “Rajah just killed Lambie!"

I stared at him. Was Lambie actually dead? And surely he didn't mean Rajah - was a neighbor's dog around? Had some other dog killed my lamb? Jarred shouted, "Lambie's still alive but he’s killed him. There's no way he's going to survive. Rajah just ripped out his throat!"

I stared behind him. Rajah was racing happily up the driveway towards us. He had blood on his face and mouth.

My mind immediately assumed there had been another dog. For some reason I flipped to the movie, "Babe" where a pack of dogs kill a sheep and the hero - Babe - gets blamed because he came to its rescue (too late) and was found with his muzzle covered with blood. There was no question in my mind that this was what had happened here. Until Jarred spoke again.

"I saw Rajah tormenting Lambie like he sometimes does, and I was going down there to tell him to cut it out. Then I saw Rajah lunge for Lambie's throat. He ripped it out. I saw the blood spray. There's no way Lambie is going to live."

Just then Rajah reached me. In a daze I told Jarred I would put Rajah inside and be right back. "Go in your crate," I told him, still trying to get my mind around what Jarred had said. He ran straight in, directly to his crate. I closed the door and left him there. On the way through the house it began to hit me what Jarred had said. I called to my husband, Dave and yelled (a little hysterically), "Dave, Rajah just killed Lambie!"

"What??" Dave shouted.

"Rajah just killed Lambie! He ripped out his throat! He's not dead yet, but Jarred says he's going to die!"

Dave's voice was as shocked as mine. "Oh my God!" He said. A pause, then, "I'll be right out!"

I ran to Lambie, my mind still confused, still unable to understand how this had happened. Was Jarred exaggerating? Was Lambie really that badly hurt? Maybe it was just a scratch. Maybe it was not so bad.

But the soft, thick wool around Lambie's throat was soaked in blood. There was a pool under his head and more poured out as I watched. Lambie, looking dazed, lay on his side, breathing raggedly. I dropped to my knees in front of him. There was no way he was going to live. Jarred was there, telling me again what had happened, as shocked as I was. “Any other dog,” he said. “I’d expect this of any other dog before Rajah.”

I didn't know what to do, so I got up. I knew Lambie was suffering and we had to put him down. "I have to tell Dave to get his gun," I said, and started to stumble towards the house. But the minute I left, Lambie lurched to his feet, trying to follow. He staggered three steps to the side and fell. My mind cleared a little and I knew I couldn't leave him. I asked Jarred to go for the gun, dropping down next to my lamb. I picked up his head and placed it in my lap. I stroked his fur and whispered in his ear. I told him I was sorry, so, so sorry, that I’d never meant for him to die this way. I told him he had been a good Lambie and I loved him. I told him everything was going to be ok, I would make the hurting stop. He could rest. He'd done good and it was time for him to go. I said I'd miss him and I loved him and he did not need to be afraid. I would take care of things and he would be safe, and happy, and loved forever. Then Dave and Jarred arrived with the gun.

"Can I - I don't think - I can't stay - can I go away while you shoot him?" I choked.

"Of course," Dave said, "Go in. Go inside. You shouldn’t be here."

But I didn't want to go. I wanted to be near. I just couldn't watch. I kissed Lambie's beautiful white nose and lurched up, stumbling a few feet away. "Christie, you need to go over there," Jarred said, pointing behind Dave, "If he's gonna shoot in that direction, you can't stand there..."

I didn't know where to be. I stumbled away, up the driveway, where I was close but couldn't see. I was walking towards the house, I guess, but the crack of the gun stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't move - I rocked back and forth, not able to go on, not able to go back. It seemed like I stood their forever, shaking, dizzy, gasping as though I cried, but unable to find the tears. Then, unexpectedly, I heard a second shot. The noise hit me like a physical thing, causing me to cry out, and propelled me forward. I stumbled into a tree, grabbing it to catch myself, and began to sob. It seemed like forever I stood there and cried and cried and cried. Eventually Dave came up behind me, gently turned me from the tree and wrapped his arms around me. I choked out, "Is he dead?" And he said, "Yes," and let me cry. At some point Jarred slipped unobtrusively past, going back to the garage to give us some privacy. Dave held me for a long time.

My city-bred background, so separated and insulated from death, wants to laugh hysterically at the absurdity of it all when I say that there was no question between Dave and I that, now that Lambie was dead, that we would butcher him and eat him. The city part of me finds this kind of sentiment appropriate to a cannibal or a serial killer - How can you grieve a friend and then say, "Oh well," and serve him up with a good cream sauce? But ranch life has forced me to learn a few things about death, about nature, and about the animals I love so much. More so than any humans I have ever known, animals are a part of nature, a part of the cycle of life and death which I struggle so hard to understand. It is deep within them, this cycle. Joining this cycle in death is as important to their being as joining it in life. I would not presume to dishonor my animals by preventing them from being part of this cycle when they die. A sheep lives its life, then gives itself to build the life of other creatures. I would not deny Lambie his right to take his place in nature’s version of eternal life, in the ultimate acting out of the sacrifice we so honor Christ for making - to give his life so that others may live. So now that he is dead, Lambie’s body becomes food. He becomes the very stuff of life.

But that doesn't mean that I was able to watch. I went inside and walked up to Rajah's crate. I looked him in the eyes and yelled, "How could you? How could you kill my Lambie? How could you do a thing like that?" I was sobbing too much to say more, so I threw a blanket over his crate (I didn't want to see him anymore) and I went out and closed the door. I sat in the living-room and cried. I called my mother and my best friend. When the butchering was done, Dave took me to dinner to get me away from the ranch for a while. We left Rajah in his crate.

For two days we kept Rajah locked in his crate except for leashed walks out to go to the bathroom. When I saw him I never smiled at him, never gave him any love. I looked him in the eye and said, "What you did is not acceptable. I can't talk to you about it yet." And then I refused to acknowledge him at all.

Rajah was devastated. He was terrified. He looked at me desperately every time I approached, ears pulled back, shaking violently, crying horrible, desperate cries deep in his throat. Never had I done anything like this to him before.

Two days and two nights, I told myself. I had to make sure that he never forgot the consequences of what he'd done. Two nights and two days and then I would begin to let him in again. He would have to be controlled much more than before. But he would be by my side again.

For two days I worked around the ranch with a lump in my stomach, working hard enough that I didn't have time to stop and think about the way Rajah had looked at me, the desperate shaking, the horrible noise he made. Two nights I sat up, unable to sleep, terrified that somehow Rajah would die that night, never knowing that I forgave him. Never knowing that I still loved him. I paced the house all night, telling myself that I couldn't let up. Rajah had to know - had to never forget - that this was not something he could ever do again.

Monday morning I went to him. I sat in front of him and told him to look me in the eye. I said, "You are my Rajah and what you did hurt me. I never thought that you could do such a thing. I never thought you would let me down, betray me like that. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know why you did it. But we will figure those things out together. You are my Rajah and I still love you. You will still be mine until the day that you die. We will figure out what to do about this together. But things are going to be different for a while." I put on his leash and we went out to do our morning chores.

This week, three neighbors have stopped by and heard the tale. Each of them has been shocked. They all said the same thing. "Rajah is the last dog I would have ever expected anything like this from. Never in a million years. Other dogs, yes, but not Rajah...”

It finally occurred to me that this was a drastic change in character. There could be a physical cause for that. We went to the vet. She ran tests that weren’t clear, coming back with bits and pieces, but nothing conclusive. He has a fused vertebra. He’s been having some stomach problems for a while - it could be that those are causing more pain that we thought. Certainly increased pain might be causing this. Or maybe it was just behavioral. The end result - she didn't know. And that's where we are today. We don't know why. We don't know if he will ever do such a thing again.

Is it wrong of me to wish the vet had found something more conclusive? Because I knew from the beginning that if she did, it would probably be terminal. I would loose him. But somehow, in some way, now I have lost him more.

What do I do about a companion I can’t trust? Will he do it again? Are my animals safe? Can I let him outside alone, unobserved? My nieces are two and 6-months old. I know Rajah finds kids annoying - he always has. But never in my life have I questioned that he would gallantly put up with the annoyance, sighing heavily whenever they were around so that I would be sure to know the suffering he was going through for me. But never did I doubt that they were safe.

Now what can I do? I cannot assume that he would not turn on them if his pain, or his mind, pushed him just a bit too far.

What do I do? My Rajah-B, the truest companion of my life, he who has barely seen a leash since we moved to Montana, who runs free everywhere he goes - is he to be chained now? Forever? At what point do I trust him again? At what point do I say, “Ok, now we know he would never do that again.” I am exhausted. This life takes all I have and more. Am I to watch him every minute, walk him on a leash - can I put him under guard and manage the guarding of him at all? How long? I feel like I’ve lost my Rajah and yet he is still here!

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? He’s still here. And he deserves more from me than this. All his life he’s given to me, all his heart and all his soul. He’s been the perfect dog. And now I moan and cry because I see a fault. I thought I had perfection, and now I am betrayed.

After all that he has given me, doesn’t he deserve to be a perfect dog, if not in fact, then, at least, to me? For whatever time we have left together, thru whatever changes come, doesn’t he deserve to be - to me - my perfect dog? Doesn’t he deserve, somehow, for me to say, “You are all I could have asked. You’ve never let me down.” To keep on loving him with the same kind of assuredness I always had before?

So how do I do that and still keep my animals safe? How do I let him change and not let that diminish all that Rajah is - but still be practical about the potential that may be there?

I am tired. This has been the hardest week. I miss my Lambie. I hurt at the prospect of taking my Rajah’s freedom away. Its Thanksgiving and somehow last spring I thought it would be wise to raise turkeys this year, to give out to neighbors and friends as gifts...and, of course, we had to butcher them all this week. In theory that’s ok, even beautiful to me. In practice, my heart feels bruised and I miss those loud, giant birds following me everywhere, bullying me for food. Last night one of my many pets (my cat, perhaps) apparently realized I was having a difficult week and was kind enough to try to help. It left a present by my bed. I awoke at 2:30 in the morning, fumbled with the light, and swung my feet out of bed. I felt something cold and rubbery under my foot, and looked down to find a severed turkey’s head laying there. Blue and red and white, at least 8 inches long and three inches thick, there lay my dead turkey's head, staring up at me. Sometimes the absurdity of my life makes it hard to know whether I’m going to laugh or to cry. I did neither. But I didn't go back to sleep either.

Tonight we got home from delivering our turkeys around 10:30pm. We’d spent 3 hours in a marathon run of the last butchering, coming in covered with blood and flesh, then running to town to give them away. Rajah is in his crate, asleep. I drew a bath and soaked for 40 minutes while Dave read a book to me. I cooked an artichoke (my favorite food) and poured myself a glass of wine. I’m finishing that as I write here. The ache in my heart has eased, at least for now. There’s nothing more to do tonight. Somehow I will find a way to be faithful to Rajah, whatever comes. And maybe, eventually, I’ll even get some sleep.

True Companion - part 1

2006-11-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

For ten years, Rajah has been my constant companion. In Colorado, building a horse ranch by myself, every minute of the day he ran beside me: protection, devotion and love, all rolled into one. During my college years, when I would take the summer months and travel, he slept beside me on hotel beds, snuck into the front seat every time I got out of the car, and waited politely at the McDonald's drive-through for the cheeseburger he always knew would be unwrapped and tossed in the back for him. He carried his own backpack when we hiked, for days at a time, exploring the wilds of the Rockies together. Each night in my tent I would wake and look for him only to find him sitting, half in and half out of the tent-flap door, straight and tall, like a sentinel, head moving back and forth, back and forth, seemingly scanning the night for anything that might bring danger to my door. During the days when we stayed in a campsite, he found the tallest perch - a boulder or a large, downed tree - and sat again, scanning. When we hiked, he placed himself, always, 10 feet before me, breaking the trail, the first to scare out snakes or bear or whatever danger he perceived. He's faced down bear for me, more than once, a low "wolf" to let me know, a body at ridged attention, placed between me and the tense, sniffing bear, eyes boring into the bear but no move to threaten, an unspoken shout, "This is mine! Move away and we can leave here in peace! Step forward and I will take you down with me if I must." And the bear always moved away.

He has faced down men for me too, a number of times, when we stumbled across surly or drunken cutthroats deep in the wilds, days from any help. They never gave us trouble. He stood between me and they, as between me and the bears. But this time his threats were not unspoken. Every hair stood on end and his teeth were bared like fangs out of a nightmare. A terrifying growl rumbled in his throat. No-one ever bothered us twice and I never felt afraid.

Around anything non-threatening, however, Rajah has always been a goof. His favorite game is fetch. He chases frisbees, tennis balls and sticks indiscriminately. In recent years, he searches the ranch for the best possible throwing stick he can find (often a ridiculously large, 6-foot-long firewood log) and drag it to anyone who comes by, dropping it hopefully at their feet and racing around, filled with joy, at any poor soul who actually tries to throw the unruly thing. He spends hours following me behind a horse, hours hiking by my side, hours checking out stream-beds and undiscovered hollows as we do our daily work around the ranch - fencing, moving horses, checking water lines. Always he was there. By my side. Like my shadow. Like my spirit and my soul.

Once, when Rajah was less than two years old, he saved my life twice in one winter. I was sick - very sick - and fighting the illness with all the will I had. Mind over matter, right? Surely, I - with so much passion and so much to do - could not be taken down by a mer physical body. So I fought, ignoring this body that got sicker every day. And twice I pushed myself past my endurance, refusing to give up the life I loved, and twice I was caught in winter storms, in the mountains, far from help when at last I could go on no more.

The first time I collapsed somewhat close to home. The snow in the pasture had drifted to 3 feet and more was coming down fast. I collapsed, falling forward, and was buried in the soft, cold blanket of the snow, my mind dimly trying to think of some way out of this, some way to go on. Then Rajah was there, barking, barking, barking. Right in my face he barked, loudly, viciously. The very annoyance of his insistent bark drug me back from sleep. "Go away," I whispered, "I can't. I can't get up from here." But his barking broke through again. Again he barked, that most annoying of dog barks, that one that puts your teeth on edge and cannot be ignored, right in my face, never letting up. "Ok!" I cried and tried to push myself up, tried to push myself through the snow. I couldn't - not enough - but then Rajah was there, teeth clamped to the hood of my coat, dragging, tugging, pulling me on. With little help from me, he drug me to the barn - the closest building to my fall. He pulled me into a large, warm stack of hay, and dropped his body over mine. He stayed there, keeping me warm, until I woke, finally, the next day, rested enough to stumble home.

The second time is fuzzy in my mind. I was partially unconscious for days. I wish I had gotten the story - the full story. I would have liked to know more about how he pulled it off.

I was hiking in the mountains, far up a mountain trail. I loved my mountains and refused to let this body take them away. I knew I was weak. But the snow was fresh and deep and there was nothing I loved more than those dramatic Colorado forests, covered with feet and feet of snow.

I was far from home when I realized I would not make it back. The snow had started again - blowing and strong. A storm was pouring down. Exhaustion was steeling over me like a curtain. Eventually I couldn't fight it anymore. I fell, the snow again surrounding me, engulfing me. I had a clear, fleeting thought that there was no way I would live through this storm, unprotected as I was. And there was no barn here to drag my body to. I don't remember where Rajah was. I had lost track of him, he who was always there. As my mind began to numb I wondered that there was no barking, no insisting I wake and try. Then everything went black.

Rajah was there in the woods with me that day. But how he knew that there was no-where to drag me, no safety to be had, I don't know. He left me, right away I think, maybe even before I fell. I couldn't have been in those hills for long, so he must have known immediately that he would have to go. He left me and he left the woods, and the trail we were on. He cut straight through the trees and found a highway and somehow, he stopped a car. I know only bits and pieces of this part of the story - I was mostly unconscious when he brought me help, only vaguely aware of what the man who found me said. Somehow, Rajah convinced a man, driving on the highway, to get out of his car and hike half a mile up a mountain, in the middle of a blizzard, to find me in the snow. I remember the man saying, "I just knew. I just knew he was telling me something, and that it was real. I couldn't get back in my car." He seemed as amazed and shocked as I was, almost confused by what he had done. He kept saying, "He wouldn't let me go and somehow I just couldn't. I just knew it was for real."

The man carried me home and fussed, unsure now what to do. I drifted into consciousness enough to explain my illness and say that I would be safe, now that I was home. I had friends who would check on me tomorrow. He must have stayed a while - I drifted in and out, seeing him there, looking unsure of what to do. But eventually I recovered enough to convince him that I was fine, thank him for saving my life, and he left. And I slept for three days straight, never having herd his name.

Rajah has always been there: Through my Colorado adventures, living on ranches and in remote wilderness cabins or tee-pees, with no electricity and no running water. Through my five years in Chicago, trying to finish my college degree. Through my illness that sapped everything I had, leaving me with nothing but dependence and family and him. He was always there, by my side. I never had to check - he was like a part of me. If I was sleeping, he was laying quietly by my bed. Even when, at the hight of my illness, I slept for days on end, he stayed beside me never rising to go to the bathroom, never rising to eat or to drink. If I slept he was there, beside me, until I was strong enough to get up again and he could follow me outside to play.

When I was well and strong, he hiked or worked or rode horses by my side, or in front of me really, always ten feet ahead, always scouting the trail. He played and loved and protected all that was mine. When we moved to Montana and bought our ranch - married now, it was my dream and my husband's to leave Chicago and that pace of life that seemed so meaningless to us, and find a ranch, off-grid, in the Rockies, at last. Now Dave works from home, by satellite, writing computer software for the Chicago firm he's worked for for years. I opened a business raising what I believe to be some of the finest pleasure horses in the world.

Its been heaven, give or take a few moments of hell. And because I'm me, the place has teamed with animals - chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, sheep, goats, donkeys, horses upon horses upon horses, every abandoned cat in the county, Rajah, and two additional dogs who have come to be family within the past few years. I am forever taking on mistreated, hurt or abandoned animals, filling the ranch (often more than I can handle, I'm afraid) with all the creatures who need love and care and a safe, free life at last.

My ranch is, as I work for it to be, a haven for life and for health. Every animal here lives the freest, healthiest life I can give it. Our birds free-range over sixty acres (though with all that room, why their location of choice always ends up being our nice, relaxing - now covered with bird-poop - wooden deck, I don't know.) Our horses live in large pastures with creeks, fields and wooded hills. The goats roam free (and these days mostly choose to stand on our second story deck, adding their poop to that of the birds and eying the dog door which they know must somehow lead to the warmth and comfort they see when they - so often - press their wet noses up to the window and glare into the house which is (surely) meant to be theirs. The many barn cats we've taken in, breaking our bank to spay and neuter each dumped, abandoned, feral one, have "cat rooms" in each barn supplied with climbing posts, free-choice cat food, clean litter-boxes and dozens of boxes and baskets, stuffed with blankets. Yet still, these feral cats, eye the house, sure that somewhere the universe has created a warm, comfortable castle with ever present servants to put out the food, scratch their ears and tend the fire - as is their just deserts. And last week two of them finally made the plunge - pushed their way through the cat door and moved themselves inside.

I work all day, when my health allows. This illness is still present, though it eases a lot out here in this mountain climate, especially when I am able able to get some rest. And always Rajah is by my side. We have had dogs come here who threatened the birds or other animals. Most at least have to be taught to leave such things along. But Rajah never has.

He knows what is mine. He always has. He lives to protect that which I have claimed. That is who he is - what he is. I would trust him with my life. I would trust him with my soul. Then last week, something changed.