Lucy Wilson Sherman
CNF Editor’s Notes
Lucy Wilson Sherman’s “The End” is aptly named, a story about the second law of thermodynamics — entropy. Her love of the life force, especially the way it is manifested in animals, motivates the collection she assembles at Grey Ghost Farm, but she soon finds that exuberance is always tempered. “Life runs downhill,” the “phenomenon of irreversibility in nature” — the chaos, the falling apart, the loss of life that Sherman’s narrator does her best to fight off and restore each day — isn’t a principle any of us can fight. Sherman’s attempt to come to terms with this, in her life, her work, her writing, makes for a piece that is full of black humor, sadness, and resignation, but that nonetheless stands as its own mark against entropy, the writing, the record, that is one of the few possibilities homo sapiens has for leaving something of this kind of perpetual motion behind, and giving it a meaning, and thereby a life force, that others can discover and hold onto themselves.
– Leslie Heywood
THE END
“The most that any one of us can seem to do is to
fashion something — an object or ourselves —
and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it,
so to speak, to the life force.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death,
We’re down to five goats, two dogs, and four cats, now, but at one time our farmstead supported a full complement of pets and livestock—24 animals in all, if you counted the nine hens. The newest additions to the menagerie were a pair of husky/hound dog puppies, given to us by our neighbor Sal two summers ago.
“How’d you like to step back in time ten years?” Sal had called out the window of his car as he drove up to where my husband, Henderson, and I were stacking wood. We walked over to the car to see what he was talking about. The puppies were entwined in a big cardboard box on his back seat. I lifted first one and then the other, and melted.
Same thing ten years ago: big box on back seat, me goo-goo eyed over the two German Shepherd puppies therein, whom we named Fanny and Teddy. Toby, our Labrador retriever who has since died, was elderly, but we didn’t need three dogs then, and we certainly didn’t need four dogs now. But I’m a sucker for a puppy face. Caramel-colored Dalton, with his blue “watch” eye, and his sister, timorous gray Waverly, came on board.
With their addition, the accumulation of animals at Gray Ghost Farm ended and the long attrition phase began. I had to face a fact that had somehow escaped me until then: With 24 animals under our care, all 24 would die on our watch. Either that, or we would die, and who knows what would happen to the animals. Or, some of them would die under our care and then we’d die, and then, eventually, the rest of the animals would die. In any case, as much as there had been lots of life on our farm, from then on there would be lots of dying.
I did not expect it to begin so suddenly. That spring, Dalton discovered he could squeeze under the fence that surrounds the dog yard. In a burst of adolescent exuberance, he ate his way through the entire brood of hens. Each day for a week I found newly mangled bodies scattered about the upper yard and into the woods, their stomachs rent. I could peer into their bellies and see already-formed eggs, shells and all.
Each time I found a dead chicken, I walloped Dalton, but because I never caught him in the act of murder, his eyes seemed to search my face in bewilderment. A local farmer said to tie a dead chicken to his neck. I did this. Dalton flattened himself against the ground and accepted this fate with what seemed like genuine remorse. Then he liberated himself by biting through the baling twine. He wagged his tail and pranced about, eager to regain my approval.
It was difficult to stay angry at so otherwise simple and guileless a dog, but in order to kiss a face that had killed chickens, I had to fashion a philosophic attitude by ranking the two species by preference. Which did I feel greater kinship with—canis or Gallus gallus? All the chickens were dead by this time, so the point was moot. I believed Dalton would outgrow the habit. It never occurred to me that he and Waverly would take on larger game.
That March, as we were loading the car for a weekend out of town, Dalton and Waverly slipped out under their fence again—a fence we had repeatedly patched, you should know—and they streaked off toward the woods. I called them back sternly. I called them again, using my most imperative tone, but they merely paused, looked back, consulted each other, and agreed, “Nah, she’s not serious.” Dalton was the ringleader. I could almost hear him call back over his shoulder to Waverly, “Psst, Wave, quick. Follow me.”
We knew they’d return home eventually. All we were worried about, at that point, was that harm might come to them in our absence. We were gone only overnight, and when we turned into the driveway the next evening, they crawled out from under the porch, wagging and wiggling and twining themselves around our legs, and we greeted them with relief. Mature Teddy and Fanny were wiggling and wagging, too, from behind the fence.
The next morning, I looked out an upstairs window into the goat yard. Capricorn, our 12-year-old buck, was lying on his side motionless on the cold ground. His head lay in a small rivulet that had been released by the spring thaw. “Sleeping,” I hoped for a fleeting moment. Hardly. A goat would not rest his head in water. Capricorn had been losing weight for months and was hobbled by arthritis in his back legs, but he enjoyed my daily brushing and, aside from his obvious discomfort when walking, still seemed interested in living. I did not think it was time for the vet.
As I approached his body, I saw tufts of hair and hide scattered on the ground around him. His groin, the fastest way to his entrails, had been chewed. I don’t think it was the chewing that killed him—the skin was abraded but not ripped open. I think the cause of death was a heart attack brought on by the terror of being selected, taunted, chased, and inevitably run down; a heart attack because he was an old goat, crippled and in failing health; a heart attack because he was forced, in those last moments, to comprehend the inevitability of the hoof prints on the wall.
But even after this, I didn’t turn against the dogs. “Capricorn would have died soon anyway,” I told Henderson. “Dalton and Waverly merely culled the herd. It’s in the nature of a hound dog to hound and dog a weaker animal.” The puppies wiggled and waggled and licked my hands and face, and again I discounted their dark aspect.
A few months later, though, they struck again. They’d gotten loose, but this time we were home, pruning some pine trees below the house. Suddenly, we heard loud, anguished cries that we recognized immediately as the blatting of a terrified goat. The dogs had cornered GG in the orchard, one on each side of her, barking. She had stumbled, trying to face both attackers at once, and fallen. She was struggling to rise, and she was bellowing. It’s not a sound you can easily forget, and it’s not a sound you want to hear on your farm—the sound of one of your beloved goats being bullied by your sweet, now vicious, puppies. It did not take a full minute this time to know which species I favored. Dalton went to the pound the next day.
I spared Waverly because she was an ingratiating omega to the older, alpha dogs, Teddy and Fanny. I figured that she had merely succumbed to pack mentality. If separated, probably neither of the dogs would have attacked alone, or the one more likely to would have been rough-and-tumble Dalton, not my sweet, shy Waverly.
***
That November, Henderson’s uncle died. When relatives phoned Henderson’s father to tell him that his brother was dead, they got no answer. The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, they drove out to the house and banged on his door. Still no answer. One of the men climbed in through a window and found Alexander dead on the living room floor from a heart attack. The coroner said the brothers had died on the same day.
In February, my 61-year-old sister Julie, twin to our other sister, Penny, was diagnosed with ALS, the wasting disease Lou Gehrig died from. She first noticed something wrong when she found she needed to reach around with her left hand to help her right hand turn the key in the car’s ignition switch. Now, a year later, her right arm flops at her side—she can’t wash her left armpit, can’t dress herself, can’t wipe herself. With her left hand she can still spoon food into her mouth, but she can’t fold laundry, pare vegetables, wash dishes, carry a cup of coffee or a glass of wine across the room. Her legs are going, too. There is not a chair in her house she can get up from without her husband’s assistance. She’s had to retire from a long acting career at Theater Three on Long Island, where she played lead and supporting roles since graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the same class as Robert Redford. She can’t turn the pages of a script.
The usual course of this disease, which has no known treatment and no remissions, is progressive muscle weakening leading to death in two to five years, making it likely that Julie will not reach 66, the age at which our mother died of cancer. In all likelihood, Julie will predecease our 90-year-old father, whose heart, despite a stroke six years ago, steadily sloshes blood to all the necessary organs without sign of fatigue. Paralyzed on his left side and wheelchair-bound in a nursing home, Daddy keeps eating the three servings of unidentifiable mash they put in front of him each day, vowing to live to 100. He survived Mother’s death by 22 years.
I was surprised when Mother died, then angry at myself for being surprised, for being so naive at age 33 to think that all the deaths I’d heard about on the news had nothing to do with me. How could a piece of me still think my loved ones and I would get out alive?
Now that I’ve let death in, everything else I hear or read tears the membrane further until death is everywhere. It lurks under every moment. But I know that spring is just as true as death. In a few months I’ll be mowing the lawns and weeding the gardens, performing the ultimate betrayal—exercising my muscles as Julie’s are atrophying.
***
In April, 12-year-old Teddy stopped eating. The vet drew blood, diagnosed him with extensive liver damage, and didn’t hold out much hope for the antibiotics he sent us home with. Teddy, thin and very sweet, slept most of his final days. His back legs wobbled when he stood up, and his body swayed. Shortly, his legs would buckle beneath him. All day Sunday and Monday I read beside him while he lay on his side, occasionally lifting his head with difficulty, looking at me.
When he could no longer stand and everything had shut down—nothing in, nothing out—we put him on a quilt in the back of the Subaru and drove him to the vet. Henderson told the receptionist we were in the parking lot while I waited on the tailgate beside Teddy. Tailgate euthanasia means less hoisting and schlepping of the ailing animal. It means not having to walk in through a crowded waiting room with a live dog and then walk out, a few minutes later, with a dead one.
After a time, the vet came out with the equipment. The previous week, Teddy had bolted when the same vet inserted a needle to draw his blood, and we’d had to hold tight to keep him from squirming off the table. One week later, he didn’t even raise his head as the catheter entered his ulnar vein.
The vet asked me if I would like to inject the serum. Yes, yes, I would, I said. Two syringes were to be emptied into the catheter. The first, a tranquilizer, slowed Teddy’s breathing perceptibly.
Then, weeping steadily, I kissed the side of Teddy’s long nose and told him how much we had really loved him. I slowly pushed in the plunger of the second syringe, which was filled with a cheery, Pepto-Bismol-pink serum. He was gone instantly. We brought him home and placed him in the deep grave Henderson had dug on the hill above the house. As the sun set, we filled in the hole and drank to Teddy, Capricorn, and our first dog, Toby.
***
September 15: GG, the goat, can’t stand up. It has nothing to do with the dog attack. For weeks, she’s not been eating her grain. She’s been losing weight, and now her belly is bloated. She has collapsed on her side in the barn doorway. I tried lifting her front end, but her back legs don’t work, and she’s too heavy for me to lift both ends at once with my arms around her middle, sling-like. For now, I take a lawn chair and a book and sit beside her. I wrap my vest and windbreaker more tightly around me as I stroke her bony head and neck. The autumn breeze is brisk, and when the swift white clouds scuttle across the sun, the temperature drops noticeably. I zip up my jacket and keep on stroking.
Although GG is not one of my favorite goats, she has an agreeable, if bland, personality. She’s a follower—somebody has to constitute the herd. She’s prone to bloat each spring after eating the bright green, protein-rich shoots of early grass, and to relieve her, we stick a fat syringe in the side of her mouth and squirt mineral oil down her gullet. I massage her belly, the way Henderson and I do for each other, encouraging the gas bubbles around, down, and out.
September 16: Yesterday, when Henderson got home, we made a temporary sick bay by enclosing one corner of the barn with upended pallets. GG can’t rise even to evacuate, so after a day of her lying in her own urine we must drag her out, sponge her off with warm water, and prepare another corner, Cloroxing the concrete floor in the first. Her urine is foul-smelling and caustic, probably the result of ketosis, a byproduct of starvation. We roll GG onto a large piece of cardboard to use as a sled. Her belly, taut as a tick’s, doesn’t collapse to the down side, as it normally would, but stays mountained up. Her eyes bulge and roll back into their sockets, showing mostly white; her mouth drops open, exposing her bottom teeth; her tongue lolls out. I think she is going to die here and now. The pain of being moved must have taken her breath away, for she doesn’t utter a sound. I quickly douse her belly with warm water and roll her back. We haul her into the new corner so she can dry on a thick blanket of hay. GG’s rumen must be filled with tiny gas bubbles that she can’t belch up, and spasmodic dry retching has failed to bring up her cud. Her digestive system is kaput. To Henderson I say, “Enough.”
September 17: The vet has come and gone. He brought his pistol, he told me, in case I preferred that method. If we went with the poison, he said, we’d have to bury GG at least three feet under. Buthanesia is so virulent and long-lasting that it could kill any wildlife—or our dogs—if they dug her up and ate her.
Until now, I’ve enjoyed the idea that all the animals will be buried up on Hoof Hill, but it’s a romantic notion and something of an indulgence. Because I don’t have the strength in my arms and shoulders to dig a deep grave in our rocky soil, Henderson has done it while I de-rock the hole with my hands, but it’s not considerate to give a man such a chore when he comes off an eight-hour shift of heavy lifting down at the recycling plant. So, because the grave could be shallower, I considered the pistol method.
“You’d put the gun right next to her temple?”
“No,” he said, “into her eyeball.”
“Oh,” said I. “Let’s go with the poison and you can take her body and cremate it.”
***
The vet and I enter the barn. Belinda, Ivy, Rosemary, Daisy, and Sweet William come to greet us. In her pen, GG raises her head, her ears twitching forward with the curiosity so characteristic of goats.
I went to a livestock auction once. When the gate between the holding pens and the bidding arena was opened, the first group, the sheep, huddled in a logjam in the doorway and had to be prodded forward. But when it was time for the goats to be auctioned, each one trotted forth smartly into the arena, curiosity and perhaps an inclination to trust humans overriding caution.
I kneel down beside GG in the hay and cradle her head in my arms, gently pulling it up and toward me so that the vet has a clear shot at her jugular. I press my cheek against her nose and softly croon good-bye. In the seconds it takes to empty the syringe, her head slumps in my arms. The membrane separating life from death is so very, very thin. There are final spasms and exhalations, but the vet assures me her brain is dead. If you can put your finger right on the eyeball, he says, and the animal doesn’t blink or pull away, she’s dead. The other goats are milling around, munching hay, untroubled. I like to think of GG meeting up with Capricorn at that great grain bin in the sky, as Henderson calls it.
The vet delivers a cursory post-mortem diagnosis: caprine arthritis encephalitis—goat AIDS. Joint swelling and pain, loss of appetite, and wasting are symptoms. As we’re no longer selling their milk or breeding the goats, we’ll be their rest home—they’re all over ten years old. Knowing that their ends will likely be as swift and painless as GG’s, we can enjoy their remaining years without a cloud of worry over their final days. I dearly wish we could say that with certainty about our human loved ones.
In fact, I would prefer death to come to all of us from the tip of a needle, a toxin-filled needle that, ideally, I administer myself. So far, no vet has agreed to slip me a few prefilled syringes for home use. Buthanesia (a barbiturate given in overdose amount) is a controlled substance for good reason. If I ever get my hands on a vial, I’ll put down my husband, when his time comes, and if my time comes before his, I’ll put myself down. I’m going to figure out a way to do it, anyway. Watch me.
***
So we’re down to five goats, and, from the looks of it, going down fast. The very next day after the vet left, Ivy began favoring her left leg. I checked to make sure there wasn’t a stone between her toes. There wasn’t, but she’s been limping steadily. And Sweet William spends too much time on his bent front knees, as if in prayer. His legs must be arthritic and, given his great hulk, standing must be painful. It’s as though once recognized and named, this virus has gained more than a toehold.
I’ll be sorry if Ivy should go next—before, say, Daisy. Daisy has a vanilla personality stippled with black moments of sheer meanness toward the other goats and toward Ivy in particular. She’s nice enough to me—I have a photo of Daisy and me stretching our noses toward each other, practically kissing, that was taken by my sister Julie when she visited a few years ago. Daisy has the most perfect breasts, a full, pendulous udder with firm, symmetrical teats that are squeezably, milkably soft, delightful to handle. And Daisy is Henderson’s favorite goat, perhaps because she’s not my favorite. He had to stake his claim somewhere. But if she and Sweet William were to die, I’d still have my three favorite goats: Ivy, Rosemary, and Belinda.
Typically, the goats gather around me when I come through the gate, but if I make a sudden move to stroke their noses, they jerk their heads away, indicating that they’re not like dogs, slavishly groveling to be petted. They come to me and, gently, I can go to them, but sudden moves and great demonstrations of affection are politely discouraged. This is true for all the goats except Ivy.
Here’s a video of my relationship with Ivy: I am striding across the hayfield, home from my morning walk with the dogs. The goats are browsing in the orchard, under the apple trees. As I move toward them, they look up and acknowledge me with soft guttural hums. Then, one goat separates herself from the herd and begins trotting toward me across the field. It is Miss Ivy. The morning light diffuses, the image blurs, violins commence a tremolo. We are that romantic couple in the commercial of a man and a maiden approaching each other in slo-mo from opposite sides of the screen through the lilies of the field. It is Ivy and I, running toward each other—at any minute, I think, she’ll grow alarmed as my size increases and will veer off—but she keeps trotting toward me, her flanks bouncing like saddlebags. I fall to my knees, spread wide my arms, and throw them around her neck as she runs into them. She stands there, panting, while I stroke her and hug her and kiss her in the hollow between her eyeball socket and her ear (my favorite place because, being out of the way, it’s less likely to be dusty). I kiss her cheeks and she whispers in my ear that she could stand like this forever.
Rosemary, the goat I nursed, I mean bottle-fed (close enough)—Rosie’s been known to get up on her hind legs and point the top of her head (where her horns used to be) at you, which is not a friendly thing to do. She did it once to guests who were house-sitting and several times to Henderson. She’s never done it to me. I can’t blame Henderson for cooling toward her after this, though I suspect he was never going to love her because she was “my” goat from the start. I think Rosemary still considers me her mother. She plunks herself down beside my lawn chair and lets herself be gently petted, but I have to tame my ebullience with Rosie; I can’t lovingly manhandle her the way I can Ivy. But of all of the goats, Rosie’s still seated at my side when the others have moseyed on to lusher grass. It’s not the high romance I have with Ivy; ours is a natural blood bond. Or we’re an old married couple, so grounded in love that we don’t have to display it by running through the fields.
The herd queen, our first goat, is Belinda. Each morning, Belinda sets out from the barn on a foraging trip up the hill, leading her family single-file into the meadow for browsing, her alpine nose thrust forward, her lean, strong body graceful and deliberate. She leads with purpose, as if she knows exactly where the grass will be most nutritious on that particular day. After an hour or so, she lifts her head and, with equal certitude, leads them back to the barn to digest in the shade. It’s easy to imagine Belinda as a grand dame, a lady. Never silly or frivolous, never begging for attention, she stands soberly beside my chair allowing her nose to be petted. If I stop, though, she moves in closer and hangs her head into the V of my open book until I’m reading Belinda.
I’ve noticed a mean streak in Belinda that I tend to forget when extolling her noble attributes. She has it in for Ivy, her one remaining daughter. She seems to look for opportunities to ram Ivy in the side, and Ivy, defenseless and perhaps not very bright, is invariably caught completely by surprise. I scold Belinda and swat at her, but she smartly ducks away. I vow to carry a fly swatter with me to extend my reach, but I don’t. I’m trying to allow some aspects of nature to take their course. Besides, do I really want Ivy’s welfare to depend on my intercession? I’d have to be in the barn 24/7.
Including this prickly characteristic in the mix that is Belinda gives me a different take on her queendom. Perhaps she’s not even aware that the herd’s following her. Perhaps, in fact, she doesn’t give a damn. She’s not “leading her family”; no maternal instinct here, just total concentration on her own gastric needs. She’s taking herself up the hill to greener pastures. If the others follow, so be it.
This makes me wonder if, over the years, I myself have become like Belinda, if my fierce independence isn’t more a certain ruthlessness. I’ve noticed in the last few years that I lack generosity, lack the interest I had in saving mankind. My days could be characterized by a narrowing of focus, and in that way I am like Belinda.
Each morning I awaken impelled by a feeling of urgency, a powerful sense that time is running out. I don’t waste it. I march through life as though there were a deadly seriousness at the heart of it, as if it really mattered that I milk some satisfaction from each day. It does matter. It really is time-limited, life.
The ruthlessness, if that’s what it is, conceals what I’ve always known made up my gelatinous essence—wobbly self-doubt. Yet, even about my own neurosis, I lack generosity. I can’t be bothered trying to recreate dark childhood incidents that would explain a lifelong commitment to self-criticism. Even if I could, my allotment of insecurity would probably turn out to be no greater than yours. My parents were happily married for 41 years. I grew up in material comfort with intelligent people who deliberated their decisions regarding our upbringing and provided us with consistency and stability.
Daddy was charming, courtly, agreeable, funny, Harvard-educated.
Mother had a bristly personality, but I alone of the three daughters reacted poorly to it. I, alone, felt undermined by her judgments. Maybe she judged only me. Maybe she was a different person by the time I was born. Raising twins for six years could change a person, knock some of the patience out of her, sharpen her personality. Who knows? All I know is that by the time I was on my third or fourth psychiatrist, I was able to articulate my deep conviction that I had done something dreadful as a child. Killed another child. I’ve gone through life believing, as I know many people do on some level, that if “they” really knew the truth about me, I’d be in for the full-scale condemnation I surely deserve.
After reading hundreds of memoirs, my complaining about Mother’s domineering disposition and her subtle censure sounds like whining. She had a personality, is all. I reacted badly to it. If I developed corrosive self-doubt, well, I had to acquire some sort of personality as I grew up, and this is the one that evolved out of the particular alchemy of me in our family.
Besides, how could the message that it is unwise to show vulnerability have been grooved so deeply and as early as infancy? And has all the growing up I’ve done since been merely to calcify scar tissue over an original wound? Could it be that I haven’t transformed any of it into wisdom but merely buried it in layers of personality? Are we all permanently skewed by parental misdeeds in the first few years of life, living out the rest of our days as our branch was first bent? The inexorableness of this, not to mention the inevitability that my own mistakes as a parent have indelibly scarred my daughter, is overwhelming. It’s enough to make me think about putting a pistol to my eyeball.
***
How is it I can speak so easily about killing myself when, on a bright fall day like today, I am so very pleased to be alive? Because if I were to kill myself it would be on a rainy day, not on a day like today.
Then I realize that if I were dying, I’d be dying on the glorious days, too.
***
Every death takes a bite out of you until, by the time you’re old, you’re emotional Swiss cheese. Death is the dirtiest trick in the book, and frankly, it gives me pause about life. It makes me loath to play the living game if these are the rules. Of course, most of the time you wake up and find that you haven’t died, and that nobody you know has died, which lulls you into the false impression that it’s an ordered universe and that you’re in control of your life to some measure. And that is not entirely untrue. You do postpone your death by taking care, fastening your seat belt, looking both ways before crossing, not running with scissors, etc.
But to be sure the end of my life is under my control, a subterranean part of me considers killing myself now.
So here’s a video of my relationship with death: I am running just a few steps ahead of death with a knife in my hands, ready to plunge it into my heart the moment death signals me. I turn and taunt the cloaked shape behind me. “Aha!” I grin. “You thought you’d get me. Watch this. Watch this. I’ll get myself!” (My life’s metaphor—say all the bad things I can think of about myself before anyone else can, inoculating myself against censure. Immunity, after all, is a kind of control.)
So there I am, and death is marching toward me. I’m holding the knife high over my head, ready to thrust it into my abdomen. Death marches on, inexorably. Death seems to be looking at me, but in fact he’s looking at the person just over my left shoulder, and there I am grinning madly, the knife trembling in my hands. Death picks up speed, now, and dashes toward me, and just before he veers off to tap the person on my left, I plunge the knife into my belly with triumph. As he scurries past, he gives me a look that says, “Jeez. What a loony!”
***
In Intoxicated by My Illness, Anatole Broyard quotes Ernest Becker as saying that we achieve immortality by being “insistently and inimitably ourselves.” I don’t know if immortality is achieved, but when we are our most essential selves, we are most fully alive, and that, at least, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from death.
Belinda is insistently herself. It may be comfortingly anthropomorphic to imagine her as the herd mother—we want our mothers to have our best interests at heart—but it is probably more accurate to see her as an individual committed to her own interests. To my sometime distress, Mother was insistently herself, too. It was difficult to be the daughter of someone who was insistently herself, but perhaps because of Mother’s example, I am resolutely drawn to become my own inimitable self. What I call ruthlessness in Belinda and in myself instead may be a sort of whittling away of what is not-us, a paring down to our very pith—stripping away distractions, killing off occasions for trivial emotions. What’s essential to me now is very simple—walking with the dogs and sitting with the goats, soaking up the colors of one more autumn, reading, and writing my self into existence.
Here’s what I picture: Becoming as concentrated as a diamond. Lest that call to mind immoderate self-regard, the word nubbin is as graphic. After all the fluff’s gone, I’ll be a kernel, thoroughly myself through and through, reduced to my least divisible self, an adamantine core. All that can be divided has been divided and what is left is the number one—the irreducible I—the only thing with which to assert life against the bleak inevitability of death.
***
You wouldn’t expect to receive one of life’s great lessons during a regular dental prophylaxis, but a few months ago I found myself in the dentist’s chair, my mouth open, tears leaking into it. My hygienist was describing the recent death of her beloved dog. It was the same week Teddy died, so my tears were ready. For weeks after putting down her old dog, my hygienist had grieved. Then one day, her husband, a police detective in a small city outside of Binghamton, New York, a man with uncommon perspicacity, brought home a puppy. His wife reached out eagerly to accept the wriggling Springer spaniel. Her husband held the puppy back for a few seconds and looked into his wife’s eyes.
“There is a beginning and there is an end,” he said gently. Then, placing the plump ball of flesh and fur in her arms, he said, “This is the beginning.”
About the author:
Lucy Wilson Sherman is the author of the memoir “Laying Foundations: A Year Building a Life While Rebuilding a Farmhouse,” the story of an unlikely couple—mismatched intellectually, socially, racially—who renovate an abandoned farmhouse in northeast Pennsylvania. She is also the author of Uncommon Appetites, a collection of personal essays. She holds an MFA degree from Goddard College. She lives with her husband on the farm they rebuilt in Susquehanna, PA, where, after twenty-five years of nearly continuous home improvement, they are launched once more on a whole new renovation project.