An Illness of a Different Animal

My family’s dog died today. He was a 14-year-old golden retriever and had, in every sense of the word, far outlived our expectations. I could write forever about all his wonderful traits and everything that made him such an amazing dog (and there are endless examples) but I’ll simply relay that Zach was so popular he got more Christmas cards every year than I did. And I’m not really exaggerating.

Even though we all knew we were living on borrowed time with him—despite relatively few health problems given his advanced years—the news still hit me with head-on force.

It all happened quickly, my mother told me, by way of reassuring me that I couldn’t have been there. He had seizures at 8am; the vet quickly came to their house, and with my parents, my brother, my niece, and my grandmother all around him, Zach then went pretty quickly.

Of course I should have been there, but death is exceedingly slippery when it comes to logistics and planning. He was “my” dog from the day we brought him home when I was 12 until I formally moved out of my house and into my own place. My mother brought clothes from my old room down to the kitchen floor and placed them next to his head so he could smell me, but that seemed so paltry a substitute in his last moments.

“I asked him to hold on for me until I was feeling better,” my mother said through quiet tears. For four years and through three major surgeries, many setbacks, and excruciating pain, he never left her side. “Heaven help us if he goes, what will we do with her?” we all asked one another, knowing that being basically housebound for so long was hard enough for my mother. Having to do that without Zach curled up on her feet, standing guard at her bedside, or giving her comfort when she needed something to hug? Almost inconceivable.

It is no coincidence to my mother, then, that just last Thursday she turned the corner and began to have some semblance of a “normal” life. The searing nerve pain, the crushed discs, the inflamed joints, the overwhelming exhaustion—they all seemed to have finally settled into a tolerable state—not gone, but subsided enough so that she could leave the house an unprecedented three days in a row.

“I’m back,” she declared on Thursday, again in Friday, all the way through Sunday night. She even managed to get some sleep Sunday night—another recent triumph, given her constant pain—and Monday morning, Zach died.

Whatever guilt I had about growing up and moving out on Zach was tempered by the knowledge that he now had another role, an important one—watching over my mother as he had done for me. The first full day we had Zach, he and I bonded: I was home from school sick with bronchitis, and he jumped up on the couch and curled up on my feet. Through countless infections, surgeries, and setbacks, Zach spent years resolutely at my side, nestled on the couch when I was well enough to set up camp there, hovering on the floor next to my bed when I was too sick to be anywhere else.

When I left for college, he spent several nights in my room, waiting for me to come to bed so he could sleep. I came home less and less, I eventually got my medical situation under somewhat better control, and someone else needed him more.

“He’s amazing, he never leaves your mother’s side when she doesn’t feel well, even if it means staying there for hours,” my father would often report to me over the phone. I would nod, picturing him and conjuring up a scene I knew so well.

This morning it was his turn to be sick and luckily he was surrounded by people who adored him. I cried and hugged my own dog, one-year-old Sasha, and was glad that in the end, Zach had what we need most: a companion in the midst of suffering.

When Illness and Empathy Clash

By all accounts, it was an innocent remark. I was on the phone with a good friend of mine who was recovering from a particularly nasty cold. Her voice still sounded a bit nasal, and she excused herself once to cough. “Not that I should be complaining about a little cold to you. I feel sort of stupid since this is nothing compared to what you deal with,” she said when she returned to the phone. She sounded sheepish.

I reassured her that that of course she should tell me about it, and I meant it. She sounded absolutely miserable, and a cold is annoying and incapacitating no matter how healthy you are otherwise. We moved on to other things, but her comment lingered in my mind. I don’t ever want to become a martyr for my illnesses, nor do I want them to influence the balance of give and take that exists in any good relationship.

Implicitly, my friend’s comment showed that she understood the realities of my life—serious lung infections, hospitalizations, exhaustion, etc—as best as she could from her perspective as a healthy person. So why did we both feel so awkward in that particular moment? The healthy and the sick have competing rights to compassion and empathy, an idea that makes total sense in theory but can be difficult to put into practice.

Don’t get me wrong, my friend’s exaggerated sensitivity towards my illness was far easier to deal with than the reverse reaction. Like most, I’ve had my share of negative responses to illness. There are volumes of stories out there of people who doubt our illnesses or dismiss them altogether. This is not a point I will belabor, but it is a common phenomenon.

What concerns me isn’t so much when other people don’t respond to me with empathy or compassion but when I am not able to extend those courtesies myself. It’s the dirty little secret of chronic illness, I think. Most of the time, like when my friends are sick or someone I know has an aggravating experience at a doctor’s office, I know what to say and do and how to be what they need from me at that time.

But there are other times when I do not feel as gracious, when I am exhausted from an infection or overwhelmed with getting my life back on track after a long hospitalization and I do not have the resources to respond to others with empathy. It’s almost as if illness removed me from the everyday world of everyday complaints and created a distance between healthy people and myself that I couldn’t just automatically bridge. I was stuck in one place—fear, frustration, etc—and I couldn’t relate to other people. Or wouldn’t relate, to be more accurate.

Deep down, I just wanted to say “Suck it up!” to the woman in the chair next to me at the doctor’s office who complained of pollen allergies, to the acquaintance at work who went on and on about how stressful her life was, or to the person who treated a mild case of strep throat as the end of the world.

For a fleeting second, it is so tempting to respond with something like, “Well, I just got out of the ICU recently because my lung collapsed” or “This is the first day I’ve been able to walk or brush my own hair for a week because my adrenal glands do not work.” I longed for the shock value I imagined those comments would elicit.

But to say such things would make me my own worst nightmare, a martyr for my illnesses. That kind of response would erect a wall between anyone who couldn’t compete with my illnesses and myself. It would also mean I was acting with the very same lack of empathy I find so frustrating in other people.

So in those moments I smiled and nodded in the appropriate places and murmured expressions of concern, but that doesn’t change the fact that my intentions were not genuine. Even though I said the right things, it didn’t mean I always felt them.

Eventually I regain my place in the pace of everyday life and I am not so temporarily boxed in by illnesses that I cannot let anyone else’s needs enter into my thoughts. I regret these instances of resentment because I am not proud of my reactions, but ultimately I take from them the idea no one has a market on suffering. Though our perspectives are often quite different, the healthy and the sick are still entitled to the same empathy and to the understanding of others that we want most in our darkest moments.