Grandmother Wisdom

Last week, I was on the phone with my mom, giving her an update on life in the Anderson household. My husband had just headed out to care for his mother who wasn’t doing well, and I’d stayed behind because our dog, Evelyn, had been diagnosed with aggressive cancer, and I felt that leaving our eldest with a dog that could begin to die while we were out of town was wrong. I knew in my bones that Evelyn wasn’t going to make it much longer, and decided I needed to be here.

This had a certain sense of déjà vu to it.

My mom asked me how I was holding up so well. I thought about it for a moment. Was I holding up well? Or was I ignoring the pain as a means of coping? Deep within my heart I knew all was as it was to be. Not should be, for that has a qualification to it, but as it was. Life is full of events, but we are the ones who label them as challenges or pleasant gifts. Life is not so discerning. Life just is.

I told my mom this and she asked how I could feel that way. Doesn’t it feel more like punishment or a trial? Again, I thought about it again and again my heart answered with, “What will be, will be.”

She wondered how I could be at peace, and I told her that I’d learned this from my husband’s grandmother, Audrey. On her 100th birthday, I asked her what the secret to long life was. She answered, “Never take anything personally.”

Never take anything personally. Not the weather, not someone’s reaction, not death, not cancer, not a wildfire, not zoning laws, not anything. Life just is.

I’d heard another version of this from my own grandmother, Marian. I loved to sit in her living room and listen to her stories about her life. She lived through many hardships. I recall one day asking her how she got through all these trials—from being whipped by her own mother to losing her kid brother to a car accident when she was only 18—and she told me, “Life ain’t all rainbows and roses, kid.”

Marian wasn’t as kind and gentle as Audrey, but the two grandmothers carried great wisdom within them. Somehow, their words did more for my psyche than all the self-help books that lined my shelves. Theirs was a lived wisdom, one they discovered through their own journeys. They both aged remarkably, one living in her own home until just before her 97th birthday when she succumbed to a broken hip and the other gracefully alive until just after turning 101. Both were mobile until their very ends and both survived things like cancer and even a completely clogged artery (that would be Marian, her body simply grew new vessels to transport the blood to her heart and when she was told that her artery was blocked she’d replied, “Oh, that’s why I’ve been so tired.”)

So, when my husband left to go take care of his mom and I brought Evelyn up to the property for a sleepover, one of the last things left on the bucket list of her end-of-life adventures, I was ready in my heart for what I knew in the back of my mind was already happening. That morning, as I packed to go up to the property, I found a beautiful kerchief of Evelyn’s that looked so pretty on her fur. She was still wearing the Christmas themed one that the groomers had given her (a spa day had also been on that bucket list) and I had this intuition that she wouldn’t want to be buried in a snowman themed kerchief, so I changed her into the fancier one. When we arrived on the property, she needed help getting out of the car for the first time ever, and I sensed we needed to walk the perimeter together, so we did. We visited the chicken coop, all the gardens, the bees, even the meadow where we sat in the afternoon sun. The weather was perfect for the first time in weeks. When she had her first seizure a few hours later, I wasn’t surprised. I knew she would die here, yet I’d had a romantic notion that she’d simply take her last breath as she slept.

Death isn’t so quiet.

After that first seizure, she couldn’t use the bottom half of her body, but the upper half was working. She could growl at Otis, the other dog in the family that she always hated, she could drink and eat, and even dragged herself to her sheepy bed. Yet, I knew she was dying and began to struggle with whether I should have a vet come up to put her to sleep. I knew she wanted to die at home, but did I chose the final breath, or should she? I called around and the earliest I could get someone to come to the property was Friday at 11 am and it was Wednesday at 4 pm. I decided that seemed like a good deadline for Evelyn. She had almost two days to decide to go on her own.

A few hours later, her regular vet called me back and said that miraculously an appointment had just cancelled for the next day, and they could come up at 11 am on Thursday. Twenty-four hours sooner than the other doctor. I wasn’t ready to make the decision that evening, Evelyn was still eating, and I’d given her pain pills. I told them I wanted to see how she’d do that night and would call the next morning with an update. An hour after I hung up the phone, Evelyn had her second seizure and after that, was unable to eat or drink, and could barely lift her head.

Wednesday night I witnessed her panting over and over and when the pain meds wore off, I heard the difference in her breath; it was shallower, and the panting accelerated. She never once whined, except when she had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t move. I had to carry her outside and then she tried with all her might to walk out of my arms to pee discreetly, so proud even until the end.

When I woke Thursday, I knew I could no longer keep her comfortable and that the cancelled appointment was a gift. I had to call the vet and have her come that day, yet at the moment of decision, I doubted myself. I called my husband, trying to force him to make the choice, but he couldn’t. He just said he supported me and that made me panic. I felt transported back to the night of the evacuation when I was alone, and he was gone, and I had to make decisions by myself, and I’d made them poorly. Why was this happening again? I hung up on him and cried as Evelyn began to pant and pant and pant, her own anxiety rising.

I begged Evelyn to tell me what she wanted, and I heard my grandmothers’ words.

“Don’t take anything personally,” Audrey said within my heart.

“Life ain’t rainbows and roses,” Marian added.

They’d made similar choices in their lives; I recall Marian telling me how she’d put down several of her dogs herself, and I realized that while I’ve learned to accept the events of life, whatever they may be, my own failures are harder to swallow. I should be better than this. I should be able to navigate this world with ease and confidence.

I didn’t want to fail Evelyn the way I’d failed the goats and Sebastian in the fire.

Listening to my grandmothers’ advice, I understood that I had to make a decision I could live with, and to do that I had to trust my instincts. The moment I’d stopped doing trusting my intuition was the moment I began to panic. During the evacuation, I knew deep down that the worst would happen, but my mind refused to accept that the house was about to burn. I couldn’t live with that truth and thus, cut myself off from my instincts and made extremely poor decisions the rest of the night. This time, I faced another painful truth before me; I was the one who had to decide either to watch her die slowly until she took her own last breath, knowing I couldn’t ease her pain since she couldn’t swallow any pills, or take the miraculous offering from Evelyn’s own vet to come to our home and give Evelyn one last breath in her meadow. I allowed myself to see both endings and while one was “natural” the latter option was beautiful. I chose beauty over pain and called the vet, telling them yes, come today. The moment I hung up the phone, Evelyn’s breathing slowed, and a peace descended in the room. I took her outside and we sat together in the morning sun one last time.

My eldest son, Jackson arrived to sit with Evelyn while I dug Evelyn’s grave with my friends, Shawn and Rory. Then Shawn and Rory took care of Otis, my bully-boxer baby who can be quite the pest when not the center of attention, while I carried Evelyn down to the meadow with Jackson and Dr. Hoeffer. There in the sun with the two of us by her side, Evelyn Star, Shepherdess of the Big Trees, took her last breath.

It was a beautiful death.

There is a stoic saying, “Amor Fati,” which means “to love one’s destiny” or “to love life exactly as it unfolds.” I feel that right now, and I owe it to my grandmothers because they gave me the wisdom needed to embrace my destiny. Part of life is to make decisions and live with them. This is easier when we’re thinking with our hearts and minds together. I now know that if I’m panicking, I’m not listening to my heart, I’m using my mind instead to make sense of something that only the heart can understand.

The challenge now is to not take it personally when I fail to remain in my heart. To forgive myself for the things I allow myself to do from a place of fear. Life ain’t all rainbows and roses, and I’m a part of life. The labels I place on events and myself matter more than I ever really understood before this moment.

Thank you, Evelyn, for choosing me to be your death doula. I will always ponder this lesson in my heart.