Caregiver Blues

April 22

I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was done in January. These surgeries were to fix toes mangled by the combination of a tall body, loose joints, and a girlhood determinedly studying ballet. Though it’s hard to remember all the doc told me because postsurgery reports go by so fast, I do remember that he fused her big toe because it was “eaten up with arthritis,” “de-rotated” her fourth toe, and unhumped her pinky hammer toe by cutting a Z-incision in the tendon to lengthen it. Toes three, four, and five all had pins driven into them to keep them straight. Erin collects the pins. There are quite a few now. This is, I think, the fifth surgery on her feet. And that’s not counting a couple of hand surgeries and a hip replacement. Though I haven’t faced any serious problems while taking care of her, this is the second time I’ve needed to do it in my seventies, and I’m wondering about the inescapable day when we can’t be each other’s crutch when a crutch is imperative.

Pulling up to the house, I parked as near the front door as I could, and Erin, still woozy from the anesthesia, leaned on me as she hopped up and onto the porch, then to the front door. She clutched the doorframe while I unlocked the house and then leaned on me to get across the threshold while I used my knees to keep Jimmy, dog one, from jumping on her and to block Lottie, dog two, from escaping.

Erin braced against the wall while I stepped away to fetch her knee scooter. Then she wobbled, gasped, and teetered, and I leapt over and grabbed her tight around the waist, crouching to take her weight. I was just barely able to hold her up and help her to the scooter. After that scare, she went to bed and propped her leg up on a slanted foam cushion. Still pain-free on the postsurgery meds, she lay in bed and texted friends that she was feeling good and that the operation had gone well. Pretty soon she dozed off. I spent the time tending to the dogs and the house before going to bed early, exhausted. Would I have been this bleary and enervated twenty years ago? Who the hell knows?

April 23

Today, I gave the dogs their early morning walk, long enough for them to pee and crap, and then, after breakfast, I rushed them through their longer walk because I was anxious see how Erin was doing. Around nine, the meds were wearing off and she took her first oxy.

She told me that during the night the stupid house alarm went off, while I, asleep under the spell of my bedside white-noise machine, heard nothing. The control panel says that the alarm battery was low, and suddenly the task of changing batteries in the seven smoke detectors seemed, with all that was going on, overwhelming.

Midmorning, I raced to Erin’s room and told her to look out the window. When she saw the two Canada geese strut by with a single clumsy gosling tumbling along behind, her face lit up with a huge, if drawn, smile through the pain. We’ve never seen a goose on the ground around here. It’s hard to imagine where a nest is hidden and easy to imagine foxes, racoons, and coyotes gobbling up the greater part of the gaggle.

Erin’s pain is coming in zaps—moments when it bursts out at her. But she ate lunch with a good appetite and went back to bed, keeping her feet elevated. The doctor gave her instructions, and by God, she’ll follow them. While she rested, I replaced all seven smoke-alarm batteries in less than twenty minutes.

Erin took her second oxy at 3:30. She hopes she can hold out till ten, when she takes the next one, so she can sleep through the night. After her first surgery in January, the second and third nights were the worst, so we know what’s coming.

I have been ordered to leave the dishwasher alone, because emptying it, she says, is something she can do. Cool. Though I have of course tended to Erin during her various surgeries, I’ve only fleetingly thought of myself as a “caregiver.” That’s changing, and I suppose we’ll be tag teaming in that role up until we can’t.

April 24

The oxy has, as expected, bound her up, and she said her bowel movement was so painful that she was nauseous, despite taking the maximum doses of stool softener, pounding water, and eating enough celery to revolt a rabbit.

At least she is better off than the person I always think of when I think of opioid-induced costivity: Samuel Taylor Coleridge aboard the Speedwell on his way to Malta in 1804. In the second volume of his biography of STC, Richard Holmes quotes the poet’s notebooks to tell the story: “The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & and returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of utmost strength injected the latter. Good God!—What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!.... At length went: O what a time!—equal in pain to any before.” He adds: “The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.” Good God indeed.

Despite Erin’s discomfort, minor compared to Coleridge’s, I got a good laugh out of her when I read her an article from the local newspaper titled “Another discovery affirms the historicity of the Bible.” In 2019, archeologists found a 3200-year-old amulet with an inscription on it, which is now the oldest known example of Hebrew writing to be found in modern-day Israel. Though scholars have long maintained that the Bible stories were orally transmitted and only written down much later, the article crows that the inscription “provides proof” that contemporary biblical writers could have recorded events as they happened. But curiously the article does not tell us exactly why the amulet proclaims, “Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed.” We giggled like idiots.

At lunch, the oxy was wearing off and E was in rough shape, but she was buoyed by a loaf of bread her friend Brooks made for her. She’s pale and loitering, but not alone, attended to by two dogs who don’t leave the room unless she does, and my frequent peeking in to see how she is doing. Later in the day, she was feeling better, hadn’t taken another oxy, and was returning a call from a neighbor even more elderly than I am. Dolores’s husband, Richard, had fallen and broken his hip, which has us all concerned. (When my father broke his hip, at eighty-nine, he said, “So this is how it’s going to be.” His mother had died after breaking her hip, and he assumed, correctly, that this fall would take him too.) Richard’s surgery is scheduled in Murfreesboro later this week. When I heard Erin tell Dolores “If you need anything, we are just a phone call away,” I flinched. I approve of the sentiment and will do my best to make it a truth, but I’m not sure what help a woman on a scooter and a seventy-one-year-old caregiver can be right now.

In the afternoon, the God-cursed security alarm started blasting its five-beat bleat, going off every two minutes, and nothing I did stopped it. Poor Jimmy was panting and quivering in terror.

Because the alarm is right by Erin’s bedroom door, we moved her into my bedroom. I put the white-noise machine right by her head, cranked it up, closed her in the room with the dogs, and moved to the guest room in the basement. I have “moderate to severe hearing loss,” and under the grace of that disability, I slept well when my moderate ear was against the pillow, infirmity briefly becoming firmity.

April 25

With the alarm still blaring, I staggered out at six with the dogs, moving so quickly to escape the noise that I didn’t even think to put on my hearing aids or glasses. Because it’s high allergy season, my uncorrected vision was further occluded by gravel formed from dried eye mucus. I also neglected to remove the plastic dental appliance I wear at night for bruxism. If I had run into any of our friends, they’d rightly wonder who was taking care of Erin as they encountered me shepherding two dogs down the road—half deaf, mumble-dumb, and squint-blind with snot lava crusted around my eyes.

When the security alarm guy finally showed up at 10:30, I greeted him with so much enthusiasm that he flinched. Sure, because he’s never had to live inside these pulsing detonations for eighteen straight hours. He knows how to disable the damn alarm, a secret he promised to share, but he left while I was in another part of the house and kept this recondite wizardry to himself.

Though jittery from the alarm blast, Erin is almost pain-free and back in her own bed. I’m still listening for the non-existent beeps and sometimes hearing them. It’s amazing how well Erin’s doing, though the pain is still switching on and off, going from nothing to harsh jolts and back again. More and more she moves easily and eats well while spurning the oxy, though she does tire quickly.

Fragility seems to be the theme of this expanse of our lives, and maybe the rest of our lives. I hope Erin and I can keep our needs for care enough out of synch that we can always tend to each other. Or is that too much to hope for?

April 26

Today, I drove Erin back to Murfreesboro for the first post-op checkup. Erin was doing well. I asked Dr. LaMay when the humped-up toes on her right foot would flatten out. He said that would happen automatically when she put weight on them more regularly. He then pressed the heads of the metatarsals on the bottom of her foot, and damn if the toes didn’t immediately straighten out.

April 27

The dogs started entering and leaving my bedroom at about seven, but I turned my good ear to the pillow and ignored them until eight, when Lottie huffed at the back of my head. The dogs get a lot of my attention, in some ways more than Erin, because I know Erin will only rest easy if she knows they are taken care of. When I get up, I don’t even speak to her. I leash up the dogs, slip dog-turd bags in my pocket, and start walking, still in my morning fog.

This morning, across the street, a woman with expensively tended-to white hair stood at the end of her driveway hollering into her phone. I started left, my usual direction, when she called out in a different tone of voice, so I turned to see if she was calling to me. She was, but without my hearing aids, I couldn’t at first make out what she was saying. She was trying to get a phone signal. Hard to do out here. The cleaning women she hired got lost trying to find her house. Easy to do out here. Would I keep an eye out for two women in a pickup truck? And by the way, my name is Janice. I was already so fixed on the assigned task I didn’t even think to respond with my name. She retreated toward her house, and I hadn’t gone fifty feet before a rusty pickup truck drifted by her driveway with two old women in it. By “old,” I mean women probably ten to fifteen years younger than I am but worn by poverty or near poverty, cigarettes, and hard work to at least my age. I waved them down, showed them where to go, and when they turned around, I saw four trump bumper stickers neatly spaced on the back window of the cab, two on each side, leaving barely enough room to see out the back. Metaphor? Yeah, sure.

April 28

I was awakened at 8:30 on the dot when Erin leaned over the end of her scooter and shook my foot. This is a turning point in getting the dogs on my schedule, even though Lottie had come in about seven to see if I was stirring. While out with the dogs, I remembered what Erin had told me last night—a memory from childhood. When she was ten years old, her mother took her to the doctor and, examining her, he murmured, “This one is a Little Stoic.” Even at ten, Erin thought “What choice did I have?” Her father was a doctor who’d served as a Marine medic at Guadalcanal, and her mother, Eve, was a nurse who’d grown up in Rock Springs, Wyoming, the daughter of a coal miner. As soon as Eve graduated from high school, she got on the train and headed to San Francisco for nursing school. Erin’s parents didn’t believe anyone was ill unless they saw blood, and a significant quantity of it. (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”) We are lucky that Erin’s grown from a Little Stoic to a mature one because she’s looking at more surgery in the future: a second hip replacement; a replacement of the first hip replacement, which is aging out; and a knee replacement. Right now, I like my odds on being able to tend to her through all of these surgeries, but anyone’s inevitable slow enfrailment can accelerate quickly, given the flukes of an aging body.

April 29

Almost the first thing that Erin said to me this morning was “Bad news from California.” Her friend Debie’s rattled. Debie’s husband is an ER doc, and one of his nurses shot himself in the ER, in close proximity to other nurses and doctors—and of course all the nearby patients heard the gunshot. Helluva resignation letter, dude. Debie’s shook for Alex, who’s also shook, and Erin is shook for her friends, as am I to a still lesser extent, being so many removes from the violence.

I changed the conversation.

“Did you slide down the stairs on your butt?” I asked Erin.

“Doctor LaMay said it was okay if I didn’t put any weight on my foot.”

“When did he say that?”

“When you ratted me out for doing it the last time. What gave me away?”

“The laundry basket full of underwear and your bathrobe. Did you butt-scoot all the way to the laundry room?”

“Yes.”

“What else did you do while you were down there?”

“I got toilet paper. Okay?”

I imagine her butt-bumping up the stairs backwards, holding two rolls of toilet paper.

“I could have got the toilet paper for you.”

“I wanted to get it myself.”

Our friend Sarah stopped by to leave a lovely pot of bean soup and some cornbread for us. She makes the best cornbread I’ve eaten since my grandmother died forty-plus years ago, far outstripping my sad efforts. She and Erin talked about Richard and Dolores, hoping Richard’s hip replacement goes well. Sarah revealed that Dolores is basically deaf but hiding the fact. Richard is basically blind but continues to drive his Dodge Ram pickup, albeit very carefully. Our friends have been generous with thoughtfulness and food, and I am resolved to be a better friend in return.

Last night Sarah went to a presentation about local programs that help old people age in place, one of which is called Folks at Home. I guess they couldn’t bring themselves to go the full Stephen Foster. Sarah said, “As I watched all those people my age and older toddle in while a quartet played so very solemnly, I couldn’t help thinking of all those images of people getting off trains in Germany and Poland in 1939. I know I probably shouldn’t say that, but that is what I thought of.” And Erin and I probably shouldn’t have laughed either. Sometimes gallows humor sneaks up on you.

April 30

I think Erin and Jimmy share a single nervous system. When she’s out of the house, he usually whines till I comfort him, and then he sits at the sliding door over the carport and watches till she comes home—Greyfriars Jimmy—and then he hammers down the stairs to meet her. Erin is acutely aware of his changes. The first thing she said to me this morning is that his left cheek was swollen. She was right, though I had to look closely to see it. I knew what she was thinking. Max, Jimmy’s predecessor, died of jaw cancer. I shoved a couple of Benadryl tablets down Jimmy’s throat, and over the course of the day his swelling abated, along with Erin’s anxiety. Jesus, when we were younger even the dogs lived healthier lives.

May 2

Nearly across from our house, there’s a stop sign where a gravel road joins the paved road. The road splits around the sign, and in the triangle, our neighbor Jim has strung a three-foot-tall wire fence around the sign and a crab apple tree to protect a small garden from voracious deer. This morning, I noticed a wooden cane with a steel ferule hooked over the chicken wire fence. So that’s how he gets over the fence to plant and weed! For the last several years of his life my father had a cane that he never used. Its sole purpose seemed to be to accompany him to places and be left there—my brother’s house, church, Burger King for breakfast once a week, and the county library, where he hid out from his cleaning lady. Jim’s unexpected garden around the stop sign is about five irregular square feet with three small red azaleas, a couple of daffodils, and a few yellow-flowering plants—coreopsis? daisies?—crowded under a large crab apple—a small, ragged delight. Jim’s at least a decade older than I am, his wife died last year with dementia, and I’d long wondered how he was able to tend to the small plot of ragged loveliness he made on public land.

Erin said Jimmy has been butt-scooting across the carpet and smelling like impacted anal glands. Thirty-three years ago, when we got our first dog, a German Wirehaired Pointer puppy, we took her to the vet. The first thing the vet did was take Rosie in the back and express her anal glands. Thirty dollars. The second time we went, it was another thirty dollars. The third time, I said, “Can you take me back there and show me how to do it?” To my surprise, the vet said, “Sure.” With six dogs over thirty years, I know I’ve saved well over four thousand dollars, and this evening I’ve added another thirty bucks to the tally.

May 3

At a quarter to eight, I was blasted out of sleep by a crash that sounded like someone had slammed a glass vase onto a piano keyboard. After a groggy moment or two, I realized that neither of those things had probably happened. Meniere’s disease, which I have, can cause tinnitus—auditory hallucinations. I’ve come to accept that my lived reality often differs from actuality, so I didn’t ask Erin if she’d slammed a vase into the piano keyboard, but only because we don’t have a piano.

Erin has placed me under strict instructions to tell her when the first peonies bloom. She wants to cut it and leave it on our friend Cheri’s porch—something to show Cheri we are thinking of her while she is in palliative care. The peonies are not yet open, but they are close, the red buds bulging tensely. They will bloom any day now and still we wonder if they will open before Cheri dies.

Yesterday walking around the yard spraying poison ivy, I met my neighbor David at the property line, and he asked if I still worked in a nearby public garden.

“Yeah, it’s work I like.”

“Hmm, they haven’t asked me the last couple of years,” he said, and added, musing, “I guess they know I’m more or less a caregiver now for Luanne.”

I nodded. David is a superb gardener, but his wife is now dependent on him. She’s tiny, small boned, and suffering with a bad outcome from hip surgery. I often see him lead her out to the mailbox on her wheeled walker and sometimes a little bit down the road, maybe one or two houses distance. It’s a sad practice but a loving one.

A few summers ago, David studied and rehearsed for half a year, maybe more, to play King Lear for a production in Nashville. It’s a role he was made for in looks, training, and passion—but he had to drop out, someone told me, because he was hospitalized for an ulcer and no longer had the physical strength to play Lear.

“What strength do you need?” I asked, thoughtlessly.

“He has to carry Cordelia across the stage in Act V.”

“Ah, that.” I guess it wouldn’t work if the bereft king trundled his dead daughter on stage sprawled across a wheelbarrow.

At Erin’s post-op this afternoon, a new chatty nurse mentioned that she had once worked in an emergency room, so I asked her the question I always ask ER personnel: “What’s the most interesting thing you removed from someone’s body?”

She thought for a moment and said, “Probably a cucumber.”

Erin and I were amused but not impressed. A wonderfully gabby nurse in southern Indiana once entertained us with the story about a man and his girlfriend who came into the ER because he had lost her grip on the lava lamp she was inserting in his rectum. While the ER doc was removing the lava lamp—were they tempted to plug it in, just to see his abdomen glow?—they kept getting calls from a woman who was demanding to know why her husband was in the emergency room. As they say: A man will go out looking for what he can’t get at home.

When Dr. LaMay came in the room, he looked at Erin and said, with some satisfaction, “That looks more like a foot.”

Erin had a different take. As we returned to the car, she said, “My foot looks like a mango.”

As soon as I entered the house after the morning dog walk, I heard a loud chirping noise that sounded as if were coming from the attic. Worried a bird had somehow got in the house, I dragged the heavy folding ladder into the house and shone a light all around the attic space. Nothing. The noise was weirdly constant. I could hear it in the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and even the crawlspace. Was something trapped in a duct? Since the noise was also loud outside, I wondered if a bird had got stuck in the chimney or build a nest in the rain gutters. I lugged the ladder outside and unfolded it. Just as I reached the roof, the ladder slid backward four inches and caught dubiously. I leapt from the plunging rung I was on and rolled onto the roof. I sat on the hot shingles for a moment to let the adrenaline subside and saw the roof looked fine. No birds, no nests, no problems. Before I set foot on the ladder, I shook it to make sure it was solid on its rubber legs, and still, when I placed my full weight on it, it slipped again, scraping down the gutter. I was trying to figure whether to ride it to the concrete or jump off when it steadied, and I climbed down safely.

Through the sliding door, I could see Erin, fist to her mouth, distraught. We were both so unnerved I left the ladder in place and went in the house. I didn’t even want to touch the treacherous damn thing until we both calmed down. As I walked in the house, Erin said, “The birds stopped while you were up there.” Suddenly I knew what the problem was. I checked my phone and, yeah, I’d butt-activated my white-noise app that has a selection called “Marsh Frogs,” though how anybody could sleep through that piercing racket is beyond me.

May 5

I finally admitted to myself that my being on jury duty next week will be difficult for Erin, maybe impossible. When she gets promoted to the walking boot, she can walk around the house but nowhere else. I could get up at six, walk the dogs, and rush off to the Franklin County Judicial Center, but Erin wouldn’t be able to tend to the dogs during the day or take them out after meals. I wrote the county supervisor, explained the situation with Erin’s foot, and asked to be excused. I was so ready to go on the warpath and mail the supervisor gruesome pictures of her foot that I was just a tiny bit disappointed when I received a gracious note back saying, “That won’t be a problem at all” and wishing me a blessed day.

Judging by Erin’s underwear in the laundry bins, she has been scooting down the stairs every morning and depositing her dirty clothes before I wake up.

After lunch, I harvested four astoundingly lovely red peonies, two for Erin’s room and two for Cheri, cutting them before they could bow their gorgeous heavy heads to the dirt. Driving to Cheri’s house, I noticed again that she lives on a 1.6-mile stretch of the Trail of Tears, a name that assumed a touch more resonance for us today. Not wanting to disturb her, we left the two peonies on Cheri’s porch without knocking. Erin texted Cheri about the flowers, and almost immediately, Jim, Cheri’s husband, called to thank us and say that Cheri was nonresponsive. The hospice nurse estimates three days at the longest. Cheri is living on morphine, and so her deepest dread, the dread of groaning, body-twisting pain, is addressed for the moment.

In the evening, I spent a little time with Martin Luther and the Lord’s Prayer as the theologian grinds through the implications of “hallowed be thy name,” touching on the perfections of God (“just, pure, true, firm, simple, upright, wise, &c”), while elaborating ardently on the degradation of humankind: “Behold, thus does the Lord’s Prayer teach thee, first of all, to know the greatness of thy state of exile and damnation; and that thou art, a dishonor to God….” Of Protestantism’s two biggest drums, Luther hammers the upturned bucket of human depravity while only tapping on the paint can of God’s beneficence. My cousin, a Methodist minister, keeps the beat on benevolence. “God is good all the time,” she says when she leads the worship service, and the congregation repeats it after her. A billboard between here and Murfreesboro proclaims the same assurance. Cheri’s current condition, among many other things, makes me wonder what it would take for me to say that with anything approaching confidence. “God is good! All the time!” Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? And wouldn’t I love to find a way to think it?

When Dr. LaMay came in the room, he looked at Erin and said, with some satisfaction, “That looks more like a foot.”

Erin had a different take. As we returned to the car, she said, “My foot looks like a mango.”

May 6

Because I take a while to fully wake up in the morning, I cling to ritual: mug of tea, bowl of cereal, local paper, silence. Now all that waits till after the dogs’ first walk, and because I’m also giving them their evening meals followed by their individual constitutionals, I often forget to refill the dog bowls and stage them on the counter for the morning. When I return from that first morning walk, I go downstairs to the basement, dogs clattering along to monitor the process and snatch up any errant kibble that hits the floor. The small detour annoys me out of all reasonable proportion to the effort involved. Today, though, I noticed the dog bowls were topped up and ready to go, which means Erin butt-bumped down the stairs holding the two bowls, slid down the hall, across the guest-room floor and into the laundry room. There she must have sat in front of the dogfood bin, scooped out the Iams, then repeated the journey, moving the now-full bowls behind her one or two stair treads at a time as she butt-hopped up the stairs backward, Jimmy and Lottie insistently nosing the bowls—all this effort to spare me a tiny morning irritant. Even before I met Erin, I knew love assumes strange and wonderous forms. This iteration of love is one that never occurred to me. For my part, I will now, without fail, remember to fill the dog bowls every evening.

Erin spent an hour on the phone with her brother Terry, who has noticed his memory declining and just this week moved into an assisted care facility in Portland. He’s in pieces because he and his wife Polly have just put down their fourteen-year-old dog Nell, who was incontinent, in pain, and afflicted with suppurating cysts. As I was writing Terry a condolence note, I received a text from my brother Roger asking how Erin is. Better than Roger. He’s had a hellacious year. Until a month or two ago, I was terrified he was dying. After spinal surgery, he developed sepsis and was bedridden on and off for six months as his docs fought his infection down to the point where they could safely remove the metal bracing in his spine and install a new brace. But during the time he was bed-ridden, he suffered two drop feet from nerve damage, and the man who used to do Ironman decathlons, has, within a year, become dependent on a cane to get around while in constant pain. Fragility seems to be the theme of this expanse of our lives, and maybe the rest of our lives. I hope Erin and I can keep our needs for care enough out of synch that we can always tend to each other. Or is that too much to hope for? In junior high, when I began reading adult biographies, I quickly noticed the last ten pages of the books were pages of decline, dependence, pain, and death. Some of my friends are living their final pages now, and it’s hard not to wonder in what hard ways Erin’s and my final ten pages will read. I hope this expanse is only the penultimate chapter, not the one right before the notes and bibliography.

May 7

Cheri died last night, groaning in pain with every breath she took, the suffering overwhelming the morphine. Sixteen years of chemo and pain came to the only end they could. Erin is grieving, and I am sad. Jim told Erin that Cheri “had gone home.” I have seldom known anyone as certain as Jim and Cheri that heaven is their destination. Even my father leaked out a doubt or two at the end, according to Roger. But the last sixteen years of chemo and emaciation have made Cheri’s path to the glorious gate and the streets of gold a hard one. Though she always appeared elegant, composed, and luminously wan as her damages mounted, she must have approached with bloody feet the twelve gates, each made of a single pearl.

I was pleased to be able to distract Erin later in the morning.

“Hey, Erin, I just saw a fox trot by with a squirrel dangling from its mouth.”

“Did it look pleased with itself?”

“No. Business as usual.”

Bluebirds have been another happy distraction. This spring a family moved into our bluebird house, and Erin and I delight in the little blue blurs zipping from twig to twig in the oaks and hemlocks.

May 8

We tended to the usual round of things on a day heavy with thinking about Cheri, child of missionaries, and her life. There is no love without fear of when and how love will end, with someone’s decision or someone’s death. So I completed Luther’s Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, from his Large Catechism, with more than the usual wariness and near-rage I have brought to the rest of the book. Life, he tells us, is “nothing else than a state of misery and evil, from which also temptations spring innumerable, we  ought to pray to be delivered from evil unto that end, that temptation and sin may cease together; that thus, the will of God may be done, and that his kingdom may come, unto the praise and glory of his holy name.” After the string of “misery,” “evil,” “temptations,” “evil,” “temptation,” and “sin,” I laughed out loud on arriving at “praise and glory.” But it was rueful laughter, as well as incredulous, because therein were summarized my childhood and adolescence, living as a Southern Baptist in a veiled death cult that spurned life as evil and celebrated the cessation of sin, which can only come with death. It is a desperately compelling and grandiose way to live, always under God’s judgmental eye, always aware of your failings while hoping still for heaven and not the burning abyss. Wherever Cheri is—may it be glory and not the nothingness I suspect—she is beyond pain, evil, temptation, and sin.

May 9

Yesterday, Erin looked at Lottie and said, “As soon as I can put weight on my foot, you’re getting brushed, dog.” Erin usually grooms the dogs every other day, and walking out the front door, I’ll often encounter white clumps of Lottie’s white hair, which she sheds by the bale, and wisps of Jimmy’s hair, which comes off one black strand at a time. It’s a job I have let slide, so the house is hairy, and Erin’s black stretch pants look like she has become a combination of both dogs.

May 10

We went back to Murfreesboro for another post-op checkup this afternoon. As the nurse unrolled the bandages that wound from the tip of Erin’s toes nearly to her knee, she stopped, plucked at the stretch tape, and blurted, “What kind of animal do you own?”

Lottie’s fur had somehow inveigled its way through all the layers of tight winding.

Erin blandly said, “A bison.” The nurse ignored her.

With the bandages removed, the nurse plucked at the dried-out black stitches with tweezers and kept up a commentary, “That’s not a stitch, that’s dog hair. More dog hair. Finally, there’s a stitch. Dog hair.” Jimmy’s black hair is, from this evidence, even more invasive than Lottie’s.

Dr. LaMay entered the room, glanced at Erin’s foot, and said, again, “That looks more like a foot.”

On a light screen, he put up before and after X-rays of the foot so we could appreciate the improvement, which means Erin can now use the walking boot, which will make our lives much easier. The toes in the first X-ray were twisted, turned, and overlapping. Without thinking, I said, “That looks like bones unearthed in a medieval dig.” LaMay jerked his head at me, startled, before he laughed. “I’m glad you said it, not me.”

Before we left, I asked LaMay to look at my big toe, swollen and painful from being stubbed so many times. As he ran his finger along the bony protrusion at the base of the toe, he said, “That looks painful. Lot of arthritis there?”

I’m now scheduled for surgery in October.

May 11

Because Erin is only allowed to go short distances with the walking boot, for the next three weeks I’ll still be getting the dogs out for their first empty-themselves-before-breakfast walk and then their longer walk. But by the time I woke up this morning, the three-days-worth of newspapers on the living-room side table were in the recycle bin, the floors had been Swiffer-ed, and Erin was heading out the door to go to the dry cleaner.

The moment she returned she ordered, “Come on, Lottie. It’s no longer the wild west here,” and she marched the dog outside for a thorough brushing. And so we enter happily into the time between surgeries, before I have to tag out for LaMay to shave down my bunions while Erin steps up to care of the dogs and me until I can walk again. I’m almost looking forward to it.