Spring pig

“A little girl is one thing, a little runty pig is another.” E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White opens his children’s classic with the birth of a litter of spring pigs. One of them, the runt of the litter, will just make for trouble; and so Mr. Arable is poised to do away with it.

“This is the most terrible case of injustice I have ever heard of,” announces Fern, his daughter, the young girl who will save the pig on her own terms.

Thoughts of Fern ran through my head when my younger daughter pulled into the driveway with a large yellow bin sitting on the seat beside her.

“What you got there?” I asked.

Proudly, she pulled the bin from the car and held it down so we could see inside. There, nestled in with old newspapers and several towels, lay a pink spring piglet.

“The sow at the farm had a litter, but she killed all of them except for this little guy. We rescued him from certain death. His name is Lucky, because he’s lucky to be alive.”

She carried the yellow bin into the kitchen and sat it on the floor. From her pocket she pulled a plastic baby bottle, filled with formula. “Wanna feed him?” she asked, handing me the bottle.

I pushed the rubber nipple gently against the piglet’s pink snout. He soon latched on and began to suck and swallow like a hungry newborn.

“How does he get along without his mother?” I asked.

“He’s got his own bed under a heat lamp at the farm. He’s gotta be fed nearly every hour round the clock. I’m usually up with Mr. Christensen anyway, so I offered to take a couple of feeding shifts over the weekend.”

Mr. Christensen is the octogenarian that my daughter takes care of during the week. He’s got Alzheimer’s dementia. My daughter makes his meals, bathes him, helps him get dressed, drives him to the adult daycare program at the assisted living home, and makes sure he gets to his doctors’ appointments on time. She did the same thing for his wife up until she passed away this past February.

Lucky dropped the nipple from his mouth and lay down in the bin. He pushed against the towels with his snout and closed his eyes. For all appearances he looked to be one contented piglet.

“Are you going to keep him here overnight?” I asked my daughter.

“No, he might get cold. He’ll probably do best in his own bed under the heat lamp. I just wanted to stop by and show him to you.”

She picked up the bin with the sleeping piglet inside and carried it back outside to the car. The engine roared to life.

“I’ll drop by sometime next week for dinner,” my daughter said. “I’ve gotta get back to the farm to look in on Mr. Christensen.”

I watched her back down the driveway, negotiating the tight turn into the street. She waved from the open window. In that moment, she seemed supremely happy.

I reckon spring piglets will do that to you. Taking care of older folks who can’t fend for themselves does that as well.

“Lucky” 2013 © Brian T. Maurer

In the wee small hours

My daughter telephoned me at work to let me know that the elderly woman she had been caring for had died in the night.

She was staying with the woman and her husband in their home. The woman had liver cancer; the man suffers from dementia. My daughter cooked them breakfast, helped them bathe and dress, drove them to medical appointments, made sure they got their medications on time, kept the larder stocked.

She heard the woman moan in the night, turned her over on her side, heard the rattle in her throat. She called the hospice nurse first thing in the morning. The nurse came to the house, pronounced the patient, and signed the death certificate. Then she and my daughter bathed and dressed the body.

I could hear the exhaustion in my daughter’s voice as she related these incidents over the phone. I was certain that she had learned quite a lot while taking care of this couple, much more than she would have learned sitting in class at nursing school.

These thoughts ran through my head as I sat listening to an old Frank Sinatra LP recording after dinner. The album belongs to our next door nonagenarian neighbor; the old turntable was a gift from the elderly woman who died.

I sipped my coffee as Sinatra belted out the words to “All the Way” and softly crooned “In the wee small hours of the morning.”

In the wee small hours of the morning
While the whole wide world is fast asleep
You lie awake and think about the girl
And never ever think of counting sheep.

When your lonely heart has learned its lesson
You’d be hers if only she would call
In the wee small hours of the morning
That’s the time you miss her most of all.

Literary critic George Steiner opines that “Death is closely related to what I call real music: a certain sense of the end of time and of personal life.”

“When somebody asks how one can have an intense meaning which one doesn’t understand, music is the one place to turn for an answer.”

Right now those words seem to make infinite sense.

Help me to not be afraid

Like all 4-year-olds, Skipper had his likes and dislikes, his favorite activities and things he would rather not do. Like most 4-year-olds, Skipper’s world consisted of family, friends, pre-school and home. And like few 4-year-olds, Skipper’s world came to a grinding halt when his doctor diagnosed him with a brain tumor.

Because of its location, the tumor was operable. The neurosurgical team labored over him for eight hours and succeeded in resecting the growth. Because the pathologist was unable to differentiate the cellular type, the slides were sent out to a world-renowned regional cancer center for review by the experts.  The results came back equivocal.

The parents were given the option of a short course of local radiation, an extended course of chemotherapy, or observation. Because of the side effect profiles, they elected to watch and wait. Unfortunately, the growth recurred.

This time round Skipper was enrolled in a chemotherapeutic protocol. Periodically, he would receive four days of toxic medications. These rounds were scheduled at monthly intervals. The initial treatment regimen knocked him down, but soon he was up and active again. The second round was worse. The morning before the trip to the hospital, Skipper’s grandmother was helping him to put on his socks when he made his small request: “Please, Grandma, help me to not be afraid.”

What do you say to a 4-year-old? What sort of reassurance do you offer? How far out on the limb do you go?

At that age, reassurance takes on the mantel of love. Words help, touch helps, doing an activity together helps. We work with whatever tools we have.

Sometime later after I heard this story, I drove to a local bookstore to browse the shelves in the children’s section. It proved difficult to locate a specific book, because they are categorized under different genres according to the perceptions of the adults who work in these areas. For the young child, a book is a story—nothing more, nothing less. Its category means nothing—it is only the story that holds meaning.

I made my selection and paid at the register. I laid the parcel on the seat beside me as I climbed into my car. I hand carried the book to the house that I had last visited years ago. Tucked in among the towering pines, it was still there, just as I had remembered it: neat and trim, well cared for.

With a short stammer of inadequate words I placed the gift into the hands of the grandmother I had come to know over the past decade. She invited me to come in, and we sat among the plants in the conservatory and talked a long while about children and grandchildren, parenting and grandparenting, love and tough love.

She gifted me a poem by one of her favorite writers, Wendell Berry.

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

At my age, reassurance takes on the form of caring. We learn to care for one another as best as we can, with whatever tools we can muster.