Originally published by Evergreen Newspapers

 

 

 

 

Shorty is a courtly cat.

 

Fluffy and golden-eyed and comfortably plump, Shorty is at all times sober in his demeanor, and wears that perpetual look of supreme self-satisfaction distinctive to the finer classes. Shorty is also a generous cat, and one that doesn’t forget a kindness. Once or twice a year, Shorty dispatches a trusted representative to Mount Evans Home Health Care & Hospice bearing his sincere and tangible regards.

“He’s a sweet man, very friendly, and he always has ‘a peso from Shorty’”, smiles Debbie Schwartz, who accepts each gift in the winking spirit with which it’s given. “His wife was a Mount Evans hospice patient, and ever since she died he comes in once or twice a year with a donation from Shorty. Never anything huge, but always something, and always in person.”

After gratefully receiving Shorty’s benefactions for a time, Schwartz impudently requested a photograph of the reclusive patron. A gracious cat, Shorty was pleased to send one along with his very next bequest.

“You can see from the picture he’s a cat of great dignity,” says Schwartz, with a twinkle. “The man told me it’s his job to take good care of Shorty, because Shorty took such good care of his wife. And he said it was very important to do something for Mount Evans, because Mount Evans took such good care of all of them. And that’s why we always get ‘a peso from Shorty.’”

 

 

 

If Mount Evans doesn’t have much official interaction with the lower orders, it has a whole lot of the informal kind.

 

That’s hardly surprising in a semi-rural mountain area where pets are as common as pine trees and come in a wide variety of people-friendly shapes and sizes. Sallie Wandling remembers one dark and stormy winter’s day when she found herself marooned among the beasts of the field.

“Long before cell phones, texting and twitter, I was visiting a patient who lived on a ranch in Pine,” recalls Wandling, now Mount Evans’ director of community relations. “He was elderly, and a bit grumpy, and he always answered the door in his underwear, even on this day when it was snowing.”

Still, even cranky old exhibitionists deserve proper care, so Wandling troopered on. As bad luck would have it, things only got less comfortable at the visit’s conclusion.

“I must have left my lights on, so my car battery died,” she says. “I went back in and used his phone, but it wasn’t a place I really wanted to wait it out.  I was seriously stuck, sitting in my car, in the snow, waiting for a staff member to come and help me jump my car.”

And yet, as alone as she was, Wandling had plenty of company.

“While I waited a good hour, the patient’s cattle gathered around my car, licking the salt off my windows while my car swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the snow and wind.”

 

 

 

Compassion is a constant value, like the speed of light, or gravity. As a general rule, people who have it can’t un-have it. True compassion can’t be turned on and off at will, or selectively applied. It’s in the bones.

When Mount Evans intake coordinator Evelyn Newton’s 17-year-old cat, Spirit, began her final surrender to time and decay, Newton did both what her heart commanded, and what she was trained to do. She turned the principles of hospice to Spirit. If it was a natural act of compassion, it also imparted an unexpected lesson on the constant value of mortality.

“I was amazed at how similar her journey was to the patients I had taken care of in the past,” Newton says. “She would have good days followed by days of sleep. Her energy level slowly decreased until she slept most of the time. She quit eating solid food, then canned food, and finally drank only water. She lost weight. During this period she found comfort, and could still purr, when lying in our laps.

“Her final days were typical – sleep, difficult to arouse, and a change in breathing habits. The last two days my husband and I took turns holding her on our chest. The last night of 2012 she took her final breath while being held by my husband. She never showed any signs of pain or distress during the whole process.

“I do believe that, in old age, all of God’s creatures die the same way. They just need love, care and support during the process.”