Originally published by Evergreen Newspapers

Robin’s hair was white, and short, and terribly thin. Her drawn face was gray, and deeply seamed by suffering. Robin was surely dying, but at least she wasn’t dying alone.

She had a Mount Evans hospice nurse who visited often, and then more often, and then nearly every day, helping to manage Robin’s pain and give her what ease might be possible for a 61-year-old woman enduring the final stages of ovarian cancer.

And Robin had Jamocha.

“Jamocha was a 13-year-old golden retriever,” recalls Julie Nelson, a registered nurse and Mount Evans intake coordinator. “Robin was a single gal and lived way up on Squaw Pass. She’d been on her own for a long time, except for Jamocha, and they apparently had a really special bond. I don’t know exactly what her connection with that dog was, but Jamocha was like her soul mate.”

However strong that bond, it seemed certain that the cancer must prove stronger. One morning Robin’s nurse called Nelson, hoping for a favor.

“Robin had reached the point where she couldn’t really keep Jamocha at home anymore,” Nelson explains. “Her nurse wanted to know if I’d be willing to take him on as a hospice dog.”

Truth is, Robin’s nurse didn’t exactly phone Nelson at random. The Nelson family’s single-minded affection for golden retrievers was no secret around the Mount Evans office, and their Conifer home seemed as good a fit for Jamocha as could likely be found. Even so, Nelson hesitated.

“We’d recently lost a 13-year-old golden we raised from a puppy,” she says. “It was pretty hard on everybody, and I wasn’t sure we wanted to take on another one right away, especially one that old.”

If Nelson had to think it over, she didn’t have to think too long. The chances of somebody adopting Jamocha were slim to none, and the alternative was simply unacceptable. The nurse delivered Robin’s cherished companion to Nelson at her Mount Evans desk that very afternoon, and by nightfall Jamocha was already an indispensable part of the Nelson household.

“We’ve only owned goldens, so it took about 10 seconds to fall in love. He fit right into our family.”

It didn’t hurt that Jamocha chose that moment to become particularly loveable.

“The weird thing is, he was 13, but right away he started acting like a puppy. For that whole week he was very energetic, and very playful. Jamocha played with all of our toys – all of them – and ate an amazing amount of food.”

It was too good to last, of course, and it didn’t.

“One day he just seemed to lose his appetite, and he lost his energy. I talked to Robin’s nurse on the phone that night. When I told her Jamocha wasn’t doing well, she said she wasn’t surprised because his mom was dying. That was the day Robin entered the final stages before death. She was actively dying.”

So much had Jamocha aged in those few hours that by evening he could no longer manage the short trip upstairs to his bed without help. Rather than make him try, Nelson lugged his dog-bed downstairs to the living room. And rather than see her beloved new friend sleep by himself in a strange place, Nelson’s youngest child, 11-year-old Carrie, asked permission for a sleepover.

“Carrie had known that dog for a grand total of 10 days, but she wanted to sleep downstairs with him so he wouldn’t be lonely.”

That night, Nelson tucked Carrie into a sleeping bag laid on the floor next to Jamocha and went upstairs to bed. By morning, the dog’s condition had plainly become grave.

“He wouldn’t eat at all. He just laid there like he was sick.”

It was Carrie who first suggested a possible reason for Jamocha’s abrupt decline.

“This is the crazy part,” Nelson says. “When I came down in the morning she said ‘I think Robin died.’ I asked her why she would think that. She said ‘I think I saw her last night.’”

A thoughtful girl, and not one normally given to flights of fancy, Carrie explained that she’d been awakened by the soft sound of a woman’s voice. Lifting her head, she’d clearly observed a stranger with thick, shoulder-length brown hair seated in a chair next to Jamocha. The woman spoke in hushed tones, and the dog responded with absolute attention.

“Carrie said she couldn’t hear what the lady was saying, but Jamocha obviously knew her.”

Then, in that uncomplicated and perplexing way peculiar to children, Carrie had merely rolled over and gone back to sleep. And that morning, with her daughter’s curious account still fresh in her mind, Nelson called Robin’s nurse.

“For whatever reason, Carrie was right. Robin had died during the night.”

Jamocha never again rose from his dog-bed, or took another bite of food. He simply closed his eyes, and before the sun reached full height slipped quietly away.

“We were all crying,” Nelson says. “My husband said ‘Promise me we’ll never do this again.’ In that short time Jamocha had become a true part of our family. But as painful as it was when he died, it was an amazing experience for all of us.”

Carrie may get her practical nature from her mom. While Nelson has seen her share of remarkable things in her years as a nurse, she certainly wasn’t ready to accept her daughter’s strange account as concrete fact. Then again, she wasn’t quite ready to dismiss it, either.

“Within 48 hours Jamocha went from really good health for a dog his age, to dead,” she says. “That’s got to make you think.”

With a little digging, Nelson was able to locate a photograph of two women, one of them Robin in younger, better days. She’d been an attractive woman with thick, brown tresses cut to the shoulder. A few days later, and without revealing anything about its subjects, Nelson nonchalantly ran the photo past Carrie.

“Right away she said ‘That’s her, mom. That’s the lady who was talking to Jamocha.’”

Sometimes little girls see things that aren’t true. Sometimes old dogs die just because they’re old. And sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where the truth lies, or why things happen the way they sometimes do. Thinking back on her one-time best friend, Carrie is plagued by no such doubts.

“To this day she swears Robin came to get Jamocha.”

Originally published by Evergreen Newspapers

The folks at Mount Evans couldn’t long endure their calling’s intense emotional rigors if they weren’t compassionate by nature.

A nurse, social worker or volunteer may attend an ailing patient for years, spending countless hours in their home, easing their hurts, seeing to their comfort, listening to stories of better days, and, too often, quietly marking the course of their final decline. Professional interest inevitably becomes friendship, which blossoms into much deeper affection.

“You become a part of their family,” explains certified nursing assistant Brenda Barrett, a Mount Evans mainstay for 27 years. “And it’s like you adopt them into your own family, too.”

In many cases the caregiver’s adopted family includes a beloved pet. While caregivers are under no legal obligation to care for a patient’s pet, they may come to feel a strong personal one: You do for family.

“I once buried a client’s dog for her. She adored that dog, and it meant a lot to her that it had a real burial. There was just nobody else to do it.

“It’s not just a pet to them,” Barrett says. “Near the end, it can be their closest, dearest companion, and they worry a lot about what will happen to it after they die.

About 18 years ago, Barrett entered the home of a Buffalo Creek client for the first time.

“Her cat was sitting on her tray table when I walked in, eating breakfast off of her plate,” Barrett smiles. “It was an old, fat, gray shorthair. It never meowed, it just made this awful croaking noise. I worked with that woman for more than four years, and when the end got close she became really concerned about what would happen to her cat. Her family wouldn’t take it because they wanted to travel, and she was heartbroken that it would probably wind up in the pound. I mean, who wants a 12-year-old cat?

“It was very upsetting for her, so I said ‘I’ll take it.’ I’m not really a cat-person – they’re too independent for me – but I figured it only had a couple of years left, anyway. It lived to be 26. I had it for a whole other life. The last week of its life it lived on my bed. I fed it with an eye-dropper. I’m still not a cat-person, but I did love that cat.”

For the record, Barrett is a bird-person.

“I had a pair of peach-faced love birds, and I had a conure parrot named Chili. He was kind of bite-y.”

A long while back, Barrett took on a new client named Mary, an ailing 83-year-old Floridian who’s family brought her to Evergreen so she could spend her last days among kin.

“She could be cantankerous, and she was definitely spunky, and very independent,” Barrett recalls. “Her nickname was ‘Casino Kate’ because she used to coerce her family into taking her to Blackhawk.”

Along with a lively spirit, Mary brought with her to Evergreen a 15-year-old grey conure parrot named Misty. Painted in shades of slate and ash, Misty had bright yellow eyes and a companionable gift of gab.

“That bird was her whole life,” says Barrett. “The day before Mary died her daughter asked me if I knew anyone who wanted a bird. It took me about 30 seconds to say ‘I’ll take her.’ Then I immediately thought ‘What did I just do?’ Parrots can live to be 75 or 100 years old. I basically made a lifetime commitment.”

Then again, Barrett’s life’s work is an exercise in commitment. After making that somewhat hasty promise, Barrett broke the good news to Mary.

“She was failing rather quickly, but I think she was afraid to go because she was worried Misty would end up in a shelter. When I told her that Misty would have a good home with me, she was so happy, and so relieved. It felt good that I could give her that peace.”

It took Barrett’s dog, Baby, a little while to warm up to the household’s new chatterbox.

“Misty can bark like three different dogs, and that bothered Baby at first.”

But pup and parrot are fast friends, now, or at least respectful cohabitants, and these days Misty reserves most of her verbal tricks for Barrett.

“She beeps like the stove timer, and she creaks like a squeaky door opening. And if I sleep a little late in the morning she’ll say ‘peekaboo!’ until I wake up.”

Misty also has more conventional manners of expression. “It’s not going to rain,” Misty will announce, regardless of observable weather. “I can talk. Can you fly?” And Misty can be indelicate. “Ya’ gonna’ go poopy? Go poopy!”

“I’m trying to change ‘Go poopy’ to ‘Go Broncos’,” winces Barrett.

And always, Misty is a poignant, sometimes even uncanny reminder of a feisty woman long since departed.

“Misty laughs like Mary, and coughs like Mary,” Barrett says.

And, every now and then, Misty asks, “Where are you, Mary?”

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.”