Part 2: I Quit Nursing After 30 Years Because I Couldn’t Hold Another Dying Hand. Then My Daughter Brought Me a Dog.
I live in a small two-bedroom house in South Euclid. My husband Ron died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Maya was already out of the house by then. It has been me, mostly, for six years.
After I retired, I stopped answering the phone.
I stopped going to the grocery store during the day. I’d wait until 10 p.m., when the aisles were empty. I stopped opening the door when neighbors knocked. I stopped watching television because every other commercial was for a hospital or a medication or a life insurance company with a voiceover about the moments that matter.
I read a lot. Old paperback mysteries. I liked them because the endings were always tidy.
Maya came by every Sunday. She would bring groceries. She would sit at my kitchen table. She would talk to me about her work and her boyfriend and her cat and she would try, gently, to ask how I was doing.
I could not answer her.
I did not have words for it.
I felt like a glass that had been filled to the brim for thirty years and then knocked over. I was not broken. I was just — empty. And I did not want anybody to come near me with a pitcher.
Maya asked me in April if I had thought about therapy.
I said yes. I had thought about it. I had not gone.
She asked me in May if I had thought about any support groups for nurses.
I said yes. I had thought about it. I had not gone.
She asked me in June, very careful, if I had thought about a pet.
I said no.
I said, “Maya, I have cared for people my whole life. I don’t want to care for anything else. I don’t have it in me.”
She nodded. She didn’t argue. She kissed the top of my head on her way out and said she loved me.
I thought the conversation was over.
It was not.
Maya showed up at my door on a Saturday morning in late June.
She was carrying a leash.
At the end of the leash was a Golden Retriever. Two years old. Pale cream fur, almost white. Brown eyes. One of those wide soft faces that always looks slightly embarrassed. His tail was wagging low, slow, uncertain.
I opened the screen door about six inches.
I said, “Maya. No.”
She said, “Mom. Listen to me.”
I said, “I told you. I can’t.”
She said, “Mom. I didn’t bring him for you to take care of.”
She paused. She looked at me through the gap in the door.
She said, “I brought him to take care of you.“
I did not know what to say.
She said, “Just let him in for an hour. Just today. If you want me to take him home at the end, I will.”
I looked at the dog.
He looked at me.
He did not pull at the leash. He did not bark. He did not whine. He just stood on my porch with his soft embarrassed face and his slow uncertain tail, and he looked at me like he was waiting to be told whether he was allowed.
I opened the door.
He walked in. He walked past me. He did not investigate the house. He did not sniff the couch. He went straight to the living room rug, lay down in the middle of it, put his chin on his front paws, and looked up at me.
Waiting.
Not for food. Not for attention. Not for anything, as far as I could tell.
Just waiting. In case I needed something.
I stood in the doorway of my own living room.
I don’t remember deciding to.
I just — sat down on the floor next to him.
I did not touch him. I just sat.
He did not move toward me.
He waited.
Maya made tea in my kitchen. I could hear her. She did not come into the living room for forty-five minutes.
By the time she did, the dog had inched himself, slowly, imperceptibly, closer to me. His big cream body was pressed against my left hip. His chin was resting on my thigh.
I had my hand on his head.
I did not remember putting it there.
Maya sat down across from me on the rug. She did not say anything. She just drank her tea.
After a long time she said, quiet, “Mom. This is Sunny. He’s yours if you want him.”
I said, “I don’t want to care for him.”
She said, “I know. That’s not his job.”
She said, “His job is to care for you.”
I started crying.
I had not cried — not really cried — in four months.
Sunny did not move. He just let me put my face in his fur.
I kept Sunny.
Of course I did.
Maya had known. She had known when she showed up on my porch that morning. She had known when she paid for his training. She had known that if she could just get him across my threshold, I would not be able to send him back.
Sunny had been trained as a therapy dog. He had finished a program in Akron three months earlier and had been waiting for placement. Maya had been on the phone with the coordinator since February.
She said later she had been terrified it wasn’t going to work.
It worked.
Sunny slept at the foot of my bed the first night. I woke up at 4 a.m. — my usual 4 a.m., the bad 4 a.m. — and the faces of people I had lost were not on the ceiling.
Sunny was on the bed.
He lifted his head. He looked at me. He put his chin on my shin.
I fell back asleep.
I slept until seven.
That had not happened in four years.
The first month, he and I mostly just existed together. I walked him twice a day. I fed him. I brushed him. He was not demanding. He was not anxious. He did not need training. He had already been given everything he needed to be. Maya had picked him because he was calm. Because he was low-maintenance. Because he would let me exist at the pace I could exist at.
Slowly, without meaning to, I started doing things I had stopped doing.
I went to the grocery store at noon because I wanted to walk him past a park on the way.
I answered the phone when Maya called.
I sat on my front porch in the evenings with Sunny’s head on my foot, and I watched my neighbors come home from work, and I waved at them when they waved at me.
By September, I was laughing out loud at things again. I hadn’t noticed it happening until I heard myself do it.
I thought that was the story.
I thought: my daughter gave me a dog, and he gave me back to myself.
That would have been enough.
It was not where it ended.
In October, I got a letter in the mail from my old hospital.
I almost threw it away without opening it.
It was from the volunteer services department. A form letter. They were recruiting therapy dog teams for the new pet therapy program. They had sent it to retired staff because of the institutional connection. Somebody — I do not know who — had put me on a list.
I stared at it for a long time.
I put it on the kitchen counter. I made dinner. I walked Sunny. I came back. The letter was still there.
I called the number.
A woman named Reshma answered. She was kind. She explained the program. She explained that certified therapy dogs and their handlers visited patients in ICU, oncology, and long-term care. She explained the training and the vetting process.
She said, “Do you have a dog who might be a good fit?”
I said, “I do.”
She said, “Are you a medical professional by any chance? It helps with ICU placements.”
I said, “Yes. I was an ICU nurse here for thirty years.”
The line went quiet for a second.
Then she said, “Oh. Marion. I know who you are. Are you — are you sure you want to come back into this building?”
I was quiet for a long time.
Then I said, “I don’t know. But I want to bring him. I think he’s supposed to be there.”
She said, “Come in on Tuesday. Both of you.”
I hung up.
I sat on the floor of my kitchen. Sunny lay down next to me. I put my head on his side.
I said, out loud, “I don’t know if I can do this, buddy.”
He did not move.
He just breathed, steady, slow, the way he always breathes.
On Tuesday morning, I put on a pair of slacks and a clean blouse and I drove to the hospital I had walked out of eighteen months earlier and I parked in the visitor lot because I did not have a staff badge anymore.
Sunny walked in next to me on a loose lead.
The lobby smelled exactly the same.
I almost turned around.
I didn’t.
Three weeks into my volunteer training, they cleared me for ICU.
My first assignment was a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Harriet. She had metastatic lung cancer. She had been admitted for end-of-life care. She had two daughters who were flying in from different states. Neither of them was going to arrive in time.
The charge nurse — a young woman I did not know, because everyone I had worked with had moved on — told me, quiet, “She keeps asking for somebody to sit with her.”
I nodded.
I walked into the room with Sunny on a lead.
Harriet was in the bed. She was small. Her hair was gone. She had the thin paper skin that comes with a body that is done. She looked at me.
I said, “Hi, Harriet. I’m Marion. This is Sunny. Would you like us to sit with you for a while?”
She looked at Sunny.
Her face changed.
It is the same face I have seen three hundred and eighty-two times.
The one where a person who is alone realizes, for a second, that they are not.
I helped Sunny up onto the side of the bed. He lay down next to her, his body long against hers, his head on her chest. She lifted her hand — it was shaking — and she put it on his head.
She closed her eyes.
I stood by the bedside. My whole career, I had stood in this exact spot. Three hundred and eighty-two times. I had been the one holding the hand. I had been the one saying the words. I had been the one carrying it home.
This time I was not the one holding her.
Sunny was.
And I did not have to do the thing that had finally broken me after thirty years. I did not have to be the only warmth in the room. I did not have to be the only thing standing between her and the enormous loneliness of dying.
Sunny was doing it.
I was just there. To open the door. To bring him in.
I stood by the bed with tears running down my face. Quietly. No sound. I did not try to stop them.
Harriet’s thumb moved, slow, across Sunny’s fur.
After a long time she said, without opening her eyes, “Thank you.”
I did not know if she was talking to me or to him.
It did not matter.
Her daughters made it. Both of them. They got there at 6 p.m. Harriet passed at 9:40 that night. Sunny and I had left at five. I had not been in the room when she died.
For the first time in thirty years, I had not been the last warm thing next to a dying stranger.
I had been allowed to leave.
I gave Reshma my number at the front desk. I told her I would come back Thursday.
I cried on and off for the entire drive home.
Not the old crying.
A different crying.
Sunny and I volunteer at the hospital three days a week now.
It has been fourteen months.
We have sat at thirty-one bedsides. We have been with nine people at the moment they died. I have stopped counting again. I have decided I do not need to count anymore.
I don’t stand in the exact spot I used to stand in. I stand back a little. I watch Sunny do the part I used to do. I watch patients who cannot speak reach for his head. I watch sons and daughters who have not slept in four days put their foreheads against his ribs and finally cry.
I do the small things now. I refill the water cup. I adjust the pillow. I dim the light. I tell the family there is no right way to do this. I tell them to talk to the patient even if the patient can’t answer. I tell them touch is the last thing to go.
I know all of this because I did it alone for thirty years.
I tell it now with a Golden Retriever at my feet.
I gave a talk at a nursing conference last month. They asked me about compassion fatigue. They asked me how I came back from it. They asked me what finally let me do this work again.
I said, “For thirty years I cared for people by myself. I didn’t have a partner. I had colleagues, but not a partner — not in the room, not at the bedside, not in the moment. I thought that was what nursing was. I thought I was supposed to be the only one.”
I said, “Sunny does the hardest part. He shows people that love does not need language. All I have to do is open the door.”
Somebody in the back row started crying. I didn’t call on her. I just let her cry.
I know that crying.
I did it for a long time.
Last week Maya came over for Sunday dinner.
We sat on the porch afterward. Sunny was on the top step. The sun was going down.
She said, “Mom. Can I ask you something?”
I said yes.
She said, “How did you know he was the right dog?”
I thought about it for a while.
I said, “He didn’t ask anything of me.”
I said, “He just stayed.”
Maya nodded.
She said, “That’s what I knew you needed.”
I put my hand on Sunny’s back.
He exhaled.
I said, “Thank you, baby.”
I was not talking to Maya.
Tag a nurse who needs to read this — or someone who loves one.
