THE PET LOVERS' CALENDAR

         An alarm went off in my head as I dozed on the couch at midday. It is a cloudy Sunday. I have no appointments, no one is coming to the house. It is too damp to mow and I have spent the morning working and am feeling self-satisfied.

         The dog must have sensed the alarm for she is at the window barking at the outside world. There is nothing out there but the green lawn, the road and the trees and shrubs across the road. I get up, take her to the door and let her out. She sniffs about, squats and pees and heads back to the flowerbed to sniff some more.

         A minivan draws to a stop out on the road; the dog senses this and begins to move toward it. I grab her collar. The people in the van look at the house and drive on. We go back into the house. A desire to look at last year's calendar that hung on the wall over the phone hits me. I am sure this urge was the alarm that woke me.

         I go to last July and see the appointment for the heart doctor scheduled on the 6th. It is in Morgan's handwriting and written quite legibly. The day before that she saw Bambi, her psychologist, at 3pm. I remember now, Bambi was alarmed at the swelling in her legs that had begun in late June. I glance down the calendar and see Bambi's name every Wednesday at 3pm and remember attending each meeting with Morgan.

         The memories flood back. We sat in the heart doctor's examining room and heard the nurses outside the door telling him how bad her legs looked. We were there most of the afternoon. They had performed an echocardiogram and now he came in and gave us the news that her heart failure had spread to the right side of her heart.

         He had found left-side failure in February, and this after she was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation in November 1999. Now he suggested he admit her to the hospital on Monday to drain the fluid from her body intravenously. It says 'hospital' on the calendar for the 10th. She came home on Saturday the 15th, her mood glum from learning that her condition was inoperable. Her mind was beginning the journey into what her psychiatrist called delirium.

         The 19th was a busy day: Bambi at three and Dr. Schaeffer, her regular doctor, at five. I don't recall the latter appointment, but Bambi, who was lithe, blond and young, assured her that heart failure did not mean she would drop dead at any minute but rather that her heart was wearing out. For a couple of days this kept her going.

         She marked 'me too' on the 21st where I had written that I was going to see the clients in Pennsylvania. She came as far as her mother's house in New Jersey where she and her mother spent the day in the barn collecting her old canvases. Her mother was selling the house; that event is notated on the 28th.

         The twenty-first and the Saturday that followed were probably the last days I could say she had a sound mind and was excited about living. August shows little but appointments with Bambi, the heart doctor, and the psychiatrist who worked with Bambi. The handwriting is now mine.

         It doesn't show the day I was supposed to take her to the emergency room at Columbia Memorial Hospital, in order to have her admitted to a mental health facility, but by mistake I took her to Albany Memorial Hospital where they admitted her because of her breathing problems. There she met Dr. Podi, a new psychiatrist, a man I came to respect.

         An appointment with Bambi is listed for September 13th. She missed this because after lunch that day she took three days of pills at once. I found her holding the organizer no more than a minute later, yelled at her to get in the bathroom and put her finger down her throat and called her doctor and then 9-1-1. On the way to the hospital I left a message to cancel her appointment. Bambi reached me on my cell phone in the ER to tell me that she and the psychiatrist had planned to check Morgan into the mental health facility that day.

         Her stomach was pumped, but as she was wheeled to ICU for observation, she went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. I had left by then to welcome her mother who was coming for a visit, not knowing of the calamity.

         She recovered only to develop a lung inflammation called B.O.O.P while waiting to be transferred to Dr. Podi's clinic in Troy and spent another three weeks in the ICU unit. The calendar goes blank but for notations that the oxygen man would be coming to take machine on the ninth of October, and for the little stickers that indicate heartworm day for the dog.

         Nothing indicates the day [October 23rd] when she was transferred to Troy, where Dr. Podi told me she was not psychotic but would not be able to be left alone because she could not think consecutively, or the day the doctor on her ward told me how bad her heart was. Only after Thanksgiving and her return home do the days become crowded with appointments again: doctors, physical therapists, visiting nurses, blood drawings at the lab.

         My father wrote down every check in a ledger book running from May 1950 until just before he died in 1993. I read through them and learned only that the forty-three years proved he would be a cipher to historians. This calendar leaps out at me, stirring up the past. I could go on to this year, but there is no need. The New York State Department of Health made the final entry.

Valatie July 8, 2001