Farewell, Matilda

A month ago my dog died. Matilda had been my companion for almost 11 years.

Matilda as a young beauty

When I adopted her at the Oregon Humane Society, she was just one year old. But already she was the mother of nine. Her previous owner had gotten rid of her because she was pregnant. The OHS rescued her from a kill shelter and put her in foster care until her puppies were weaned. She was separated from them and put up for adoption, along with her puppies.

That’s when I met her. Her photo on a page of adoptable dogs on the OHS website carefully concealed her still large breasts that had only recently been retired from nursing puppies. I hesitated. That’s when she put her front paws in my lap and looked earnestly into my eyes. “She likes you,” said the attendant.

That may have been true but the next thing the attendant said was something I very soon learned to be false. “She’s a barkless breed,” she announced. “I have never heard her bark.”

I said I would take her home, whether she was barkless or not, but I was advised against going to see her puppies. “Then you’ll be taking home 10 dogs,” said the attendant.

Matilda and my granddaughter

Matilda was part Akita and part Australian cattle dog. She was super smart and so beautiful I got used to people stopping me to tell me what a gorgeous dog I had. It never got old. I just said, “Thank you.”

Her name when I adopted her was Faith. I learned that she had lived on a farm in Central Oregon with a couple of other dogs. I assume their names were Hope and Charity. My neighbor suggested I name her Matilda to honor her Australian relatives. The name “Matilda” better suited my sassy gal than “Faith.”

She had a hard time adjusting to life with me in my apartment. At first she kept searching for her babies, whimpering and pawing at possible hiding places. That was heartbreaking for me. Also, she couldn’t bear to be left alone. Her separation anxiety proved to be quite destructive. I had to replace the door frame several times.

Matilda on a walk in her old neighborhood in Portland
Matilda & Newton

But in time she came to love our routine, especially her daily walks to the local dog park where she liked to climb atop a picnic table, as if it were her throne. She was indeed regal.

Three years ago she and I moved far from Oregon to Indiana, to be near my son and his family. There were no dog parks here, but she gained a best pal in Cory’s little dog, Newton.

Granddaughter Octavia and daughter Meriwether walking Matilda and Newton.
Meriwether’s last hug

I figured she had three good years left, but fate ordered otherwise. She fell victim to kidney disease and lost all interest in eating. At our last visit to the vet, he encouraged us to let her go, to free her from agony. My daughter and I were with her as she breathed her last.

I was blessed to have Matilda in my life for 11 lovely years. May she reign supreme in the dog park in the sky.

Bumped off the treadmill of life

“Sometimes we assume that normal is the treadmill in the direction that we’re going. When you have this bump that takes you off your track, sometimes you realize, that wasn’t the path I was supposed to be on anyway.”

That’s what a woman lawyer told me when I interviewed her recently for an article for the Oregon State Bar Bulletin. It was a follow-up article of one I wrote for the same publication just before my move east, during the pandemic.

For the original June 2021 article, “Demands Drive Women to the Brink,” I interviewed a dozen Oregon lawyers (including just one man), about how they were coping with Covid. As might have been expected, all reported that their lives were in chaos, thanks to the unprecedented demands of remote work, home schooling, caretaking of youngsters and elders and at-home confinement of entire families during lockdown.

The update

For the update, I interviewed eight women. Nearly all reported major life changes since the pandemic. One got a divorce, one took early retirement, several switched to part-time work, and two stopped practicing the law altogether.

The woman who described her metaphorical bump off the treadmill had realized she was shortchanging her personal and family life by continuing to pursue her legal career. So she gave it all up and retired.

When I told the editor what I was hearing from the eight women, he was truly surprised. He had certainly expected resilience from these polished professionals, but the news that many of them had radically redesigned their personal and work lives came as a shock.

The take-away

The main point of the story was that most of these women reported that since readjusting their lives, they had never been happier. But until the pandemic turned their lives upside down, they hadn’t seen the folly of trying to maintain the status quo of a life that wasn’t satisfying to them.

I thought back to how I handled the pandemic and the lifestyle changes I made. Of course, it was no small thing that I left my birthplace to make a new home in the Midwest. Now I live next door to my son and his family, so in some ways it’s like I never left home. But the lesson of these Oregon women lawyers (and some ex-lawyers, now) is a good reminder to occasionally check if you’re steering your treadmill onto the right path in life — or if you’re due for a wake-up bump.

He Ain’t Heavy

My brother died a year ago. Or was it a little more than a year ago? Or a little less?

All we know for sure is that the police, responding to a welfare check requested by my sister, broke down his kitchen door on Halloween Day and followed the smell to his bedroom, where he’d been lying dead for weeks. As long as a month, the police surmised, but judging from the recollections of friends who last spoke to him, probably longer.

David P. Hauser Oct. 1949 – Oct. 2022

What I know for sure is that he failed to send me a birthday card on September 25. It was not like him to forget a birthday, and he usually sent one of the cards that various wildlife organizations had sent him as thanks for his generous donations.

I thought of calling, but then worried that it would sound rude: “Where’s my birthday card?” A few weeks passed before I sent him a newsy email without mentioning the birthday he had missed. No answer.

So it wasn’t until Halloween, when my sister called from Portland to tell me the results of the welfare check she had requested, that I learned that David Paul Hauser, my little brother, had died all alone in his secluded rural home.

A few years earlier, before my move to Indiana, he and I had gone hiking along the Columbia River. As we trudged along he casually asked if I would serve as his executor. At age 72, he thought it was time he made a will. He also told me he would name me as a beneficiary.

So, a few months after his body was discovered, I flew to Portland to attend his memorial, to meet with the lawyer and tour David’s house with a Realtor. The house, ready to be sold, bore no evidence that my brother’s decomposing body earlier had lain in the back bedroom.

David was a very caring and generous man but when it came to his own health, he was negligent. He had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, but he told my sister he had trouble changing his lifestyle. From all appearances, he did not watch his diet or take prescribed meds. The last people who talked to him said he sounded confused and disoriented. Apparently, as he began to slip into a diabetic coma, he lay down on his bed, never to rise again.

After David’s memorial, my son, Cory, and I took possession of David’s truck in order to drive it to our home in Indiana. Entrusted to me were his cremains, the several pounds of bone fragments remaining after his body was cremated. My sister had already poured some of them into the soil at his home in Amboy, Washington. Cory and I decided to take the rest of David on a final road trip (an activity he loved), leaving parts of him in different locations along the way.

Our first David deposit was in Washington State, on the east side of the Columbia River after it turns northward. Next we scattered some of the cremains on a snow bank in the mountains of Idaho. In Montana a meadowlark sang as we left David in a field near the town of Rosebud. Early one morning, in sub-zero weather, we left a bit of David in Fargo, North Dakota.

We hurried to get back home, never stopping to continue our task in either Minnesota, Wisconsin or Illinois, arriving late that afternoon in Chesterton, Indiana. I took home with me the rest of David, promising to find a perfect spot for the remains of the cremains.

I didn’t attend to it until after David’s estate had been closed this July. I had many months earlier requested that the post office forward all his mail to me, so I had been getting almost daily reminders that he needed a final resting place in the form of scores of solicitation letters from the many organizations he had supported. The letters requested that he buy a heifer for a village in Africa, that he pay for an indigent person’s Thanksgiving meal, that he pay vet bills for abused pets, that he continue to support the Democratic Party, Planned Parenthood and other liberal causes, and of course to continue his subscriptions to magazines supporting wildlife, national parks, birds, etc. The oddest request, I thought, was for him to sponsor Holocaust survivors. I can’t imagine there are too many left to sponsor, but I assume David gladly contributed to that cause too.

My brother’s sixth and final resting place, with a lovely view of Lake Michigan

On a clear and sunny summer day I leashed my dogs, placed the bag of cremains in my back pack and drove the five miles from Chesterton to Indiana Dunes State Park. After a short hike, bearing my brother on my back, I found a high dune overlooking Lake Michigan. I thought David would have loved the view. The dogs rested in the cool sand as I furtively dug a hole and then dumped the small amount of cremains into the embrace of a sand dune.

Thinking of my brother now lying in various places along two-thirds of the width of the nation, a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet comes to mind, as Juliet wishes that after Romeo’s death he will become a multitude of stars and shine down from above.

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Dear David is now mixed, not with stars, but with soil and sand, so that he will make the face of earth so fine . . .