A Profound Experience with Dogs at a Writer’s Retreat
It was a chance to complete several articles related to the Kennedy assassination; instead I discovered a new ending for a book that had taken over my life.
It was supposed to be a solid couple of months of uninterrupted writing at a retreat in central Northland, New Zealand where I could go down some very murky rabbit holes and get a few articles written before my move to Australia interrupted my writing flow. There was Part 3 to finish for How the ‘Magic Bullet’ Covered Up a Monumental Double Cross, and many more ‘rude awakenings’ to write about.
The retreat was in beautiful New Zealand countryside, lush and green with spring, new lambs bleating in paddocks, and the haunting catlike cry of peacocks piercing the still night air. Farmland, hills and pine forests surround the beautiful two-storey villa built early last century. Yet I noted with considerable dismay when I arrived that the extensive lawns and gardens were untended, long grass and weeds chocking out what little color struggled to emerge from roses and flowering plants now almost hidden from view.
At the front of a shed bordering the drive a very friendly and licky border collie, Jessie, was chained to a short wire run. In a cage on a circular lawn section the drive swept around, was a big brown dog called Sprinter, locked up because she had attacked the other dogs and could no longer be trusted around them. On the deck at the back of the house facing an empty swimming pool with weeds growing in the bottom of it, was another border collie, Sam, chained to a wire run outside the dining room, where the chain rattled back and forth behind him along the wooden decking. Two rescue dogs, a medium sized black dog and a Jack Russell, lived inside. At night the border collies also slept inside.
Well at least I had a large and comfortable room to retreat to, I reasoned, where I could shut everything out and just focus on my writing. Or so I thought. But it began to bother me that the dogs outside were not usually let off for a run during the day.
On a writing break to get some sun, I braved Jessie’s excitable licking and let her off for a bit of a run and a pee. She obediently returned to be chained up again. From then on, each time I needed a break, I let Jessie off the chain and we went to the paddock that was once a tennis court, where I did some stretches and she sniffed and poked around in the bushes.
When Jane, the owner of the retreat, was out one day, I let Sam off his chain for a run. He found a stick and looked up into my eyes as if to say, “Can we play fetch?” He lay the stick at my feet and I picked it up and threw it. He bounded after it in great excitement and returned to deposit it at my feet again, panting heavily. The game continued until I noticed he was struggling for breath. I thought he was just unfit. So it became my habit sometime each day to also play fetch with Sam.
And then…
One day he collapsed and could not get up. Jane discovered that he had a massive growth on his liver and kept him close to her while she worked from home during the day. At night she slept next to him in the lounge as he could no longer climb the stairs, expecting him to die at any time. She said she wanted to be there with him while he died and did what she could to make him feel loved.
The raw emotions around a dying dog permeated the walls of the house and my retreat was a retreat no more. Jane recalled their early years together and how funny Sam was with all the antics he got up to romping on the deck as if he was center stage at a play, and how it made them laugh. And I began to wonder what happened between those early happy times when it was obvious she had put a lot of love and work into his training, to the time Sam became chained on the deck for most of the day with sad resignation.
Perhaps Jane had compartmentalized her experiences like she may have done during the abuse she endured as a child. It seemed to me that the early fun filled experience with Sam was the reality she clung to and the present reality did not exist. Yes, she loved him. But something had happened. Yes, he was safe, he was fed, but he was also emotionally neglected and his exercise needs weren’t met – or so it seemed to me. Jane’s recollections of those fun-filled days simply did not reconcile with the sad dog I witnessed chained on the deck day after day, often waiting until late in the night to be fed.
Sam died early in the morning on December 1. Over coffee, Jane told me of her final hours with him. A grave was dug, and he was buried later that afternoon. The experience left me profoundly disturbed. Lost down several rabbit holes all at once, I lost track of what I was writing and much to my frustration, lost my ability to join complex dots.
Sitting alone and enclosed by the the warm tones of the totara wood panels, I surrendered to my disturbed feelings. Instantly I was transported back in time to my parents’ divorce and the changed circumstances that saw me take charge, at the age of eleven, of my brother’s and sister’s welfare. My mother was in grief – not only because of her failed marriage, but also because her long love affair had ended that caused her to cry each night in bed next to me. She struggled financially. I often struggled to find food to feed my brother and sister, my sister ending up with malnutrition. My mother went out at night and left us alone. My sister and I took over the household chores and lost our childhood.
Continuing to sit with my painful memories, I discovered that it was my mother’s neglect of my three-year-old brother that affected me most. Perhaps it highlighted just how much my mother had changed from the conscientious way she had brought up my sister and I with her caring for our physical needs, the discipline, the lovely food she cooked, baking cupcakes together, summer holidays at the beach, attending parent/teacher interviews and taking an interest in our learning and development. She sang to us with a beautiful high voice, read fairy tales and stories of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, and a story about Pookie the rabbit with wings who tried to set things right.
And then…
All the good days were gone. Like I witnessed with the dogs. And I wondered if my mother compartmentalized her experiences, too. Was there a serious disconnect she was unable to bridge? Was she still living in the days when she was a good mother and could not see the physical and emotional neglect she was subjecting her children to in the present? Or was her grief and depression so compounded by the unresolved abuse in her own childhood, it caused her to lose the ability to feel for her children in present time?
So disturbed was I by my own childhood experiences I started writing a book about why relationships fail after my marriage ended in 1985. It gradually morphed into a book about the ripple effect of child abuse, where my research led into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that soldiers can suffer when engaged in combat. However, I also discovered that a significant risk factor for men developing PTSD was physical neglect in childhood.
I pondered this while sitting in the pain of my past at the writer’s retreat. Anxiety had begun to gnaw at my stomach. I was unable to sleep through the night and awoke each morning exhausted. The anxiety would not subside. Yes, I had also suffered physical neglect, but what made it far worse for me was the emotional neglect and the lost relationship with my mother. The neglect caused me to believe that my mother had stopped loving me and I wondered what I had done wrong. It led into feelings of rejection and then abandonment, which intensified when my mother sent my sister, brother and me back to live with my father when I was thirteen and I never saw her again. It was just before Christmas. By then I had learned not to cry.
The following day Jane was away and I let Sprinter out of her cage for a run. True to her name, she sprinted around and around the tennis court paddock before collapsing on the grass to soak up some sun, expelling her distress with a big sigh of relief to be free. While I did some stretches it occurred to me that I had also set myself free: free from a long held belief that my mother did not love me or care what happened to me, and the erroneous beliefs her abandonment spawned.
It became clear to me then that the abuse and abandonment she suffered as a child had seriously impeded her ability to remain a good mother through adversity. Depression and grief disconnected her from reality and she became a prisoner of her past. Gradually, as compassion broke through my anxiety, I felt a desperate need to leave this writer’s retreat where I could no longer write.
A few days later a friend in a stressed state struggling with changed circumstances asked if I could house and cat sit at the end of the week through until the end of January in her lovely old home overlooking Whangarei Harbor. Instantly I knew that I had learned what I needed to learn at the retreat.
On my last night there I cooked a meal for Jane and I and we sat in the large dining room to eat it with a glass of red wine. She said she had wanted to spend the whole evening with me before I left the next day, but regretted that she had other things she needed to do.
And then…
The power went out. Jane lit candles in some of the rooms and checked how long we would be without power – all night and half the next day. “We need some music,” she said, and picked up her guitar and began to sing and play. She is a talented song writer with a lovely clear high voice, reminding me of my mother’s singing. I closed my eyes and let her haunting songs flow through me like an elixir. And I thought, who am I to judge? Since being at the writer’s retreat I was offered a few jigsaw puzzle pieces of Jane’s life, yet not enough to understand the whole picture of what had brought her to this moment in time. And in that moment I knew I was through playing the role of Pookie the rabbit with wings my mother read to me about, struggling in vain to set things right in her life, and then other people’s lives over the years.
What I had learned at this writer’s retreat had nothing to do with who killed Jack Kennedy or why they wanted him dead, but that the most important thing I could do for the world, and world peace, was to set my own life right and find peace within. I had experienced enough to know that life moves in cycles and there was a time in everyone’s life when they are ready for change, and only they know when that time is. It is an inside job, an inner healing. For change to last, never can it be a bandaid applied on the outside.
I asked Jane if she would let me play her guitar. Struggling to remember chords from years ago I clumsily finger-picked my way through one of my favorite tunes and returned her guitar. She continued to play a few more songs and handed the guitar back top me saying, “Play me something else.” This time my fingers were not so clumsy and I played Harry Chapin’s haunting song, Circle, with great inner feeling.
And so the time passed. I told Jane she reminded me of the free spirit my mother was, and recounted the time she stripped off her clothes to run naked down the sand dunes at a back beach in Australia, my father angrily screaming after her to put her clothes on. We laughed.
Jane then recalled that the baby grand piano she had been given for free had just been tuned that day and maybe we should test it out. After we each played what we could remember from years ago, Jane taught me the top part of a duet and was so delighted that we could play it well together she took a video of our efforts.
Around midnight she asked if I would go with her to change the bandage on a large wound on one of her horse’s legs that was taking months to heal, proud that her diligent care had considerably reduced the area of open raw flesh. By torchlight we chatted while she bathed the wound and showed it to me before putting on a clean dressing while the horse contentedly munched noisily on lucerne chaff. It was after 1:00 am when I finally climbed into bed. With a smile on my face.
The following morning after coffee, and with my old car packed, Jane gave me a warm hug goodbye. I was surprised because on a previous occasion she said she didn’t like hugs. It was one of those ear-to-ear hugs that told me some profound change had occurred within us both that was beyond words to express. I know that for me it could set my life on a different course. And that book I began writing all those years ago when I was so full of grief, now has an ending that warms my heart.
***
Note: No original names were used in this post.
May you have a happy holiday.
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Beautiful!!
A lovely story.