Robbie Gamble
Hospice Pet Therapy
–for my mother, Anne Conant Gamble, 1932 – 2026
It had been a tiring morning, with two well-meaning visitors, and the energy seeped from her body like oxygen from a faulty tank. So, when the pet liaison from the hospice association knocked on the door, she was inclined to send them away, even though she had been looking forward to this dog visitation for weeks. “Couldn’t you come back another day?” she asked. The liaison looked doubtful. “Our schedule is so full, it might be a couple of weeks. Why don’t you say hello to Mudge now, even if it’s just for a minute?” She reached down and lifted a small dog over the bed rail, and laid him on the blanket beside her.
Mudge was a chihuahua/Jack Russell terrier mix, six pounds at most, white with tan patches, with soulful dark almond-shaped eyes that brimmed with compassion. He nestled against her side, and gazed up into her face. His expression said, You can tell me anything. Use your hands, if you like. And she began to stroke him, under his chin, behind his attentive ears, over his calm belly, and through her fingers, she told him her stories.
She told him of being a lonely little girl, sent away repeatedly to live with her indifferent grandparents while her mother took to bed with another difficult pregnancy —seven miscarriages in all— until her baby brother was finally born. Mudge tilted his head, Oh my, how hard that must’ve been!
She told him of discovering the beauty and rigor of biology in high school, the absorbing hours working in the lab with her mentor, and then the elation of riding the train home from the National Science Fair in Philadelphia, having placed third in the nation for her project on the effects of human and amphibian pregnancy hormones.
She described the ecstasy of singing in Radcliffe Choral Society: Berlioz, Brahms, and other classics, of being one voice in a multitude of voices and instruments, all moving as one like a school of fish swirling through an oceanic current of polyphony.
She caressed the tale of meeting Walter, in the wake of a botched date with his brother Dick, the two of them accidentally thrown together and discovering that they were both completely at home in each other’s tentative nerdiness, soon sharing love letters that were as much lab report updates as attempts at flirtation.
She traced an early scene of motherhood, tucking newborn first son Robbie into a pram and escaping the confines of their walkup apartment with her corgi Smudge in tow, circling around nearby Rittenhouse Square to take in the soft spring air under a canopy of blooming magnolias while Walter toiled long clinical hours on Philadelphia hospital floors. Hmm, Smudge, what a lovely name! Mudge sighed.
She sighed, too. Then Monmouth Street, the big echoey house on the doorstep of Boston that rapidly filled with two more red-headed sons and diaper hampers and building blocks and drippy art projects; rat and hamster cages, playdates, birthday parties, piano practice, spilling over into the world of band concerts, soccer games, ski meets, emergency room visits, college visits, graduations, and then a temporary lull before grandchildren visiting with their insatiable precociousness and curiosities. Her fingers swirled Mudge’s soft belly fur, then relaxed. And the one constant across this tumble of years— long summers in Maine in the house on the end of the point, waves pressing their rhythms into the beach below, the days drawn out according to the schedule of the tides, fog fingers weaving through the spruces, and the white-throated sparrow intoning its anthem, that reassuring rising fifth.
And then the unfathomable loss of Brad, the ambiguity of his passing, the journey to Wyoming to be borne up by his circle of friends while we searched for scraps of answers. Her insistence on seeing his body: “I brought him into this world, and I intend to hold him one last time.” Mudge shivered and nestled even closer.
So much more, and her hands were tiring: a kaleidoscope of friends and loved ones and golden retrievers, square dances and choral performances and recorder consorts; bird banding and whale watching, her dear colleagues in Patient Relations at Children’s Hospital. And Walter, always Walter: sometimes stubborn, often late for dinner, but ever constant, kind, and resourceful through celebrations and mourning, the humdrum of everyday chores, and even the surreal quarantine lockdown of COVID. She was determined to trace one last image for Mudge: summer evenings after supper, they would sometimes walk arm-in-arm down the beach, swatting mosquitos with their free hands, her knock knees and his bow legs forming X’s and O’s as they traversed the dunes, watching the tides recede or return.
Her hands fell still. Mudge leaned in with his gaze: Thank you for sharing your beautiful, complicated life. I promise to carry it with me.
“Can he come back tomorrow?” she asked. The liaison chuckled softly. “I’m afraid not, he has others to see. But we will remember you, and you will remember him, as we all journey onward.”
And so it is that we remember, through our hands and our bodies and our stories and our breath, washing in and out like the tides, we remember.
Back to “Motherhood and the Body”
Robbie Gamble’s nonfiction work appears in Pangyrus, Scoundrel Time, Tahoma Literary Review, Soundings East and Under the Gum Tree. His essay “Exit Wound” was cited as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2020. He divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont.