Angel on a Leash. David Frei
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administrator walked us down the hall. He told me that he was bringing me first to Richard, a long-term care patient who had a photo in his room of himself with a Brittany. However, Richard was battling the early stages of dementia, the administrator told me, and I shouldn’t expect too much from him. Richard also believed that his family had simply dumped him in the facility to live out his days. “He’s not happy to be here,” said the administrator. “He’s rarely spoken and rarely smiled since he arrived here some three months ago.”
With that information, Belle and I entered Richard’s room. I was a little anxious and was hoping for just about any reaction from him—a smile, maybe a few words. We walked in, Belle tugging me along with her tail wagging and her body twisting in that Brittany kind of way. She apparently had not heard anything that the administrator had told me, and she was ready to make a new friend.
Instantly, we got the smile—and then some. Richard’s smile lit up the room, his face beaming, tears forming in his eyes. All at once, he became animated and vocal.
“Come here, you knucklehead,” he called to Belle, slapping his thigh. She jumped on his lap and he hugged her as the administrator’s eyes widened at this first show of emotion. I watched without speaking, but I was thinking, Geez, we’re already breaking the rules by letting her jump on his lap.
I decided, given what I had been told coming in, that this was a rule that could be broken for Richard. The interaction was exciting to watch, actually.
By the way he was talking to her, I quickly realized that Richard thought Belle was his dog. He confirmed that when he said to me, “Son, will you take care of her after I die?” When his tears started flowing, so did mine.
Belle could feel what was happening, and she was loving it. Here she was—the dog who runs through my house at about 40 miles an hour, the dog who chases pigeons, squirrels, and her brother throughout our urban neighborhood, now just patiently resting her head on Richard’s lap—looking him right in those tear-filled eyes.
When it was time to move on, Richard gave Belle a big hug, some more pets, and said good-bye. He was smiling. He was happy. Maybe just for that moment, but that’s the moment we have, the moment we want, and the moment we contribute to.
We wandered through the facility and had a couple more visits. Belle stuck her face onto the bed of another man, who was bedridden but smiling. She sat on a chair and went eye-to-eye with a woman who produced a smile that she apparently had never given in this place before. She lay on a bed next to another woman who couldn’t talk.
On the drive home, I realized that now I got it. Richard and those other people we had visited—we had made their day. Had we changed their lives? Well, at least for that day, we certainly had.
Eventually, I passed the evaluation with Teigh, and Cheri passed with Belle. I was ready to set out on my own with Teigh and Belle. I had lost a few friends from the dog show world to AIDS in the past ten years, so I thought I would volunteer in their memory at Bailey-Boushay House in Seattle, an AIDS hospice.
I understood the basics about hospices: that they are administering palliative care, and the idea is that they are helping people deal with the end of their lives. I really hadn’t been around a lot of death, and while I wasn’t reluctant to do what I could to help, it was going to be a new experience for me.
I came away from the volunteer orientation believing that Bailey-Boushay was good at this, but I was anxious to see the reality versus the classroom. To me, death was always sad; here, they were trying to show that passing peacefully could perhaps ease some of that sadness.
On our first day, Teigh and I showed up and went right to the nurses’ station. It seemed a little quiet, almost grim, but this came as no surprise. As soon as one of the nurses saw Teigh, she broke into a big smile, dropped to her knees, and started talking to him.
“Hey buddy, how are you?” Teigh lay down and rolled over onto his back, ready to make some new friends. “What’s your name?”
“He’s Teigh, and I’m David,” I said. “This is our first visit here.”
“Well, Teigh and David, we are so glad that you are here,” she said. I could feel that her remark was more than just some platitude. Another nurse joined in with the stomach rubs while several others watched and smiled, stopping what they were doing at the moment. We would always be greeted in this fashion at B-B. After a few visits, I could understand why.
People were dying there every day. I would come back every Tuesday and be unable to find one or two people that I had seen the week before. Sometimes it was expected, sometimes not. I am sure that the people who worked with this every day could find it a little grim, even if helping the dying was their life’s work. So I came to realize that here, visiting the staff was just as important as—maybe even more so than—visiting the patients. They, too, needed some revitalization, something to make them smile or just help them move on after losing a patient.
After working our way through the staff, we would have quite a variety of patients waiting for us. They all had different stories, and many of them wanted to share those stories with us, perhaps in kind of a cleansing process as they were preparing to die.
Their stories weren’t what mattered to Teigh or to me. We were there to get some smiles and some pets for Teigh, whether from a well-to-do gay man, a tough street person, or a woman dying of cancer. Teigh would crawl into bed with some of them, sit in a chair next to the bed with others, or just hang quietly in my arms. Already I found myself wanting to be just like Teigh, with his measured enthusiasm and his ability to draw out some difficult smiles.
Cheri soon finished her master’s degree and was ready for her residency at Swedish. About that time, the American Kennel Club (AKC) asked if I would do some work for them as a public relations consultant and public spokesperson. The AKC was headquartered in New York City but told me that I could do the job from Seattle. We made a trip to New York and, while we were there, Cheri was offered a residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center. We decided that we would move to New York.
We were sad to leave Seattle but excited about the professional opportunities in New York. And out in New Jersey, Emily, my mother-in-law, was happy to get her daughter back home.
After a two-year residency at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell, Cheri spent a year as the chaplain and director of pastoral care at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in New York. Then, Ronald McDonald House asked her to be its Catholic chaplain and director of family support. That turned out to be a life-changing offer for both of us. Ronald McDonald House is a home-away-from-home for families who would come to New York from all over the world. Here, they hoped to find answers for their children who were fighting battles with cancer and being treated at New York hospitals such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering, NewYork-Presbyterian, and New York University.
Meanwhile, the Westminster Kennel Club asked me to come and work for them. I had done their TV commentary on USA Network since 1990, so we were not strangers. They created a full-time position for me as director of communications, and I moved a few blocks south on Madison Avenue from the AKC to Westminster in 2003.
The following year, I suggested that Westminster consider creating and supporting a charitable activity that combined dogs with children—something to bring the club into a new part of the New York City community. We were very active in a number of dog-related charities, but as the kennel club of New York, we could do more. I suggested a therapy dog program at the NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, something that would bring us into the area of helping humans. I also suggested the name “Angel On A Leash,” and we all agreed that it was a perfect description. So we were off and running, soon adding Ronald McDonald House New York and Providence Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, as Angel facilities.
Anyone who shares his or her life with a dog understands intuitively