Grief is always a painfully slow experience for me to work my way through—grief for my non-human family members as much as for the human ones. Now, 2 months after her death, I’ve finished the third of three digital mosaics of my cat, Mari. Each image has been increasingly complex, each exploring deeper, less articulate levels of my grief. With the completion of the last picture, my farewell feels complete. My grief is taking up residence in memory and only occasionally flashing into the now.
“Mari: Doorway Into Forever,” image CL Francisco (2022)
I finished this first mosaic on the night of Mari’s death (“Mari: Doorway into Forever,” above). It was built on an earlier image I’d created more than 10 years ago (see below). In it I find myself grappling with the simple fact of her dying and moving beyond my reach.
“Doorway Into Forever,” image by CL Francisco (2012)
The second mosaic, “The Passing of Mari,” (below) I finished two weeks after her death. It reflects on Mari’s own awareness of her living and dying, and the natural place of both in the universe as we experience it.
“The Passing of Mari,” image CL Francisco
The third image, “Slipping Away,” (below) I finished yesterday. It reaches out toward yet further horizons, beginning with Mari’s intentional withdrawal from life and her brief return to my lap on the day of her death (using photos I took of her then). Beyond those beginnings, I tried to capture my sense that the flame I knew as Mari had already begun drifting away on another wind, into vast starscapes yet unknown to me.
Mari was one of two kittens I adopted after I lost the cat who later became Yeshua’s Cat. Since the-cat-who-became-Yeshua’s-Cat was actually named Morgan, I needed a more appropriate name for a cat from the 1st C Levant. Mari (named after the ancient city) kindly loaned me her name, as well as her insights as I wrote. She is survived by her littermate, Bacchus.
Almost 2 years have passed since I last posted any personal updates—2 years of confusion, anger—and grace. Most amazingly, I do NOT have Lewy body dementia (or any other kind of dementia, for that matter): that’s the warm, beating heart of my news. I am infinitely grateful that I won’t be walking that road.
I do have a few thoughts about my experiences in the hands of physicians.
Here’s the background, in case you’re just tuning in. Early in 2019, I saw a respected neurologist, and assumed—foolishly—that he would be a man of principles, skilled in the performance of his art. Feeling anxious and off-balance from the sudden changes in my life, I reached out to him in trust. He, however, did little but look to his own divine omniscience (or personal lottery hopper, whatever) for inspiration before burdening me, a patient he’d barely met, with a capricious diagnosis of a rare and deadly disease. Following up on another doctor’s preliminary sleep study, he took perhaps 15 minutes to administer a quick mental status exam and a standard connect-the-dots psych test and then delivered his extempore diagnosis full-blown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.
Image CL Francisco
I’m still angry, although I’m trying to let it go. After all, a physician who believes himself a god could easily have contracted his delusion by just breathing the air of our culture. As long as we hail our physicians as god-like purveyors of medical miracles, doctors who lack confidence or crave power will cloak themselves in our expectations like the great Oz in his curtains.
But I must accept some responsibility for my willingness to be misled. No one forced me to accept this man‘s diagnosis as a truth engraved on the foundation of the world. I’ve known for most of my adult life that a diagnosis is simply an opinion—as reliable, or as dubious, as the person who offers it. That’s why we call a second diagnosis from a different doctor a “second opinion.” Still, in defense of my foolishness, I was anxious and off balance, and not thinking very objectively.
Image CL Francisco
And this is one of the huge ethical challenges of doctor-patient relationships: physicians encounter people at some of the most critical points in their lives, when they’re at their most vulnerable. We might even define patients as people experiencing diminished capacity brought on by poor health and the resultant anxiety. They come praying that a doctor will work miracles with his/her incomparable wisdom and skill. Patients are predisposed to be gullible: easy prey, in fact . . . except that doctors aren’t supposed to be predators (and most aren’t). Going to a doctor should never be a case of caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware.”
Image CL Francisco
So I’m back where I started. Angry. If I were a litigious person, I’d have sued him; however, I’m not, and I didn’t. I can only say what many others have said before me: in a more humane world, doctors would be required to experience—at least in some virtual sense—the conditions they would treat before being loosed on a world of suffering patients. That might go a long way toward eliminating a physician’s god complex.
Grace . . .
Grace intervened in late 2020, in the person of a wise and caring neurologist I happened upon during a phone conference she had with my husband. He mentioned my diagnosis in passing, and she asked to speak with me. By the time we hung up, I had an appointment to see her the next week. Two weeks after that, following a huge battery of blood and tissue tests, she confirmed her initial diagnosis of small fiber neuropathy (SFN) and started my treatment.
SFN is a complex syndrome with a staggering array of possible symptoms. I find the diagram below helpful in making sense of it:
There is no cure for small fiber neuropathy, but it is treatable, especially if caught early. Its progression can be slowed, and some losses may be recouped, although not completely. In my case, I’d already had two years of acute symptoms without any treatment before receiving an accurate diagnosis. Fortunately, I’ve responded well (if slowly) to therapy, particularly in areas of cognitive loss. I may never write another book, but I’ve recovered much of my vocabulary, my brain fog has lessened, and I’m remembering more of what I read. I can write letters and short essays (with the constant support of a thesaurus), and on a good day I can even edit existing manuscripts.
So, to all of you who have sent me messages of love and encouragement, I thank you! I may not have replied, but I’ve been warmed by your concern. I still don’t anticipate having much presence online, since I find writing of any kind exhausting. This post, for example, took three full days to compose, not counting getting it up online. I try to choose where my energy will be best spent. But I no longer perceive my life as a tragedy in process; I’m just aging, as every living creature does.
Image CL Francisco
I sometimes imagine these last few years as an expression of my physical uniqueness. Just as each of us has different fingerprints, and a distinct mosaic of genetic patterning, so every body slows down and wears out in ways that reflect a person’s particular life experiences and physical being. Our paths home will always take us by surprise, because no two are ever the same.
A note in closing: my 15-year-old grey tabby cat Mari, whose name I borrowed for the Yeshua’s Cats books, is dying of advanced renal disease. (The cat who inspired Yeshua’s Cat was actually named Morgan—an unlikely name for an ancient Levantine cat! So I used the name I’d given to one of the two kittens I’d adopted after Morgan’s death.)
Image: SDean@sdean.netImage CL Francisco
Mari and I are exploring the shadowy vales of aging and illness together. We’ve become unexpectedly close as her health has deteriorated. Sometimes I’m not sure which one of us is the woman and which the cat. My husband says that Mari has been my sea anchor for most of her fifteen years, and that she’ll take pieces of me with her when she goes. I’m sure she will, but she’ll also leave pieces of herself behind. Neither of us will be the same.
Image CL Francisco
Afterthoughts
What follows is an unpublished post from June, 2020, written 1 ½ years after I was erroneously diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and 3 months before I began treatment for small fiber neuropathy. It was intended to be the 4th in a series of posts on Lewy body dementia, but it was shuffled aside in the excitement of a possibly new diagnosis . . .
Robin Hobb’s Memory Stone and Progressive Dementia
“I feel like a tree being ruthlessly pruned into a stump,” June 30, 2020
I wrote these words earlier today, as I was updating a symptom diary that I’ve been keeping for over a year now, so that I can remember how I’ve changed, and when. It took me a long time to understand and articulate that feeling, partly because I am diminished, and my awareness is narrowing. I feel life less keenly every day. I forget to care—about people and things I love. I drift, and draw in. My horizons shrink. My spirit vision darkens.
Image by CL Francisco
In an earlier post I mentioned that I forget every new book I read within a few months (books I read many years ago I still remember clearly). So when I find good books, I can enjoy them over and over again! This past Christmas my son gave me three new books: the Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb’s epic fantasy. I didn’t really like the first book when I started it, but since it was my son’s gift, and chosen with care, I didn’t set it aside. I’m not sure when I got hooked: maybe it was when the wolf Nighteyes entered the story. I know I was captivated by then. I bought the trilogies that continued the tale as I approached the end of each of the others. Nine thick books. And tonight I finished all nine for the third time.
Robin Hobb’s Trilogies with Fitz and the Fool
Hobb’s books haven’t been just entertainment. For me, the Farseer series (including The Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool trilogies) is that rare thing, a story that flickers with hidden meaning, troubling and fascinating me with something just out of reach. I believe that the only way to understand a story like that it is to journey to its heart—and to mine. I’ve always done this by reading a book again and again, until a key eventually emerged to unlock the mystery. I’m not sure if forgetting the details between readings has helped or hindered me with these books, but when I closed the ninth book tonight, I finally understood.
Image CL Francisco
Hobb creates a fantasy world where some humans are gifted with an extraordinary sense she calls Skill. At the end of their lives, a very few choose to journey to a distant quarry and carve a dragon or other beast from the near-sentient stone there called Memory Stone. As they carve the stone, they release all their memories, and eventually their physical bodies, into the carved stone, hoping to bring it to a kind of life and achieve for themselves a limited immortality: their memories never really die.
Image CL Francisco
Image CL Francisco
The most difficult part of the dragon-carving is the carvers’ long and arduous process of yielding up the memories that make them who they are, in hopes that they have accumulated enough depth of memory to bring the stone to life. But once these carvers have given up a memory, they no longer have access to it. As their lives are poured out, they become vague and distant. They lose the love they feel for friends and family, recalling only dimly the fact of its earlier existence. They drift away from life, and from all but the current of Skill that draws them on.
I’m sure you see the parallels by now—not exact, but intriguing. I don’t know if Hobb intended to mythologize progressive dementia (or cognitive loss), but I believe she has, at least for me. What makes her telling so unexpectedly personal is her description of the effort her carvers make to invest their ever-dwindling strength and capacity into the creation of something that encompasses who they are . . . that embodies their lives’ essence.
image CL Francisco
Her images shine a light on my own days, making sense of what I have been doing in darkness and unknowing. For I also feel a compelling need to complete expressions of myself: a couple of unfinished books, paintings for my grandson’s walls, pen and ink portraits of my family, a Flickr photo site. I don’t do them as memorials, or to have my name remembered. I’ve always preferred to remain invisible, anonymous, like a cat hidden beneath the shadowy eaves of a forest. Instead, I am pouring my life into a spiritual nexus that I sense as myself, and the effort I expend contributes to its solidity.
Image CL Francisco
It’s so hard to put this into words!
British folk in times past sometimes spoke of retiring from the world in their old age to “make their souls.” That phrase feels oddly appropriate here. I am struggling to yield who I am into the will of the One, whose Being flows like a river through all that is. I am clarifying for myself who and what I am while confronting my own dissolution. I may grow vague and distant, unresponsive and hollowed out, as the life I’ve known seeps away. But by willingly releasing what I know as myself into the Creator’s vessel, I rest on the Deep of Being. I make my soul.
(like a cauldron of bats, or a coalition of cheetahs)
3rd in a series of posts about the author’s experience
of Lewy body dementia
As an author, I never wrote from outlines or carefully crafted plots. Each book remained in flux as I wrote, balanced lightly in my mind, open to shifts in a character’s development or new paths to far horizons. Yet I always knew where I was headed and what I wanted to say. Alas, no more. Even writing a journal entry tumbles me into the wayward crosscurrents of a fraying consciousness.
People sometimes speak of women’s organic logic (as opposed to the linear logic of men), using words like spiraling, intuitive, archetypal. But increasingly, as I write even small posts like this one, I find myself moving through dementia’s bizarre post-logical inscape, where all patterns fade.
My efforts remind me of a befuddled spider struggling with an uncooperative web. Battered and ancient, she lurches from side to side, mumbling to herself as she lays one unlikely strand upon another. Much of her webbing falls away, its intended pattern vanishing through the gaps in her thoughts . . . words floating free of their mooring. Strands cross and re-cross at impossible angles, presenting only confusion to the reader. Yet somewhere beneath the chaos, a compassionate hand takes hold of the tangle, plaiting it into a rudimentary whole, and a pattern flickers through the ragged web—a glimpse of meaning as welcome as sunlight in the midst of storm.
I invite you to consider my web with me.
We all know the story of the frog sitting in a pan of gradually warming water until he quietly boils into dinner. This may be an outworn cliché, yet it confronts us with a real peril of our human nature. Changes that creep up slowly can ghost under our radar. Only rarely do we perceive them as threats. When changes come slowly (they don’t even have to be subtle), or when the people perceiving them are unfocused and distracted, a shifting “normal” can erode into runaway catastrophe . . . Have politicians always been so venal? Has hate always been such a conspicuous part of American life? Didn’t New York winters used to be bitter cold? I can’t remember–is this the way home? Did I think to turn off the stove?
Lethargy has that kind of lethal potential for me.
Sometimes I wonder how I might’ve felt if my doctors hadn’t been familiar with LBD’s symptoms when I first had the sleep study. Would I have shrugged and dismissed my strange new life as normal aging? Would ennui have taken root in the mind fog? Putting a name on it does nothing to slow the disease, but at least it shows me what I’m facing. I possess a piece of data, a bit of knowledge, a light focused on the sly and slippery changes.
So what shall I do with myself as I confront this murkier-than-usual descent into the great mystery?
Dylan Thomas’ famous line, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” is one option that everyone mentions sooner or later, as if such rage were a noble thing and a useful option.
But if you look at his whole poem, you’ll see that Thomas is talking about regret—regret for things his father didn’t do, for life unlived, and the rage he should feel. Yet a whisper intrudes on the poet’s advice: “Is this so different from a child’s rage at being carried off to bed too soon?”
So, should I rage? Or refuse regrets? I think I’ll pass on both. I can’t agree with the No regrets meme; too often it leads to complacency. I do have regrets, mostly for times when my spite made the world an uglier place. Those regrets are important to me. Without regret, I would never have confronted my unkindness, never turned away, and in some small way, Creation would be diminished. But wallowing in regret over foolish mistakes or pleasures denied corrodes the soul and makes a bitter tale for darkening days.
No, I prefer to hold in my tattering mind a passage from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I can still remember how it rang like a bell when I first read it in high school:
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.”
So I learn what I can, even now. Not facts, or political scandals, or even devotional thoughts: facts and concepts soon disappear in the mist. Mostly I learn with my hands and vision—spiritual and physical—because memory is strongest there. I still love to take photographs, although I fall asleep trying to process them. Last fall I foraged for woodland bounty to make gift wreaths. During the winter I experimented with sketching family portraits. Over the last few months I’ve been working on a series of paintings for my 2-year-old grandson’s room. The transformation from digital mock-up to painted canvas should begin any day now. Five years ago I never expected to pick up a paintbrush again.
I was an author, and I am no longer. I was once an artist, and now I may be again. I am a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a wife, and a servant of cats. I was a daughter, and sometimes I remember to be an aunt. And, of course, there are things that never change: I detest hot humid weather and love the cold grace of winter trees; I have a feline heart, except for a well-hidden malamute shadow; and I’ve known since I was a preschool child that the Creator holds me in love and all Creation with me, regardless of the disasters we as humankind visit on our world.
Photo by S Dean
“I will never be further from you than your heart.”
~~The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat
** All photos not otherwise attributed were taken by CL Francisco
2nd in a series of posts about the author’s experience
of Lewy body dementia
“All I can tell you is that the train is coming. We can feel the vibration in the tracks and hear the rumble in the distance. I can’t tell you when it will arrive, how fast it’s traveling, or even what direction it’s coming from. But it’s coming.”
(My neurologist’s words after confirming a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia)
I always imagined it would be cancer; after all, cancer is the great leveler of our time. Lewy body dementia (LBD) came as a complete surprise, partly because I’d never heard of it—but then not many people have. Few support groups exist; few physicians are familiar with it. People say it lies somewhere between the Alzheimer’s acute dementia and Parkinson’s progressive motor dysfunction, but when my GP took an on-line LBD seminar, he came away with one conclusion offered by experts over and over again: “We don’t know.”
Photo CL Francisco
So I decided to try journaling from time to time, reflecting on my own experience of LBD. Maybe someone will find it helpful.
sketch by CL Francisco
I noticed a slight mental slow-down in the fall of 2018, but my first real clue that something was wrong was when I started falling asleep without warning, almost as if I had narcolepsy. A sleep test showed me to be one of a very small percentage of people who physically act out dreams during REM sleep; normal folk are pretty much immobilized. Apparently REM sleep disorders are red flags for LBD, so neurological tests followed and confirmed its likelihood (84%). A higher degree of certainty would require an autopsy.
Soon I noticed that words didn’t come to me when I tried to write. I got more dependent on the thesaurus. I couldn’t hold complex thoughts in my mind. Reluctantly, I retired from writing. Meanwhile, the sudden drops into sleep intensified. Short-term memory loss erased the books I read. Each book faded quietly into the LBD wallpaper within a few months. The old joke about people with dementia endlessly re-reading their favorite books is no joke.
Everything always seems to become more and more itself over time, and LBD is no exception. My memory loss continues apace. My balance and physical stamina have noticeably worsened, as have a variety of autonomic functions. But perhaps the most difficult thing about this strange disease is the sleepiness. Such an innocuous word, sleepiness. Along with its equally bland opposite: alertness. Boring, everyday words. Sleepy was something I used to associate with bedtime or tedious meetings. Alert was something I could access on demand.
Photo CL Francisco
But LBD has introduced me to a whole new order of not-alert. People talk about mental fog, or fug . . . this is a mental swamp, a bog, with hidden drop-offs into unconsciousness. I feel as if I walk through my days in a viscous pool. A port-a-bog! The day’s normal routine can’t penetrate it. I never wake up. It takes all my mental and physical strength just to stay afloat in daily life.
Photo CL Francisco
I’m deeply grateful for the drug modafinil: it takes some of the edge off. I’ve also found a few things that can offer temporary relief, at least for me:
Compelling fiction: if the characters are skillfully drawn, the tension tight, the writing clear, and nothing too horrendously tragic happens, I can read and stay awake . . . as long as I don’t get too comfortable. My favorite authors are people like Ursula K. Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Laurie R. King, Robin Hobb, and Dorothy R. Sayers.
Total absorption in creative tasks has been a lifeline—painting, drawing, and crafting. The trick here is that it has to be intensely absorbing and challenging. If it bores me, I fall asleep.
Long walks in the woods have never failed me yet. No more than a few yards into the trees, my mind clears. Clarity and life wait there, as they always have. But when I return, low-lying clouds move in as soon as my feet hit the pavement. I also take photos when I walk . . . I just have trouble staying awake to edit them when I return home.
Intense emotional encounters with others also penetrate the fog, but I can hardly schedule those, good or bad. They’re a kind of grace . . . and here I include awareness of the presence of Spirit/Deity/All That Is/God/ess, whatever word you choose. But since traditional prayer involves silence, quiet, and closed eyes, I tend to do my praying as I walk in the woods. That way I don’t fall asleep.
Photo CL Francisco
LBD is often characterized by hallucinations, usually visual ones. The dissolving boundary between normal reality and the Lewy bodies’ alternate reality is still in its early stages for me. I’ve had few actual hallucinations, but when I drop into episodes of sudden sleep, vivid dreams come immediately. Here I’m making a distinction between episodes of involuntary sleep and intentional, lying down sleep. The waking seems different, although that may just be the suddenness of awakening at my desk (by dropping something, falling over onto the keyboard, etc).
Art by CL Francisco
The intensity of these dreams and their extraordinary presence often result in serious disorientation when I wake up, far more intense than any awakening to a strange room. The best image I can offer is of a deep, swift-flowing river of color and emotion that runs alongside the more solid reality we think of as normal. It reminds me a bit of what I’ve read of the Aboriginal experience of the dreamtime. When I wake from it, I feel long moments of near-vertigo. I stagger between the two streams of consciousness until I can regain my balance in the here and now. Even so, my sense of self remains shaky. I’ll often get up from my desk and get something to eat to ground me in my body. Comfort food, literally.
It’s not such a long stretch to imagine myself disappearing into that tumbling chaos of color and never finding my way back. But as Wayne Oates, an old mentor of mine, used to say, “That’s a basket of summer fruit. It’ll come into season in its time. You can think about it then.”
Moving: nobody likes it. It’s unsettling, disorienting, chaotic. Every stress scale includes it. If you live within a tight budget it’s also appallingly hard work. And the older you get, the greater the possibilities of personal disaster. The specters of back injury and clinical exhaustion pile onto the routine risks of things broken or left behind, toes smashed, muscles strained, and near-death experiences driving top-heavy, tank-like vehicles. And I speak from a continent of experience.
When humans move, we understand why we do it, although it’s never easy, and seldom without pain. But what about the animals who share our lives, who go because we go? No, let’s be more specific: what about our cats?
Morgan
We had finally been forced to leave our fire-scarred land for a new home, and the year was turning toward the 2nd anniversary of my cat Morgan’s death, which had resulted from the stress of our original flight from the wildfire. And that meant I was also approaching the 2nd anniversary of my mother’s death (she died a week after Morgan).
Trauma makes tracks in our memories, links among synapses like connections in a railroad switching yard: a mental switch is thrown, direction changes imperceptibly, and we find ourselves traveling a road wearing the smooth semblance of the here and now, but invisibly cracked and pitted with old emotion. The unseen past trips us with its rubbled pain and creates new trauma where none need be: a trick of the mind, and one that caught me off-guard.
I had adopted a pair of kittens from a local shelter not long after Morgan’s death. From his earliest days, the male, Bacchus, had a sweetness I’d rarely encountered in a cat before, and I loved him beyond reason. When we moved to Colorado, he developed a urinary infection in the first weeks. I watched him closely, and began to see symptoms like Morgan’s appearing. When he strained to urinate for over a minute with no success I packed him into his carrying case and took him to the vet. Probably stress-related from the move, the vet said, and my heart quaked.
Bacchus
Stress. We talk about it all the time. Most of us are sure we have too much of it. We assume we understand what it is, but the word can mean at least four different things:
in physics, force per unit area;
in language, emphasis on a word;
in psychology, emotional discomfort produced by external and/or internal circumstances;
in biology, a stimulus that generates a state of heightened physiological response, and the physiological and anatomical consequences of that response.
The familiar buzzword is #3. Most people are aware of #2, some are superficially familiar with #1 from news reports on structural collapses after earthquakes, but I doubt that many people without biological or medical training are aware of #4.
The vets I consulted about Morgan and Bacchus almost certainly spoke in biological terms—but what I heard was pop psychology. I went away believing that the emotional terrors of moving were direct causes of both infections. We were speaking subtly different languages.
Photo by Hannibal Poenaru
There are two basic scenarios for biological stress: the perceived threat can be real, or it can be imagined. If the threat in the stimulus is real, then running away or fighting will relieve the stress, and the body can return to normal. But when the threat is imagined, the situation is more complex. If, as in Bacchus’ case, a cat perceives a threat in a new environment, but neither fight nor flight is possible, his body is unable to relax from the heightened response, and the stress is prolonged and unresolved. So he remains in a state of inappropriate physiological alert to the stimulus of this new environment for days and weeks. Such stress has an exhausting effect over time.
Apparently, Bacchus’ response to feeling lousy from the extended time on high alert was to stop drinking water. An unfortunate choice, since he then started building up uric acid in his system, which caused bladder inflammation and pain, making him think he needed to urinate when he didn’t—with the result that he felt worse and even less inclined to drink anything, and became dehydrated.
Morgan-Bacchus collage
By the time I packed Bacchus into his carrying case, my emotional train had already switched tracks without my awareness: I was sure I was rushing to save his life, but in fact I was caught up in a replay of the trauma of the wildfire and Morgan’s illness and death. Judgment and clear-sightedness had fallen away. As for Bacchus, taking him to the vet was probably the worst thing I could have done. Already suffering from the effects of physiological stress because of our move, he found himself suddenly moved again, but this time abandoned in a strange vet’s kennel, with neither his human nor his sister for comfort. Suddenly his life had gotten much worse.
Bacchus stayed overnight at the clinic, but by midmorning the next day he had produced no urine sample, so the vet used a needle to draw urine from his bladder. It hurt, and Bacchus vomited. Concerned that shock was a possibility, the vet hydrated him, analyzed the urine, and sent him back home with some antibiotics. At 2 AM Bacchus began to stagger and vomit. He was going into shock.
Shock is a sudden and drastic drop in blood pressure that is usually fatal if not reversed quickly. It is commonly caused by an extreme reaction to threatening stimuli, great blood loss, or pain—any of which will have greater impact if the animal is already dehydrated. Immediate intravenous fluids are the only effective treatment for a cat in shock, so I rushed Bacchus to an emergency clinic twenty miles away. He barely made it, but they saved his life.
If I had responded to Bacchus’ symptoms with a little thought and research instead of recycled panic, I could have taken special care to be sure he drank enough water and watched him closely for a couple of days. Perhaps he never had an infection—just inflammation. By taking him to the vet, I subjected him to greatly increased stress and dehydration, and when the vet drew urine, Bacchus was frightened by the pain. I might as well have been setting him up to go into shock.
Cat’s Nightmare, C.L. Francisco
The odd thing about the whole situation is that neither Bacchus nor I engaged with actual events. Bacchus responded to threat where there was only sudden change, and I was running on fear laid down by a similar trauma in my past. In a sense we were both sleepwalking, moving through self-created dreamspace.
My emotional overreaction to Bacchus’ stress probably added to his difficulties. A cat’s human is rather like a parent, and the cat looks to his human to assess danger and alert him to its presence. My alarm at Bacchus’ health issues and my ongoing anxiety over his well-being undoubtedly communicated their message to him: “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” And his stress increased.
Sad cat in cage, by Giordano
I suspect the vet realized that if the feedback loop of Bacchus’ stress response couldn’t be interrupted, Bacchus would not recover. So after hydrating him for 36 hours he told me to come get him and take him home. When I approached the cage, Bacchus was lying in the back corner, looking much like he looked when he went into shock: almost dead. I knelt down and called his name, and he growled and hissed without even opening his eyes. I unlatched the cage door and called him again, and his eyes flew open as if he really heard me that time. But when I reached in and picked him up, he snarled and spat and tried to scratch me. At last, as I pulled him out and held him close, he relaxed and began to burrow into my neck.
Bacchus
I recognized the pattern and felt sudden shame. By permitting old trauma to derail me from the reality of the present, I had opened a door for Bacchus to do the same. Now we were both sleeping the troubled sleep of past pain reliving itself in the present. Did he hear someone call his name? Terror. Was someone picking him up? Pain soon to come. He was snared by a shock different from what nearly killed him—he was suffering from incipient post-traumatic shock.
Each day after he came home he grew a little stronger. Kitty water bowls bloomed throughout the house, tempting him to drink. He started eating and drinking, and soon he even romped a bit. I worked relentlessly at monitoring and releasing my own anxiety. Now, more than 5 years later, he still flinches at any sudden noise or movement, but otherwise he’s my warm, loveable friend.
Miner’s Canary
Bacchus granted me a rare inside look at the damage we inflict on ourselves and others when the landscape around us is transformed by our own emotions. The animals who share our space mirror more than our care and grooming. They are individuals with interwoven multilevel awareness like ours. But unlike our human relations, they suffer in silence, never accusing us, allowing us to see how we hurt them without triggering our defensiveness and self-justification.
If we let ourselves see them clearly, they can be our counselors, even our guides. But too often they are only our miners’ canaries, dying in vain to warn us of inner toxins we have ignored until escape is impossible.
Bacchus Today
Thanks to the One, it wasn’t too late for Bacchus or for me.
In the days before Yeshua’s Cat was written, before the wildfire scorched our land, I was exploring the changes that had carried humanity forward in time from the old Earth-based cultures of the Stone Age, through the violent upheavals of the late Bronze Age, and into the time of the Roman Empire. The planned lectures and workshops vanished in the wildfire’s smoke, but something else emerged. I realized that without the art of these ancient peoples we would understand almost nothing about them. So where was the art of the early church? How had my education in early Christian history managed to focus so entirely on words? As a result, I turned to the internet and the local university library and began to search for the visual language of the early Church. (In case you’d like to explore on your own, Picturing the Bible by Jeffrey Spier is a good place to start.)
Painted bust of Jesus, Nunziatella Catacombs
For much of the mid-20th century, common wisdom dismissed the “search for the historical Jesus” as a groundless hope, a fantasy for the unrealistic. But although we may never see a portrait of the flesh and blood man Jesus, the search has proved far from “groundless”: in our time the Earth herself has been yielding up the voices and visions of Jesus’ earliest followers with increasing frequency.
1st C walls under San Clemente, photo Marc Aurel
Anyone who visits Rome today steps into a buzzing archaeological hive. This in itself isn’t so strange; after all, many of Rome’s greatest attractions were literally unearthed from its ancient past. What fascinates me is how these ruins emerge. They aren’t turned up by a farmer’s plow, or weathered out of an eroding riverbank, but excavated from beneath the city’s basements. Apparently, Rome buried itself. And the same can be said of Jerusalem, or almost any other Mediterranean capital.* In Rome, for example, the twelfth-century Basilica of San Clemente that still stands today used the walls of the fourth-century San Clemente as foundations. This earlier church rose on top of a first-century mansion. Stairs of ever-increasing age, exposed in recent excavations, descend from the sunlit world down through the virtually intact fourth-century church and into the bowels of ancient Rome. There visitors can walk along a first-century Roman alleyway and explore a now-subterranean apartment building adjacent to the walls of the mansion used as an early Christian meeting place. And under it all lies the rubble of Rome’s great fire of 64 CE.
Santa Maria Antigua, Rome
Canyons carved into the human past are literally opening at our feet along the Roman streets. We can almost believe we hear the slap of sandaled feet two thousand years dead. Anything seems possible. The past walks with us in ways we never imagined. Beneath the many strata of Roman civilization lies tuff, or hardened volcanic ash. Tuff is relatively soft until exposed to air, and is ideal for tunneling. This Roman bedrock made possible the creation of the lowest levels of all Roman ruins, the catacombs. As long as sufficient structural support was left in place, there was almost no limit to the number and extent of these labyrinthine burial chambers.
Catacombs of St. Callisto
Although the most famous are Christian, catacombs existed before the early church period, and provided burial space well into the Common Era for those of many different religions. Their painted burial chambers offer us some of the earliest glimpses into the faith of Christian believers, perhaps even back to the middle of the first century.
Vatican Necropolis, 3rd C. CE
Visual art as a way of communicating our experience of the world is always personal, and far more powerful than words. Art strikes human depths directly. When a person chooses images to express the soul’s deepest yearnings in the face of death, non-essentials fall away. The heart chooses whatever makes life livable, hope possible. When we look at funerary art, we meet human beings as they turn their faces toward the mystery of life moving into death. This mystery is what we find in the catacombs.
Jesus raising Lazarus, Via Latina catacombsWinged Victory and Hercules
So why are these earliest of Christian testimonies so little known? Why have these painted gospels made so little impact on how Christians understand their faith today? Perhaps it is because our own worldviews get in the way. So an American tourist in Rome snaps a photo of Nike (Winged Victory), and calls her a Christian angel. Another sees a faded catacomb painting of Hercules with the three-headed dog Cerberus and identifies him as the Good Shepherd (with peculiar sheep). We see what we expect to see, squeezing everything into familiar molds. Or perhaps most people just haven’t had the chance yet to truly experience these painted gospels for themselves.
Early Christians chose dramatic images of Jesus and the Old Testament when they painted their tombs. Those appearing most frequently in the 3rd century and earlier are below:.
Jesus the Good Shepherd, who cared unceasingly for his flock:
Early catacomb images of the Good Shepherd
Jesus the miracle-worker, who healed the sick, raised the dead, and controlled the elements:
Early catacomb images of Jesus performing miracles
Jesus the wise teacher:
Early catacomb images of Jesus teaching
Jonah’s sojourn in and emergence from the fish’s belly:
Early catacomb images and tomb carvings of Jonah
Daniel’s deliverance from the lions:
Early catacomb images of Daniel in lion’s den
The three young men protected from the fiery furnace:
Early catacomb images of three men in fiery furnace
Early Christians also painted images of themselves on tomb walls, using two motifs more often than others: women and men with arms raised in prayer and praise; and small groups of Christians gathered around shared ritual meals.
Early catacomb images of Christians gathered together
The paintings in the house church at Dura Europos in Syria (dating from about 230-250 CE) are the only Christian images of similar age that have been discovered. The paintings there depict the good shepherd, Jesus’ miracles, the Samaritan woman at the well, and the women at the tomb, as well as Old Testament scenes. Also like the catacombs, they portrayed contemporary believers in positions of praise (orants).
Dura Europos, Good Shepherd
Dura Europos Jesus walking on water
Dura Europos, Good Samaritan
Dura Europos, Jesus healing the paralytic
No crucifixes, no suffering martyrs, no images of sacrifice appeared in the early years. These came at least 500 years later, with the developing doctrines of the church.
Possible crucifixion or possible orant figures, Santa Sabina, Rome, 6th C
Crucifixion, 8th C, Santa Maria Antigua
But what does all this have to do with people like us, living two thousand years later? What impact might it have? Let me paint you a picture with words.
Jesus, Nunziatella catacomb
The Christian faith whispering from the dark walls of the catacombs shows us a young man of their own culture–robed, beardless, often holding a wand in his hand–reaching out with compassion and power to touch and heal the human pain around him. He stops the flow of menstrual blood that has made a woman ritually unclean for years. He commands death to release the dead Lazarus, and death yields to him. He sits as a teacher in a circle of disciples, speaking words of life. A strong man with bare legs, he stands among a flock of sheep, carrying a lamb across his shoulders. He betrays no weariness or impatience, only watchful care.
The faith pictured here is in a loving, powerful, and wise man sent from God to point the way and guide his people. They relied on his healing power, his love, and his commitment to their well-being. His God-given power was stronger than death, stronger than the destructive powers of nature, and stronger than human malice.
Early catacomb image of women serving a meal
The believers in these painted gospels were neither theologically complex nor concerned with church structure. Women appeared in positions of leadership as often as did men. No canon of scripture had yet been established, although Paul’s letters were circulating among believers by the 50’s–when there were already growing Christian communities in Rome. Church hierarchy was only a spreading shadow on the horizon, and authority was fluid. What we now consider to be the four gospels were written between 70 and 100 CE, and did not become authoritative until much later. Communities of Christians followed their own personal experience and oral traditions, and suffered at the whim of Roman emperors.
By the third and fourth centuries, the increasingly hierarchical church forcibly silenced dissenting voices. Orthodoxy narrowed to a fine line. A few men concentrated all the power in their own hands. Congregations became sheep in ways they had never anticipated in the early years, and their shepherds were not always good. Too often fear, shame, and guilt discouraged the sheep from straying. Bloody sacrifice–Jesus’ own, and that of the martyrs–became a cornerstone of church doctrine where it had never been before. Bishops formulated creeds, damning those who did not confess Jesus in precisely their words–along with all followers of other faiths. The groundwork was laid for the Crusades and the Inquisition.
The Pains of Hell, 1100 CE
Like the Romans buried Rome, the church buried itself. But unlike Rome, what the church buried they rarely considered fit to use for new foundations. Whether these developments, and those that have followed in the centuries since, have anything at all to do with the message of Jesus of Nazareth is a question more and more people are asking today. In the end each of us may need to dig through the rubble of time and consciousness to find our own buried treasure. But one thing seems clear: the treasure is there. Perhaps our perceptions are at fault.
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Wealthy Jerusalem home of the Herodian period
* The Wohl Museum of Archaeology in Jerusalem has excavated similar subterranean houses of the Herodian period from the hillside overlooking the Temple Mount. Although currently the museum has no website of its own, many pictures of their discoveries are available online . . . .
A number of people have asked me to share more about the wildfire that resulted in the death of the young cat whose memory lies behind Mari in The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat. This is the story of that wildfire.
Killing drought followed years of plentiful rainfall. Temperatures spiked into the 100’s and refused to drop. Creeks ran low. The odor of pine resin hung heavy in the air. A dry lightning strike—and a rancher who didn’t take it seriously enough—provided the critical mass, and two weeks later wildfire had consumed 40,000 acres of forest, pastures, and homes.
We dismissed the first smoke rising behind the buttes as nothing more than a wayward cloud, never imagining that the storm building there would explode into a holocaust. The days that followed dragged by in anxious succession. Winds dropped, and then blew up again out of nowhere. The fire turned back on itself, only to gather strength and roar off in another direction. Waves of rumor obliterated facts.
One night we drove out to watch the fire’s progress from a nearby ridge. News pictures of fire-lit nightscapes are commonplace now, but for us 8 years ago the scene was nothing less than apocalyptic. Small refugee animals fleeing the fire choked the dirt roads as we steered a path among them. I remember the porcupines best, humping their way in unseemly haste through the sullen light. Lines of flame spreading across the black ridges looked like flowing lava. The images presented themselves to our visual processors as nonsense, unreadable data. Nothing in our lives had prepared us for this.
First we evacuated the horses, just in case. We found carriers for the dogs and cats and set them by the doors. When the call came, we were as ready as we could have been, but we had room for little but the animals, basic clothing, toiletries, and our computers. Then for a week of endless days we waited in a small motel on a busy highway 30 miles away.
Why our home didn’t burn will always remain a mystery. The firefighters abandoned their efforts in the face of high winds and encircling fire. We were advised to expect a total loss. But in the end, the flames stopped as if by divine fiat all along the wire pasture fences that enclosed our buildings. Sap melted out of the old redwood paneling in my house from the heat, but only the land burned—the land and something deep in the flesh of my small black cat.
Morgan, cat of quiet pine groves that she was, probably hadn’t ever been in any building other than my house, and certainly never a motel on a busy highway. For a week she hardly came out from under the bed. No matter what I tried, she refused to eat, and she probably didn’t drink. By the time we returned to the still-smoldering ruins of our forest, she had a urinary infection. No medication touched it, and she grew steadily weaker, until at last the vet tested her for feline leukemia. The results were positive: she’d probably been born with it. All options vanished. The vet’s theory, and a sound one from what I’ve heard, was that the physical stress of her changed environment roused the sleeping disease into burning life. She might have stood a better chance if I’d left her behind to survive the wildfire on her own.
Within two months of the fire, Morgan was dead. I buried her in the charred grove where we had planned to build a small chapel. Beneath boughs once sweet with resin, in smoke-filled light and brittle shade, I laid her under the endless sky. And I grieved.
Morgan in her last week with friend Toby (Photoshop design, “Doorway Into Forever”)
But the grief had really begun when the vet first placed the figurative black cloth on his head and passed sentence of death. A dead forest surrounded me. My gentle cat was fading away in my arms. Eventually I gathered courage and resumed my walks beneath beloved trees, now wasted skeletons streaked with amber tears.
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I remember shutting my heart against the echoes of pain that surely must lie in ambush along those charcoaled aisles. But as weeks passed, only woodland stillness reigned. Blowing ash darkened the sun—smoke without fire, forest lives airborne—but already the forest’s heart was turning to the east. Life was emerging from death.
Blasted meadows were greening. Tenacious pines, seared but stubborn, drank deep to gather strength for life. Fire-crimsoned cones dropped seed. Seedlings broke the fragile soil. *
I found comfort in the cycle of life, and even in death..
Somehow over the next five years, Morgan’s death, questions about the Creator’s on-going involvement in non-human nature, the timing of Jesus’ coming in human history, and the redemption of the suffering Earth—all came together into the creation of Yeshua’s Cat. The spiritual doubts that had plagued my heart for years ripened and bore sweet fruit.
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I’ll continue the story of this journey in a few weeks. Come back soon!
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* To read about the devastating effects of salvage logging on the recovery of burned forests, click here.
Grace . . .
Moving: nobody likes it. It’s unsettling, disorienting, chaotic. Every stress scale includes it. If you live within a tight budget it’s also appallingly hard work. And the older you get, the greater the possibilities of personal disaster. The specters of back injury and clinical exhaustion pile onto the routine risks of things broken or left behind, toes smashed, muscles strained, and near-death experiences driving top-heavy, tank-like vehicles. And I speak from a continent of experience.
There are two basic scenarios for biological stress: the perceived threat can be real, or it can be imagined. If the threat in the stimulus is real, then running away or fighting will relieve the stress, and the body can return to normal. But when the threat is imagined, the situation is more complex. If, as in Bacchus’ case, a cat perceives a threat in a new environment, but neither fight nor flight is possible, his body is unable to relax from the heightened response, and the stress is prolonged and unresolved. So he remains in a state of inappropriate physiological alert to the stimulus of this new environment for days and weeks. Such stress has an exhausting effect over time.
We dismissed the first smoke rising behind the buttes as nothing more than a wayward cloud, never imagining that the storm building there would explode into a holocaust. The days that followed dragged by in anxious succession. Winds dropped, and then blew up again out of nowhere. The fire turned back on itself, only to gather strength and roar off in another direction. Waves of rumor obliterated facts.
Why our home didn’t burn will always remain a mystery. The firefighters abandoned their efforts in the face of high winds and encircling fire. We were advised to expect a total loss. But in the end, the flames stopped as if by divine fiat all along the wire pasture fences that enclosed our buildings. Sap melted out of the old redwood paneling in my house from the heat, but only the land burned—the land and something deep in the flesh of my small black cat.
