Angel on a Leash Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€œHey buddy, how are you?” Teigh lay down and rolled over onto his back, ready to make some new friends. “What’s your name?”
    â€œHe’s Teigh, and I’m David,” I said. “This is our first visit here.”
    â€œWell, 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