< Back to Issue 10

NONFICTION

Seven Days with Ethel

My friends Steve and Deirdre have a yellow dog named Ethel, who is a stray that they finally enticed to live with them after exercising copious amounts of patience and coordinating a visit to the vet after a lost fight with a neighborhood raccoon.

Last fall, they asked if I could spend a week with Ethel. They’d pay me, they promised, as if the love of your friends alone isn’t enough to make you cross an ocean for them, to say nothing of spending a week with their cute dog who almost smiles with her little canine teeth when you say the word w-a-l-k in front of her.

On the first night I spent with Ethel, she laid by the window and watched for the return of her preferred humans, who would not return for another seven days. I cooked pasta at the stove and fed her sauced noodles, and she licked my hand tentatively once she swallowed them. Even though her humans loved her enough to ask another human to spend a week with her, she was still in many ways a stray, and I hated how much I empathized with the steadfast way she expected everyone to abandon her.

We’ve made some progress, I texted my friends that night from their couch. I attached a photo of Ethel lounging at my feet—a safe distance away, but still in the room with me.

***

Pope Francis proclaimed that my freshman year of college was the jubilee year of mercy.

I was a mainline Protestant at an evangelical university, so practicing this year of mercy with a group of friends felt like a revolutionary act: we drove to New Orleans to hear Anne Lamott give a lecture on the ways that we might be merciful; we lit candles in our dorm room and in church services; and we ate honey-butter chicken biscuits in the Whataburger parking lot as we contemplated the most unmerciful questions of all, like how miracles happen and who gets to decide.

My best friend, Claire, was better at mercy than the rest of us, and she told us solemnly on the first day of Lent that she was giving up apathy. The rest of us, who had given up soda and dessert and vowed to go out less, felt suddenly bad about our decisions, but not bad enough to join her on her pilgrimage.

The second week of Lent, Claire told us that her biology professor had a wife with early onset Parkinson’s disease. Her name was Adele, and she was a writer who could no longer hold a pen. A local college hosted a dance class for people with Parkinson’s, and Claire’s professor was busy explaining the difference between herpetology and hematology to his undergraduates at the same time as that dance class, so Claire offered to drive her.

Every week for the next four years, Claire Shrader gave up apathy in practice and not just in theory—even long after the jubilee year of mercy ended. She gave it up on other nights, too, helping Adele cook dinner or continue writing her volumes of poetry and children’s books.

We graduated, moved out and away and on, but Claire, always better at mercy than the rest of us, stayed in touch with Adele, who had become her friend. They Zoomed as Adele’s world diminished because of the combination of COVID-19 and her advancing disease, and the call came on my second day with Ethel that Adele had died.

“Can I stay with you when I come? The only flight into Jackson is the day after tomorrow, and it’s so late. Almost midnight,” Claire fretted on the phone. She was not crying—there would be time for that later—but that night, she booked flights and ironed a black dress.

“Yes,” I said, looking at Ethel curled up on her dog bed in the corner of the basement. Until that week, I had believed that animals could mourn and had souls as an intellectual exercise; that week, I believed it in practice, as Ethel sniffed hopefully at Steve’s car every time we passed it in the driveway and buried her face in Deirdre’s left-behind jacket when she took her naps. “It doesn’t matter how late it is. I’ll pick you up.”

***

The next day, there were violent thunderstorms projected in the evening. Steve and Deirdre had warned me that Ethel was afraid of storms, and I left work an hour early so that I could take her for a walk before the weather set in.

The skies were already dark when Ethel stopped to lap water in front of the Episcopal church. Her tail was tucked, and she gave me a suspicious look that told me plainly that I did not know best.

This was particularly evident later that night as the thunder rolled and the streaks of lightning illuminated the dishes in the cabinets and the fear in Ethel’s eyes.

She whined and finally vomited near midnight when a sickening crash told us that lightning had hit a tree farther up the street. The lights I’d left on in the kitchen flickered, and I prayed that they wouldn’t go out. As long as the lights were on, only one of us was afraid.

I cleaned the rug and Ethel apologized with her eyes. “It’s fine,” I told her as she paced back and forth from the sofa to the dining table. “I have anxiety, too.”

I remembered the first time I’d gone to therapy for that anxiety, how it felt like everyone in my life was absent even when there were I hope this helps text messages in my inbox, even when all the evidence told me that I was not alone.

Another flash of lightning illuminated a picture of Steve and Deirdre on their mantel. Ethel saw it, too, and I put my hand on the back of her neck, where a collar advertised her humans’ phone number, advertised that she was loved and loved and loved.

I remembered the cross that had dangled from my own neck during my own miserable months-long breakdown, how it, too, had advertised that I was loved and loved and loved, how I had not been able to perceive that love at all.

(How I sometimes still can’t.)

Whether it was the steadying sight of her two favorite and most familiar humans or my hand on her neck, I do not know, but Ethel finally decided that she no longer had to keep vigil in the living room. She did not need a meteorologist to tell her where the safest room in the house was, and I sighed, wishing that she believed the guest bed was as safe as the shower. She did not, and so we laid on the tiled floor.

My voice seemed to help, but I had run out of things to talk about by one in the morning, so I read to her.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night, and said to him, “Rabbi–”*

Ethel panted against the next round of lightning, and I thought about all the books on spirituality that I read during the many months that I did not feel spiritual at all. I lived on bread alone, and the writers heard every word that had proceeded from the mouth of God; they caught a glimpse of God’s retreating back, and I saw only the cleft in the rock.

Some of those words came to me on the shower floor, and I was mysteriously and finally buoyed by Barbara Brown Taylor’s belief that Jesus did not come to enlighten Nicodemus but to endarken him, to establish the limits of what he could know about God and what he could not. I thought about all the things I could not know about God, like why Ethel and I cannot perceive presence in depths of our fear, how we can only see the darkness.

***

The next night, I kissed Ethel and promised her that I would be back and would bring a friend when I returned.

She seemed to believe me, and even though the Jackson airport is always strict about the fact that the arrivals lane needs to stay in motion, no one said anything when I jumped out of my car and embraced my friend, who had given up apathy and was shipwrecked on the beach of what it looks like to really care. We had not seen each other in three years, the length of a pandemic, and we cried and said I love you I love you I love you, the truest words we still knew.

We ate apple pie straight out of the tin at the kitchen counter once we arrived home, and Ethel looked at us tiredly from beneath the dining table: the storm had kept her up until three the night before, and now we were at the kitchen table at one in the morning, saying the unsayable things: Jesus died and I believe it and Jesus rose again, and on my best days I believe it, but in this kitchen at one in the morning, I only hope for it.

I thought irresistibly about The Magician’s Nephew, a book I listened to on tape while I drove to my endless therapy appointments during those long months of reading anything that said God’s name when I couldn’t say it for myself, a book that has been the soundtrack to my misery but now felt as real to me as my own life.

I remembered Digory’s desperation to keep the apple that would save his mother’s life, how he only received the balm that might heal her when he heard Aslan’s assurance that grief is very great; only you and I know that in this land yet.** I wondered if it was the acknowledgement of his pain that began to make all things well and not the solution itself. I wondered if it would have still been considered a miracle had it not been accompanied by deliverance.

I did not arrive at an answer, and the rest of the street slept while we got ready to go to a funeral.

***

The next day, Claire went to spend the afternoon with Adele’s family, and Ethel and I sat on the sun porch. She liked me enough by then that she touched my bare foot with her paw, and I felt its warmth as I confronted the fact that I was sick.

There was blood when I went to the bathroom, a persistent feverish pain in my back. Sick was the prevailing adjective of my childhood, and I had avoided it as an adult, but the word came to me that day on the porch, and I felt like I was seven years old again, swinging my feet that did not touch the ground from the plastic chair of a urologist’s office filled with old men whose pity made me cringe.

“I hate this, Ethel,” I told her, and she cocked her left ear a little, as if to sympathize.

When I was in elementary school getting special dispensations from the school board to move to the next grade even though I had missed 20-some-odd days of school, a well-meaning religious person offered my mother anointing oil, a bottle their church used to invoke God in hopeless cases that medicine had so far failed to fix.

It made her think of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, and she did not know if she could use it, and so she drove around with it unopened in her car. She never had to decide, because the school eventually called to tell her that I’d passed the kidney stone that had plagued me all school year, the stone that had blocked and infected my kidneys time and time again.

I thought of how my mother’s refusal to anoint me was a deeper sign of her unshakable belief that God would not force her to draw the knife, a belief I have often wished I could share, I who always expect to draw the knife or to have it drawn.

I thought of how afraid Ethel and I are to be left alone, of how the trite Christian answer to this fear is that we are never alone because God is with us. It is a statement that does not feel true to me when I am sick, because I have never heard God’s footsteps on the bathroom floor when I have lain there.

I wondered if Ethel hears God’s footsteps, if that is the sound she follows to the safest room in the house every time she is afraid.

And it was evening, and it was morning, the sixth day.

***

A few months after my week with Ethel, my sickness finally became unignorable, and Deirdre drove me to the ER. We were there for nine hours, and at hour seven, Deirdre sat down beside me in bed and showed me photo albums from a trip to Italy. I was nearly delirious from the cocktail of pain and pain medicine, but I thought about Ethel on the bathroom floor, about Claire’s abdication of apathy, about my mother’s refusal to use the oil, about how Deirdre had a thousand other things she could be doing that weren’t distracting me from my misery.

I realized that, like Ethel, I have heard footsteps on the bathroom floor all these many years and had failed to recognize them because they sounded like the footfall of everyone who ever loved me.

---

*John 3:1-2 NRSV

**C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (HarperCollins, 2002).

---

Taylor McKay Hathorn is a Mississippian by birth and a Jacksonian by choice, and you can read more of her work online at www.taylormckayhathorn.com.

---

Next (Kim Furst) >
< Previous (Kathryn Thompson)

---

Photo: Filip Maljković from Pancevo, Serbia, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by Veronica McDonald.