Sandwich Generation Part 2: Goodbye Mr. Lucy

Mr. Lucy did not survive the weekend.

He was an elegant, dapper old fella, always dressed in his tux and white gloves. When he walked up on our front steps in Newark nine years ago purring, he walked into my daughter's heart. She was entranced with Barney at the time and so named him Ms. Lucy after one of the characters. I'm usually pretty good at identifying, but I totally missed it this time.

When we moved, he was hit by a car and after a long night at the emergency pet vet, diagnosed with a torn diaphragm and a sex change, she became Mr. Lucy--Mr. Lucy Three Dots, because of the three black dots on his nose. He could be a tough customer, annoying, with an ear grating meow, and at times the best snuggler of all.

Pets are playing a larger and larger role in health care--serving as guides of course, and bringing cognizance to dementia patients. In nursing homes, pets are a happy thing for even the most withdrawn.

In "The Instinct to Heal", author David Servan-Schreiber, drawing on the work of The Institute of Heartmath.org, notes that animal human relationships can bring what is called heart coherence. In other words, when emotions run high or negative and a corresponding chaotic zigzagged heart rate ensues, overall health--physical and mental  degrades. Heart coherence--a more regular heart rate without wild jagged peaks and valleys, promotes over all health. 

What Mr. Lucy brought to my daughter especially, for whom he was her pet sibling, was a close coherent heart connection.

We Americans are very attached to our pets--sometimes we lavish more care on our pets than our elders. Since my daughter's elders all have become stardust, Mr Lucy meant more to her, at once her "sibling" and her funky old cat. they had a real heart to heart connection.

Tuesday, in company of many of his admirers, we will lay him to rest under our neighbor's 100 plus year old copper beech tree. It's silky skin and  bower of leafy limbs overhanging our yard will provide a fitting shelter for him--who as always will be dressed in his best black tux and spotless white gloves.

Nothing earthshaking in social observation...just a mark of observance for the old cat.

This afternoon the house was less filled with energy. It was a little more empty and cooler--for the time being--with a little less fuzzibutt heart.