AFTER TRYING EVERY single medication protocol in the latest and not-so-latest literature, my neurologists hit upon a combination of prescription drugs that worked to mitigate the pain. Even better, the meds didn’t make me “high” and didn’t make me gain as much weight as the other medications. From 2000 to 2002 a new doctor was finally able to get me off the roller coaster of hospital stays and drug treatment experimentations. My mother found me a place to live just a few blocks from her house and helped me move in. Wesley came along with me, of course, and I installed him on his perch in my bedroom.
I was still very sick and slept constantly. I fed Wesley and we talked, but we hardly ever cuddled anymore. He mostly slept and I mostly slept. “Teep deep deep, teeple teeple teeple…” We slept for a couple of years, he and I. Wesley was eighteen years old, ancient for a barn owl, so he didn’t seem to mind.
One day I looked into his obsidian eyes and saw a faint grayness. Very faint, but as time went by, there was more and more. Wesley was going blind. But he didn’t show any signs of distress; he still looked healthy, beautiful, and glossy. He did finally lose interest in mating on my arm, however, after one last halfhearted attempt. And that July, he skipped his molt. I waited and waited, wondering if perhaps I had altered the light cycle that triggers the molt by putting a night-light in my bedroom.
Wesley was also getting stiff; his movements now were slow and tentative. His poop stuck to the feathers around his bottom. He could no longer reach back there to groom, so I trimmed his feathers and, like a nursemaid, cleaned that area for him every day. He began to screech at odd hours of the night, and I had to move into another bedroom to get enough sleep.
His sight was failing, but his hearing was still sharp. If I walked quietly downstairs or got up from the couch, Wesley could hear my footfall, even barefoot on carpet, even with his door closed upstairs. He would screech in acknowledgment and I would answer “Hi, baby!” Although I could no longer sleep in the same room because of his erratic screeching, he was always aware of my presence, and we conversed back and forth. I could speak to him in a soft voice from the opposite side of the town house and he could hear me perfectly.
I kept thinking Wesley would molt soon because he was demanding more and more mice. And more. However, I’d find whole mice and mouse parts left on the perch despite his begging for food (a very distinct verbalization). Perhaps he could no longer see the mice, though he certainly could feel them with his feet. Was he just getting picky? I would give him new mice, which he would attack as if he’d been starving for days, sometimes holding one mouse in his beak and clutching another in his talons. He would turn his back to me, and hunch over the mice protectively. It was strange. Why was he so paranoid and worked up about food? Did he have some eating disorder? I usually could figure out what he was trying to communicate, but now I was confused.
One day Wesley was hanging upside down off the edge of his perch, as he loved to do. He’d hang there by one leg, perfectly still, and quietly observe the world. After tiring of this amusement, he’d grab the towels on the perch with his talons and chin-up onto the platform. By habit, I’d walk by his perch and cup my hand under his hanging body, and swing him back up onto his platform. But when I did that this time, he fell forward off the perch and just hung there by his leash. I tried again. He fell. I unhooked Wesley and set him on the floor and he fell forward on his face. What was going on here?
I decided his eating problem had gone too far and he was probably hungry or dehydrated, so I injected him with a large dose of IV fluid with electrolytes and held him in my arms until his blood sugar rose. My diagnosis was correct and he was fine. But now I knew he couldn’t stay on his perch anymore. He wasn’t eating his mice properly, and if weakened, he could no longer pull himself back onto it.
It was time for new quarters. I had a super-size travel carrier—the kind used for very large dogs—for Wesley, which he adored. It was exactly the kind of nesting site he would have selected as a young owl, with lots of room to flap his wings and walk around. I set him up with dark towels draped over a stack of books set on the carrier floor, so he had a soft, elevated perch. I filled a heavy white dish with seven or eight mice per day. This new living arrangement made it easier for him to find his mice. And now that he knew he always had mice, he settled down and no longer begged for food.
Things seemed to improve for a while. I still believed that I could handle whatever new situation Wesley threw at me, since for almost twenty years I had always been able to improvise with very little outside help. But not long thereafter, Wesley began to beg for mice again, even when he knew they were there. This drove me to tears. Everything else about him seemed fine, his feathers were gorgeous, he still played in shallow water and took face baths and drank, so he was generally well hydrated, even if he didn’t eat the whole mouse. But he was too skinny.
One day I was driving home from an appointment and took a country road, the scenic route. I was listening to a morbid Scottish song, translated into Irish Gaelic, about a man discovering his beloved—dead and frozen to her bed during the famine. I was always learning songs in Irish, but this one was even more morbid than most. As I drove along, singing this lament, I suddenly spotted a dead barn owl by the side of the road. My heart leapt into my throat. It was like seeing my own child, my Wesley, dead by the road. I stopped to check, just in case it was alive and not moving. This gorgeous young owl was unmarked but dead. I had a horrible premonition and felt ice cold as I stood in the warm sunlight. I picked up the owl, cradled it, and took it out to the field nearby. I got a camp shovel out of the truck and buried him slowly and carefully, knowing now that this was a portent. Tears streaming down my face, I kept saying to myself, “No, I can’t lose him. I just can’t.”
The one thing I hate about animal stories is that after you’ve almost read the entire book and you really care about the animal, they go and tell you all about how the animal died. In fact, I often read the end of these books first so I can at least brace myself for the inevitable. So you should stop reading now if you don’t want to hear about Wesley dying. But I need to tell you.
Of course, I knew it would come. Wesley was ridiculously old. Dr. Coward said it was like a human still living at 120. He told me I had taken exceptional care of Wesley, there wasn’t a single stress line in his feathering; he was perfectly groomed and gorgeous. When I protested about how skinny he was Dr. Coward said, “Well, a 120-year-old man is very skinny and weak, too, you know.”
If only I had cuddled him more that last year, but he didn’t seem to want to be cuddled. If only I had spent every last moment with him instead of sleeping so much on the couch. If only I had figured out what was going on with the mice. But there’s nothing I could have done. I had done everything I knew for Wesley and I knew a lot, but Wesley was masking an illness from me, as wild animals do.
The night of January 8, 2004, at a time when Wes would normally wake and start talking to me, I heard a weird sound upstairs. I immediately raced up to his room, knowing something was very wrong. Wesley was in his carrier house, trying to greet me, but the only sound he could make was a raspy wheeze. I brought him out of his carrier and stood him on the floor. He swayed. Oh, no. Please don’t sway. He made a pathetic whistling noise. What was wrong? Did he need water? I gave Wesley water and he took a sip but couldn’t swallow properly and it came back out of his nose. I dried him off and began feeling desperate.
Wesley was so weak it must mean he needed nutrition. I felt his tummy and it was empty. I brought him a mouse, but he wouldn’t even look at it, so I tried to force-feed him. I fed starving raptors as a wildlife rescue worker, so I knew what I was doing. After a few minutes, he spat out the piece.
I held Wesley in my arms and raced downstairs to my animal medical station and gave him IV fluids. He lay on his back on the couch, gazing at me with his solemn eyes. He didn’t seem perturbed. I kept telling him he was okay, I was with him, I loved him, I’d help him. I was sobbing now. I called Dr. Coward’s office and cried, “My bird is in an emergency! He is collapsing! Tell Dr. Coward!” They replied, “Come right away. Don’t worry that it’s after closing time. We’ll be waiting for you.”
I tucked Wes into his small travel carrier and propped him up with little pillows and rolled towels so that he wouldn’t have to brace himself during the drive. He lay his head down and watched me silently as I put the seat belt around his carrier and jumped into my SUV. I opened his carrier door and caressed his head and talked to him all the way to the vet.
“It’s okay, Wes. I love you. I’m your mommy, I’m here. It’ll be okay. Just rest. Dr. Coward will help you. I love you so much. You are my light and my joy. You’ve been my best friend and I’ll always love you. Thank you for letting me into your life. Mommy loves you so much.”
I ran into the vet’s office with Wesley in his carrier, then gently lifted him out and cradled him in my arms. Dr. Coward gave him more fluids and a shot of vitamins and tried some other tricks of the trade. Wesley didn’t even try to resist. By now we were all crying in the room, and I was spilling out my guilt about why didn’t I do more and what if I could have done this or that for him or figured it out…And Dr. Coward kept telling me it was a miracle that Wesley had lived this long, that my care for him was possibly the best he’d ever seen as a vet, that Wesley obviously had an incredibly full and happy life and that he had grown older than was seemingly possible.
I cradled Wesley in my arms as I had done for the last nineteen years. Dr. Coward brought something over to give Wesley and as I lifted him to the table his head fell forward onto his chest. I held his head up but it fell again. I looked into his eyes. He seemed far away. Was he dead? Dr. Coward grabbed his stethoscope, felt around…yes. Wesley was gone. Everyone was crying. One of the vet techs threw herself on me and kissed me on the cheek. I was wet with tears.
Dr. Coward slipped out of the room with Wesley and did a very small, informal exam to see if he could tell me exactly what he had died of. It was massive liver cancer.
He told me, “I don’t know how he was alive at all. There’s no viable tissue left. It’s all cancerous. All of it. You did absolutely everything humanly possible for him, but there was nothing you could have done about this.”
And I had done the best I could to make Wesley comfortable. I had protected him, kept him warm, fed him, made him feel safe, and we made it to the end without anyone hurting him. We’d made it. All of my prayers for Wesley had been answered.
Wesley changed my life. He was my teacher, my companion, my child, my playmate, my reminder of God. Sometimes I even wondered if he was actually an angel who had been sent to live with me and help me through all the alone times. He comforted me; many times I cried into his feathers and told him my troubles and he tried to understand. He listened and cuddled with me.
He chose to sit on my pillow while I napped and he washed his face when I washed mine. He tried to feed me his mice and make me his mate. He created hundreds of nests for me. He joyfully poured out his love in loud exclamations and had boisterous opinions about everything. He kept a running commentary on all that happened in our lives, in his owl language. He brought us wild owls to the bedroom window with his joyful and jubilant sounds…We were happy together.
I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for Wesley at the end. I did take good care of him and I loved him completely. He was amazing, curious, joyful, strong willed, full of life, a huge soul. His eyes were indescribable. I saw eternity in them, and now at last he was free to fly. My last prayer is that we be reunited in the afterlife, and that he is with God now and that God is taking care of him.
When he died Wesley was lying across my left arm like he always did, with his talons dangling down, his head in my left hand, his eyes closed, and I was grooming him with my right hand. That’s when his spirit went out of his body. I’m glad we had that one final embrace.