Dewey's Nine Lives

Bill Bezanson is better now. The fear and isolation triggered by the events of September 11, 2001, sent him to the local Veterans Affairs (VA) center for counseling, and he finally confronted his memories of Vietnam, and especially of September 1968. He had been experiencing the “fight or flight” syndrome so common with PTSD, a biological response triggered by a subconscious conviction that the world is unsafe, that to survive, you must either run or defend yourself. For more than thirty years, Bill Bezanson had been running.

“What would you have told me about your life before that breakthrough?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

It was as simple as that.

A few months later, in late 2001, Bill retired. He adopted another kitten so that the cat he brought home when Spooky was sick would never feel alone. After decades of rental houses, he purchased a condominium in northwestern Washington. He no longer felt the urge to flee, but that September he painted his entire condominium. Painting was a good middle ground.

In 2002, he bought a house outside Maple Falls, Washington, a small town near Mount Baker and the Canadian border. He’s still not sure he’s truly let anyone in, not all the way, but he’s found a home for life, and he’s made good friends in the neighborhood. Mr. Helpful, they call him. He built a porch for his neighbor, who is battling cancer. He drives another neighbor, a ninety-year-old former schoolteacher with macular degeneration, on her errands. His father died ten years ago after a long battle with cancer, having told only one story to the nurses who cared for him—the story of how a raccoon loved his son Bill so much that it jumped out of a tree to greet him and brought its babies onto the porch to meet him—but Bill has reconnected with his mother. He calls her in Michigan two or three times a week.

Every now and then, he has friends over: fellow retirees, neighbors, people he met on the job or in the past few years. They share a few drinks, laugh, chat. At some point during the evening, someone always reaches down and brushes the back of their leg. “I thought I felt something,” they say, when they see Bill watching them. “A cold spot. But there was nothing there.”

Bill doesn’t say anything, but he knows there was something there. “It might be Zippo,” Bill told me, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. That’s just a kindness to an old friend. In his heart, he knows it was the cold nose of Spooky. The cat has never left him. He still comes around, sometimes, to say hello. He is waiting for Bill to come home.

FOUR

Tabitha, Boogie, Gail, BJ, Chimilee, Kit, Miss Gray, Maira, Midnight, Blackie, Honey Bunny, Chazzi, Candi, Nikki, Easy, Buffy, Prissy, Taffy . . . and more

“When I was reading your book I had to think of what a great book it would have been if I would have kept a diary of our times here on Sanibel Island, FL. My husband manages a resort on the island and I work reservations and one night we were taking a walk on the grounds and a lovely cat followed us home and so of course I fed her and she of course kept coming back. . . . Well, to make a long story short, we ended up with 28 cats.”

I love Sanibel Island, Florida.I’vetraveledall over the country to library conferences—and enjoyed every dancing, laughing minute of it—but nothing, for me, compares to that special island. Thanks to my brother Mike, who was friends with the former manager, I’ve been visiting a resort there called Premier Properties of Pointe Santo de Sanibel for more than twenty years. I was there the week after Dewey died, in fact. Brother Mike’s daughter was getting married, and I was packing for the trip when I got the call. Dewey wasn’t acting like himself.

I immediately rushed to the library to pick him up and take him to the vet. I thought it was constipation, a frequent problem for our elderly cat. I was stunned when the doctor used words like tumor, cancer, intense pain, and no hope. I felt as if I had been flattened by a hammer blow, but when I looked into Dewey’s eyes, I could tell it was true. He had been hiding it from me for weeks, possibly months, but he wasn’t hiding it now. He was hurting. And he was asking for my help.