A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher

"I loved the book. When writing about pets and infirm and elderly people, the temptation to get sappy and sentimental may be great, but Halpern never succumbs. I found myself choking back tears... There are small and great triumphs... and there are many laughs as well... It is a great gift for someone with Halpern's mind to join with Pransky's heart to shed light on some very dark places for the rest of us." -"The New York Times Book Review" "Massively insightful... Consider it a meditation on morality, aging and friendship, as well as affirmation that, no matter our physical conditions or economic circumstances, 'We are rich in life.'" -"O Magazine "(one of "O"'s Only Dog Books You'll Ever Need to Own) "This book delves far deeper into human nature than that old theme of 'we all love our dogs, don't we?'... her book is more about humanity and how wonderful, fulfilling and even surprising experiences can be had in the most unlikely of places... Amen." -"USA"" Today" (3 1/2 / 4 starred rating) "A terrific, bighearted book that anyone interested in the human-dog bond cannot fail to be delighted by... Honest and touching, this book illuminates the lessons owners and dogs teach each other, as well as the transformative nature of acts of kindness--and not just for the recipient. Thoughtful, inspiring, and often joyous, "A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home" is, at heart, about nothing less than what it is to be human, hopefully with a good dog by your side." -"Modern Dog" "[Fills] readers with goodness and stories of the near-miraculous relationship between pups and people. Hers is a quiet, Zen-like book packed with philosophy, theology, and a dog. It's more reflective, more spiritual than other dog books, and it will make you look at your canine kids with a little more wonder." -"Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune" "Heartwarming... intellectual, thoughtful and deeply perceptive... Halpern is a gifted writer who effortlessly weaves philosophy, theology, psychology and neuroscience into gently humorous, vividly descriptive storytelling... "A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home" is an unexpectedly profound and informative read, even as it entertains and, yes, warms the heart." -"Seven Days" "Skilled in the art of combining vivid in-the-moment storytelling with thoughtful analysis... [Halpern is] a deeply ethical thinker with a bright sense of humor... A profoundly affecting and edifying chronicle brimming with practical wisdom." -"Booklist" (starred review) "Halpern's love of life and openness to its infinite possibilities shine through in this powerful and engaging account... Time and again, anecdotes bolster her contention that in places where 'life is in the balance, ' it is possible to get to the essentials about human nature." -"Publishers Weekly" "Witty and compassionate... readers will take away the knowledge that we are each given one life and we had best not squander how we live it." -"Kirkus" "It proved more challenging than she had anticipated to teach Pransky, accustomed to roving through meadows unleashed, to ignore everything from food to wheelchairs to other dogs and interact politely with people who were ill, fragile, sometimes uprooted and often demented... But Pransky and her human succeeded, and Ms. Halpern's new book tells about their adventures--an appropriate word... perceptive and unsentimental." -"The New York Times," "The New Old Age" blog "A therapy dog opens many doors of deeper human communication. All people interesting in improving the lives of others should read this insightful book." -Temple Grandin, author of "Animals in Translation "and "Animals Make Us Human" "Affectionate and deeply affecting, written with a light hand and a keen eye, this is a wonderful story of great things--namely, love, life, human kindness, and dogs." -Susan Orlean, author of "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend "and "The Orchid Thief" "A joyous and moving account of how seemingly small gifts of kindness can make a profound difference. And not to the recipient alone." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "March," "People of the Book," and "Caleb's Crossing" "This is a gem of a book, a beautiful, wise, and big-hearted story about companionship and the true nature of virtue." -Diane Ackerman, author of "One Hundred Names for Love" "A book about a dog that is ultimately a book about humanity... a beautiful, honest, joyful accounting of what matters." -Terry Tempest Williams, author of "Refuge "and "When Women Were Birds""Skilled in the art of combining vivid in-the-moment storytelling with thoughtful analysis... [Halpern is] a deeply ethical thinker with a bright sense of humor... A profoundly affecting and edifying chronicle brimming with practical wisdom." -"Booklist" (starred review) "Halpern's love of life and openness to its infinite possibilities shine through in this powerful and engaging account... Time and again, anecdotes bolster her contention that in places where 'life is in the balance, ' it is possible to get to the essentials about human nature." -"Publishers Weekly" "Witty and compassionate... readers will take away the knowledge that we are each given one life and we had best not squander how we live it." -"Kirkus" "A therapy dog opens many doors of deeper human communication. All people interesting in improving the lives of others should read this insightful book." -Temple Grandin, author of "Animals in Translation "and "Animals Make Us Human" "Affectionate and deeply affecting, written with a light hand and a keen eye, this is a wonderful story of great things--namely, love, life, human kindness, and dogs." -Susan Orlean, author of "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend "and "The Orchid Thief" "A joyous and moving account of how seemingly small gifts of kindness can make a profound difference. And not to the recipient alone." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "March", "People of the Book", and "Caleb's Crossing" "This is a gem of a book, a beautiful, wise, and big-hearted story about companionship and the true nature of virtue." -Diane Ackerman, author of "One Hundred Names for Love" "A book about a dog that is ultimately a book about humanity... a beautiful, honest, joyful accounting of what matters." -Terry Tempest Williams, author of "Refuge "and "When Women Were Birds""Witty and compassionate... readers will take away the knowledge that we are each given one life and we had best not squander how we live it." -Kirkus "A therapy dog opens many doors of deeper human communication. All people interesting in improving the lives of others should read this insightful book." -Temple Grandin, author of "Animals in Translation "and "Animals Make Us Human" "Affectionate and deeply affecting, written with a light hand and a keen eye, this is a wonderful story of great things--namely, love, life, human kindness, and dogs." -Susan Orlean, author of "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend "and "The Orchid Thief" "A joyous and moving account of how seemingly small gifts of kindness can make a profound difference. And not to the recipient alone." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "March", "People of the Book", and "Caleb's Crossing" "This is a gem of a book, a beautiful, wise, and big-hearted story about companionship and the true nature of virtue." -Diane Ackerman, author of "One Hundred Names for Love" "A book about a dog that is ultimately a book about humanity... a beautiful, honest, joyful accounting of what matters." -Terry Tempest Williams, author of "Refuge "and "When Women Were Birds""Affectionate and deeply affecting, written with a light hand and a keen eye, this is a wonderful story of great things--namely, love, life, human kindness, and dogs." -Susan Orlean, author of "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend "and "The Orchid Thief" "A joyous and moving account of how seemingly small gifts of kindness can make a profound difference. And not to the recipient alone." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "March", "People of the Book", and "Caleb's Crossing" "This is a gem of a book, a beautiful, wise, and big-hearted story about companionship and the true nature of virtue." -Diane Ackerman, author of "One Hundred Names for Love" "A book about a dog that is ultimately a book about humanity... a beautiful, honest, joyful accounting of what matters." -Terry Tempest Williams, author of "Refuge "and "When Women Were Birds""Halpern is a writer of immense talents and enormous heart. A joyous and moving account of how seemingly small gifts of kindness can make a profound difference. And not to the recipient alone." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "People of the Book "and "Caleb's Crossing""With uncommon wit and insight, Sue Halpern has written a book about a dog that is ultimately, a book about humanity. "A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home" is a beautiful, honest, joyful accounting of what matters." -Terry Tempest Williams, author of "Refuge" Sue Halpern is the author of five previous books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books , The New York Times Magazine , Time , The New Yorker , Parade , Rolling Stone , and Glamour , among others. She has been a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow and is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. She lives with her husband, the writer Bill McKibben, and Pransky in Ripton, Vermont. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionPransky, my soon-to-be ten-year-old dog, is lyingon the living room couch, her body filling it end toend, for though she is not a big dog, she is double-jointed, which means that her hips lay out flat. If I weren’ttyping this I’d be stretched out next to her because I’mtired, too, as I often am on Tuesday afternoons. Everyother day of the week, Pransky is a carefree country dogwho operates by instinct, roaming the meadow aroundour house. But Tuesday mornings we spend time at thecounty nursing home, going door-to-door dispensingcanine companionship and good cheer. Working at thenursing home requires us to pay attention—Pransky tome, to her surroundings, and to the people she ismeeting, and me to her, to our surroundings, and to the peoplewe are meeting. After three years you’d think wewould have gotten tougher or more robust, but that’snever happened and probably never will.When I first considered training Pransky to be a therapy dogshe was in her late adolescence. Dog years beingwhat they are, she is now about the same age as most ofthe people in the nursing home. Even so, the words“work” and “walk” still get her to her feet in a unit oftime that is less than a second. Is she better at her job,more empathetic, now that she, too, is of a certain age? Idoubt it. I doubt it because I don’t think she could bemore empathetic.As foreign as the nursing home environment was toboth of us when we first started visiting County, it wasa little less so to me, since my first job was at a medicalschool in a teaching hospital where I sometimeswent on rounds. I was in my late twenties, with a newlyminted doctorate, hired to teach ethics to second-yearstudents. This should tell you all you need to know abouthow seriously that place took the ethical part of medicaleducation: at that age I had about as much experiencewith the complicated ethical dilemmas of sick peopleand their families as the second-years in my class hadtreating sick people and dealing with those ethical dilemmas,which is to say, basically, none. Still, realitywas not our mandate. We were supposed to considerwhat might happen “if,” and then think through the best“then.”The one thing you need to know about modernphilosophy is that the operative word in the previoussentence is “best.” The first thing we had to do in that classwas figure out what it meant. Was it what the person in thebed said she wanted, what the doctor wanted, what thehospital’s risk manager wanted, what the church(whatever church it was) wanted, what the husband wanted,what the other doctor wanted, what the wife wanted,what the parents wanted, what the partner wanted, whatthe children wanted? Sorting out what was best was, tosay the least, challenging. For guidance, we read works byKant and Aristotle and Bentham that were harder to getthrough than the textbooks on human anatomy andorganic chemistry, and, for my students, who were itchingto get into the clinic, largely beside the point. While Ididn’t think for a minute that an abstract principle, likeKant’s categorical imperative, say, was actually going tolead to the right decision on whether or not to give a newheart to a homeless man, it seemed like a reasonable idea,in a place where right answers were often not as black-and-white as they might appear, to inject some of thesenotions into the future doctors’ heads. If ideas like thesecould become part of their mental landscape, then in thefuture, confronted with that homeless man, they mightsee the terrain with greater definition.Historically, when people looked for guidance on howto conduct their lives, they turned to philosophy or religion or both.That’s less true now, as formal religiousaffiliations drop away and academic philosophy becomesmore and more arcane. It’s not that people are less inclinedto examine their lives or to seek wisdom, it’s just that theyare more likely to look for it in other places: in supportgroups, on radio call-in shows, from life coaches, on theInternet, in books, or, in my case, inadvertently, with mydog, in a nursing home.When Pransky and I started working at County, Iexpected to learn things—how could I not?—thoughwhat those things would be I had no clue. I assumed I’dlearn something about old people, and about the thera-peutic value of animals in a medical setting, and aboutmyself in that setting, which was alien and not a littlescary. What I found myself learning quickly sorted itselfinto a template that anyone with a Catholic education,especially—which would not include me—wouldrecognize as the seven virtues: love, hope, faith, prudence,justice, fortitude, restraint.It should be said that the Catholics didn’t have a corneron virtue, in general, or on these seven in particular;they just happened to enumerate and, in a sense, popularizethem, so when we think of virtue, we tend to think insevens. But well before Catholic theologians codified theirlist, Greek philosophers, most notably Plato and Aristotle,offered advice as to the traits and behaviors that shouldbe cultivated in order to live a good, productive, meaningfullife, a life with and for others. It was to Plato’s original four—courage, wisdom, justice, and restraint—that, centuries later,Saint Augustine added love, hope, and faith—what are commonlycalled “the theological virtues.” These, he believed, both came fromGod and delivered one to God and, ultimately, to a place in heaven. Inour own time, for most people, love and hope and evenfaith, if you think of it as loyalty and consistency, areunmoored from visions of an afterlife. Still, the virtuesremain as guides not only to good conduct but to ourbetter—and possibly happier, more harmonious, mosthumane—selves.Happiness, as it happened, was the dominant emotionfor both Pransky and me when we were at the nursinghome, strange as that sounds, and strange as it was. Ididn’t go there to be happy any more than I did to learnabout hope or fortitude, or to think about courage andfaith, but that’s what happened. You could say I was lucky,and, in fact, by landing at County, I was lucky. Countyhappens to be blessed with tremendous leadership, a devotedstaff, and a larger community that embraces rather thanisolates it. I wouldn’t presume that it is comparable to anyother nursing home. But I do believe that in settings likenursing homes, as well as hospitals and hospices and anyother place where life is in the balance, we get to essentials,which is what the virtues are.More than luck was at work, too. My dog was at work,and she brought to it a lightness and easiness that seemedto expand outward and encompass almost everyone sheencountered. We often talk about “getting out of ourcomfort zone,” but rarely about entering someone else’s.Pransky made that possible. With her by my side, andsometimes in the lead, I was able to be a better, moreresponsive, less reticent version of myself. One day a manI didn’t know was sitting idly by himself in the nursinghome hall. He was wearing a badly tied hospital johnnythat exposed part of his back, and nothing else. It wasrare for people at County not to be dressed in streetclothes, but it wasn’t his attire that caught my attention.The man was jaundiced and almost as yellow as the liquidrunning through the tube that started under his hospitalgown and ended in a bag on the side of his wheelchair.That, and he had no legs. This was not Joe, another doubleamputee who became one of our regulars and willappear in these pages, but someone I’d never seen beforeand never saw again. If I had been alone, I might havenodded in his direction and kept going, because that manrepresented most of the things that scared me about nursinghomes: debilitating illness, a lack of privacy, bodilyfluids. But I was not alone, and my partner veered in hisdirection, which meant that I had no choice but to goover and talk to him. What a nice guy! We talked dogs(he had two Yorkies at home), sports (he was a Steelersfan), and dogs some more. I was in his comfort zone,and Pransky’s, and then, ultimately, mine. It was, in thescheme of things, a small thing, but small things add up.My mommy would like your doggie,” a youngishwoman with developmental disabilities said to methe first time we met her at County.“My doggie would like your mommy,” I said. “Wheredoes she live?”“In heaven,” she said.“Oh,” I said. “Pransky has a lot of friends in heaven.”And after what was by then a year at County, it was true.A certain amount of death is inevitable in a nursinghome. This is where the virtues can be helpful. Theypoint us at what’s important and valuable in life. Theycan offer perspective and frames of reference, and if adog is in the frame, all the better.As I was working on this book, and friends asked mewhat it was about, I would say “right living anddogs” or “moral philosophy and dogs” or “old people anddogs.” Eventually I realized that every one of thosedescriptions was wrong. I was saying “dogs,” plural,when it was actually about one singular, faithful, charitable,loving, and sometimes prudent dog. That dog hasrisen from her slumber and is standing behind me now,showing great hope, restraint, and fortitude as she waitsfor me to stop typing and go for a walk. Read more