Gaits of Heaven

fervently wished that Kevin Dennehy were there and that he’d stand up and assure Eumie’s patients that she had not committed suicide.
    The person who actually moved to the podium was Caprice. “My mother did not kill herself. Not deliberately and not accidentally. She placed a high value on herself and her own life. She was not self-destructive.” And that was all she said.
    Before Caprice had even taken a seat, she was replaced at the podium by the woman who had introduced herself as Nixie Needleman, Eumie’s psychiatrist. I remembered who she was because of her distinctive appearance: mountains of platinum hair, heavy makeup, and a black dress with a neckline that plunged almost to her navel. By distinctive , I mean that she looked radically different from everyone else at the service. On certain street corners, her appearance wouldn’t have been distinctive at all; if the police had been present, they’d probably have kept an eye on her in case she started soliciting. When she spoke, however, it wasn’t to offer the wares she was displaying but to repeat what others had said, namely, that Eumie placed a high value on life. “Furthermore,” Dr. Needleman said, “she had no history of suicide attempts or gestures and no suicidal ideation. Any loss touches off fantasies of primitive abandonment and betrayal, with concomitant grief and rage. In some cases, it arouses powerful feelings of guilt. All of those emotions can be traced to sources far back in our own lives. They have no basis in present reality. We need to remind ourselves that no one, including Eumie, could have foreseen her death.”
    Dr. Needleman’s definitive tone had a simple, obvious effect on Dolfo, who spontaneously sat. I did not, of course, interrupt the proceedings by pulling out the clicker and startling everyone with its sharp metallic sound. Rather, I just slipped Dolfo a treat and rubbed his chest.
    As I was doing so, Vee Foote stepped forward to second everything that Dr. Needleman had said. “Eumie made no preparations,” she declared. “There was no note. There were no warnings. There was, in fact, nothing to hint at self-destruction.”
    Behind me, someone softly exhaled. Turning around, I saw that Quinn Youngman was now standing at the back of the room. Out of nowhere came the realization that he was not just exhaling; rather, what I’d heard was a sigh of relief. As Eumie’s psychopharmacologist, he had prescribed for her. Dr. Needleman, an M.D., might well have written prescriptions, too. Vee Foote was also a psychiatrist, an M.D. The picture I had been given by Kevin and by Caprice was of a family with a pharmacopeia of psychoactive drugs, presumably including the prescription medications that had caused Eumie’s death. The cynical thought came to me that Eumie’s doctors were not “sharing memories,” as Ted’s e-mail had phrased the purpose of the memorial service, but were using the occasion to make self-serving, self-protective claims that had nothing to do with Eumie and everything to do with themselves. Were they afraid of lawsuits? Were they simply protecting their reputations? I had no idea.
    The service continued. Other patients of Eumie’s spoke of their attachment to her. I took Dolfo out. And brought him back in. More than once. Eventually, I returned to find that Ted was concluding the service by reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which I’d read in a college English course. It consisted, if I remembered correctly, of 133 incredibly long poems in memory of a dear friend of the poet’s, Arthur Hal-lam, who, I’d thought at the time, was lucky to have been the subject of the lamentations instead of what I felt myself to be, namely, their bored-to-death victim.
    Ted couldn’t possibly have read the work in its entirety. But he did read a lot of it. Dolfo and I found it tedious. We left. We returned. At eleven-thirty, when the service finally ended, Dolfo was sitting and staying on command. In a small way, I had kept a promise to Eumie: I had used exclusively positive methods to train her dog.
     

CHAPTER 20
     
    It is five minutes after nine on Friday morning, and Rita is in her office seeing her second patient of the day. Rita and her patient are sitting in expensive and extraordinarily comfortable chairs designed to minimize back strain. The chairs are upholstered in a pale beige fabric that is neither sensuous nor scratchy. They are identical. Rita’s hair is newly trimmed—it always