Caregiving lessons from a two-legged friend and from a four-legged friend

Two recent pieces in the New York Times discussed the difference a caring companion makes in coping with serious illness.

First, a medical student reflects on the comfort and companionship a man gave to two patients who faced death and long recovery.

His story, I realized, was a kind of love story, and in some way it evoked all of our stories, whether we are doctor or patient, comforter or comforted, healer or healed. Josh reaffirmed for me what we medical professionals know but all too easily forget: the human story is not a series of illnesses and treatments that we manage, but is an unfolding mystery — a process with which we ourselves are in ongoing communion, both as witnesses and as full participants.

Also, from the "Well" health blog, Dana Jennings tells Life Lessons from the Family Dog--the author's struggle with agressive prostate cancer and the contemporaneous age-related decline in his dog's health.

Even so, as I face my own profound health issues, it is my dog’s poor health that is piercing me to the heart. I’m dreading that morning when I walk downstairs and … well, those of us who love dogs understand that all dog stories end the same way.

. . .

Dogs also tell us – especially when we’re sick – of our own finitude. And, partly, that’s why we cry when they die, because we also know that all human-being stories end the same way, too.