I was initially reticent to write this blog because it’s about the loss of my dog. And to be honest this is uncomfortably personal. For those who know me I am quite comfortable with sharing on a personal level but I must admit that writing this has not felt comfortable. Once again, I think it comes back to the fact that the topic is simply about a dog. But putting aside my own discomfort I hope that what I have learned might be of some comfort to others (2 Cor. 1:3-7). So here goes, this is about a dog…
On January 25 this year our family bought a dog. The previous owner bought him to the RSPCA in tears saying that she was fed up with him. We had been looking at dogs all summer but they were all too expensive so we eventually visited the RSPCA and found this one, a twelve-month old Maltese Shih Tzu. At the time he was called Ghizmo and he looked a shabby mess. But he caught my wife’s (Kathleen) attention with his chocolate-brown eyes and won me over with his affordable price tag – $200 was a bargain! The RSPCA shaved him, cleaned him up and we brought him home. I remember so vividly the first time our boys saw him. They were getting out of school and spotted him from a distance in our car. I’m sure they must’ve felt that we’d never get a dog and so to finally have one…well their delight was palpable. All three boys immediately broke into a run smiling from ear to ear. That night we named him “Sparky”.
Over the next few months Sparky wormed his way into our hearts and became part of the family. We, along with others who met him, could never figure out what possessed his previous owner to give him away. There was not a day that went by where our boys failed to appreciate him. In fact one friend said to us six months after getting him, “I can’t believe that your boys have never gotten over [being fond of] Sparky.” They loved Sparky, and so did we! The best $200 we ever spent.
But while I was imagining Sparky being around until our boys left home and possibly even married, God had other plans. August 25th– seven months to the day we got him – was Sparky’s last day with us. It was a Monday and I was at home, having just returned from a week of mission with students. Kathleen and I set out to take Sparky for a walk but before I could get his lead on, he took off out the door like there was no tomorrow. I watched him run down the street from house to house sniffing everything there was to sniff, all the time thinking,“he’ll come back.” But he didn’t. He ran to the end of our street, through the foliage, onto the footpath of the main road and out of our sight. A few seconds later I heard a yelp; I ran. Sparky had bolted up to the crossing (since we always crossed at crossings) before running across the road when an unsuspecting motorist hit him. I got to him and he was lying on the ground trembling. At that point I knew it was bad since he was covered in urine. But in my mind I simply imagined rushing him off to the vet. I picked him up and hurriedly walked back across the road to Kathleen. Just before I got to the other side I looked down at his face to see the life disappear from his eyes. I literally saw him die in that split second. The seriousness of the situation hit me just as hard as what the car would have hit him. He was gone.
We all have times – I would say they are rare, for me anyway – in our lives where we really (really, really!) wish we could turn back the clock. Well this was one for me.
I remember clearly the order of my thoughts:
- First, the finality of what happened was indescribable. I so much wanted to go back in time, to do things differently. For the next few hours my mind would replay various scenarios of “what if…”
- I was astounded at the grief I felt. As I observed my emotional reaction, I was honestly flabbergasted with the depth of my sorrow and completely surprised that I was so affected (shattered!) by this. I even wondered -for a split second- if I should ask God to raise him from the dead.
- Romans 8:28 soon followed: “God works all things for good.” Yes I know. I really do know! But our dog who was here only a few moments ago was now gone – FOREVER! There was no changing it, no second chances, no try again, no turning back the clock. There was a heart breaking finality that my heart, in that moment, felt unable to cope. It was gut-wrenching.
- I was angry at Sparky. In my mind I asked why an earth would he do such a stupid thing. He had it so good.
- And once again, I was deeply cognizant of how fragile my heart was.
What I have just described took place in my mind as I walked the length of our short street. By this time our neighbour had come out to console Kathleen, and I went inside and cried in a way that I have only very rarely ever cried from the depths of my soul. And I cried to God. Two things haunted me in those moments: the irreversible nature of what had just happened and the fragility of my own heart.
If it was not enough to come to grips with what happened, we had to think about telling our boys: Luke (12), Jackson (11), and Caleb (8). It was 11.00am and they would get out of school at 3.00pm. The thought of breaking the news to them was harder than anything I’d experienced as a parent so far. But whatever lay ahead, Kathleen and I were concerned for three things: first, that our boys would feel free to grieve; second, that we would be there to talk with them and hug them and offer them our unconditional love; and third, that God in his mercy would use our grief to direct us all to him.
For what it is worth, here are some things that we learned through our loss and grief:
1) It is not strength when we courageously suppress our grief. How many times do we apologise for crying or try so hard not to cry? Crying is something we (perhaps I’m speaking to men here mostly, perhaps not) generally don’t do well. And I presume the reason for that is because we think of tears as a sign of weakness. I think one reason we have the Psalms is to dispel that notion. God takes note of our tears (Ps. 56:8). Jeremiah is often referred to as the ‘weeping prophet’ and yet James asks his readers to remember “the prophets” as examples of “patience in the face of suffering” (Jas. 5:10). Of course there is Job, who James names as another example of perseverance (Jas. 5:11). And then there is Jesus whom the author of Hebrews also puts forward as an example of perseverance in the face of suffering (Heb. 12:1-3). Jesus…who was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mark 14:34). Jesus cried (John 11:35) and at times fervently (Heb. 5:7). All these people cried and yet all these people are held up in Scripture as models of perseverance. This is instructive: we need to let Scripture shape our understanding of strength and perseverance and not culture. So tears are okay, more than okay! Even the unflappable apostle Paul is said to have “served the Lord…with tears” (Acts 20:19). The Greek of Acts 20:19 suggests that this was more than an occasional occurrence as verse 31 (see also 2 Cor. 2:4; Phil. 3:18) goes on to confirm. A couple of mornings after Sparky died my eight-year old son Caleb was struggling to keep it together at breakfast. Sitting him on my knee it suddenly occurred to me to tell him something I had not thought of before, “God made tear ducts, which means he made us to cry. It’s okay to cry,” I told him. I can’t tell you how much that thought encouraged me in that moment.
2) Grief can take us to God if we will let it. As a father it was gut-wrenching to watch my boys receive the news about Sparky. I felt so helpless to give them what they so desperately wanted: their dog back. That afternoon was spent saying goodbye to Sparky (we laid him in his little bed and placed him on our table tennis table) before burying him. One moment I will never forget is when my son Jackson prostrated himself over Sparky burying his head in his fur crying, “Oh Sparky!” As you can imagine it was incredibly tempting in the days that followed to try and provide our boys with ‘things’ to alleviate their grief. And while we were quite lenient initially when it came to things like games on the iPad we also did not want to communicate that grief is something we should try to eliminate by running to various ‘saviours’ like a toy, activity or whatever it may be. These boys will grow into adults eventually but the temptation to run to the things of this world to either save or protect them from grief will always be there. This does not mean that the lesson is, “Only God can take away grief.” That’s certainly true but if God exists merely to take away grief then he may as well be a game on an iPad. Let me put it plainly: the goal is not to eliminate grief; the goal is to find God – and grief can facilitate that. Here I think is an illustration of that. The night after Sparky’s death I lay beside Caleb on his bed and we cried together for half an hour. Now normally Caleb is pretty keen to have me leave so he can ponder or go off to sleep. That night I said to him after nearly thirty minutes, “Does it help to have me here?” He nodded his head. The point is that sometimes we can’t enjoy God’s presence unless we allow ourselves to experience absence – absence of the things we love. That means allowing ourselves to remain in the grief and resisting the temptation to turn to the things of this world – and dare I say it, even to God – to get rid of it. Loss hurts and we so desperately want that hurt feeling to go, and we can even think that it’s God’s job to do it. But what we must understand is that God’s presence is sometimes most intense when loss is most intense. If there is one passage in Scripture that teaches us this, it’s 2 Corinthians 12 where Paul is given a thorn in the flesh to keep him humble. While Paul naturally pleaded to have the thorn removed, God knew that leaving it there meant Paul would experience Christ’s presence in ways he had not experienced before (2 Cor. 12:9).
3) We would not want to live without grief. But believe me, I would love to. A week after Sparky’s death I was putting one of my boys to bed and asked him one thing he wanted Jesus to do in his life and he said, “Take away death.” I remember digging Sparky’s grave and thinking how much I hated death – like I’d never hated it before actually. Both my parents have passed away but I do not remember feeling this much malice toward death. The thing that struck me as I dug Sparky’s grave was that there was no escaping grief. And what’s more, since Sparky was only an animal (after all) the inevitable grief that would come my way in the future would be far worse than what I was now experiencing. For a moment I really felt scared by that thought and wondered how one might escape the horrors of grief. But as I thought through this, hands on the shovel and my mind on how one might escape grief, I concluded that one would have to avoid love, for grief is the result of losing that which we love. Thus, grief is inevitable for those who want to love. To escape grief would mean avoiding getting a job you might end up loving, close relationships, marriage, having kids, or even getting a pet (I’ve heard of people avoiding the last one for that reason). But what kind of life is that? It might be a life without pain and grief but it is also a life without love – and that’s no life. And what’s more, it can never be the Christian life since the life of a Christian is to be defined by love – love for others that is (e.g. Gal. 5:6) rather than the things of this world (1 John 2:15). Our family grieved deeply for Sparky but the only reason we did is because we loved him. Perhaps we loved him too much. I don’t know. Certainly we could have spared ourselves the grief by not getting him to begin with or keeping him at bay and not allow him into our hearts. But now our boys know what it means to grieve and that is something they inevitably will experience again.
This last point makes me think of what God has done for us in sending his Son into the world. God loved the world, but it’s because he loved the world that he would also grieve. It could be no other way for where there is love there will always be suffering and grief. But it’s here – and only here – hat we find our comfort. The cross means that all potential and possible sources of grief for us have now been crucified with Christ on the cross (Gal. 6:14). That does not mean that when we lose things or persons we are immune to grief. But it does mean the sting has been removed (1 Cor. 15:55). So we now grieve but not like those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). And that is the point I ultimately wanted us as a family to learn: Sparky is a small picture of everything in this world that we attach our hearts to. The point is not that it is wrong to love a dog. The point is that everything in this world will eventually leave us. Nothing or no one is secure. Sparky represents that. Hence, those who hope in the things of this world will ultimately be consumed and ruled by grief. But those who hope in God will ultimately be able to move on, being consumed and ruled by his grace and love and sustained by the thought that he too knows what it’s like to grieve. If my boys, Kathleen and I, have learned this then Sparky’s death, as a friend of mine kindly told me, was a “gift” to us. Sometimes God’s gifts come in the most strangest of packages.
Dr Alan Stanley is our Lecturer in Bible and Christian Thought and Director of Post-Graduate Studies.
[banner text=”Study with Alan”]
