My best dog died two Fridays ago. Or so that’s what I was told.
“Tell her she’s a good girl now,” the vet said before her last breath. I held her graying chin in my hand. Rush rested his arm on her rising ribs. And, then, stillness.
The anticipation of grief was worse than thing itself. She’d been trying to die on us for almost two years. Even before then, we knew she was too good to be true. We had morbid conversations like happy people do. “Can you imagine?” “I’ll be a wreck.” “Let’s go like they did in The Notebook—spooning in bed and all at once.”
Amelia was our firstborn. We had tried to wait after our wedding, at least a year or maybe six months, before bringing a young thing into the family. We lasted six weeks. She lasted almost fourteen years. Lasted through the bitter fights she’d break up. The cross-country moves she was our constant through. The adoption of three girls and another dog, none of whom would have loved us if they had not loved her first. I’m sure of it. She was our therapist, our witness, our co-parent.
I imagined the grief would be gruesome—and, of course, imagining it made it so. But after the stillness of her body, came the stillness of mine. Rush and I poured ourselves a jar of wine and rocked on the front porch, singing spirituals. “I’ve got a feeling everything’s gonna be okay. Oh, oh, oh, I’ve got a feeling…” We drank and cried and made up new verses about all the things Amelia was now doing and all the dogs she was now greeting until the wind chimes rang three times and we went silent again.
It was then that the voice got loud.
“She’s not in the tomb.”
When it comes to Holy Week, or the week in which Christians rehearse Jesus’s path to death, burial, and rebirth, I have more of a Holy Saturday personality than an Easter Sunday one, by which I mean I’m drawn to the suspense rather than the ending, the bitter rather than the sweet. “The threat of resurrection,” as Parker Palmer so perfectly puts it, is more terrifying to me than death for it seems to require an enthusiasm for life I don’t come by honestly. I would rather read in bed.
But this year, Amelia’s death has opened up something surprisingly mystical in me. Not more than twenty minutes after the doggie hearse departed from our house did I get the surreal sense that she wasn’t in the hair we clipped off her back and stuffed into snack-sized bags. She wasn’t in the anointing oil we rubbed between her black eyes or the poem we tucked into her Pepto-Abysmal blanket. She wasn’t in any of these things; not even in the photos or memories, as pleasant people kept insisting.
She lives, like really, really lives, within me.
There’s this story in the Bible about Jesus raising his friend, Lazarus, from the dead. When he goes to tell Lazarus’s sister, Martha, that this is the plan, she responds with reason: “I know that he will be raised up in the resurrection at the end of time.” In other words, I know the doctrinal drill that all will be set right in some distant day, just not this day when we need it most. It’s easy during these painful days to feel the same painful way.
But then Jesus says something that’s even harder to believe than bringing back dead bodies: “You don’t have to wait to the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this?”
Okay, I might have said before Amelia’s death. I’m lucky enough to never have lost anyone that I lived with until now; Death has largely been a comfortable abstraction. But because of this, so too has Resurrection. So too has Life. It hardly seemed possible that I could experience the fullness of either without some massive Jedi mind tricks. But then the reality I had so long feared happened and I am okay. Better than okay, I am alive.
I walk around the house crying and smiling and breathing and holding my hand to my chest when it hurts.
She says, “You hurt because you love.”
I go to bed at night praying and talking and listening and clutching the angel pin I stick to my pajamas.
She says, “You’re in pain but not suffering.”
I feel her presence on the porch and under the table and in the bathroom watching me pee like a creep.
She says, “You’re alone but not abandoned.”
She speaks to me like this all the time now. And I don’t care to distinguish whether it is the little she (dog) or the big S/he (God) because it all sounds the same.
“I will be who you need me to be.”
I don’t suppose every death will feel this way to me—or that every death should feel this way to you. I write only to say that it’s possible to live resurrected now. To let something go and grow larger. To grab hold of God and see glory. Any day. Every day. This day, when you need it most.
I miss Amelia’s physical body like a phantom limb. But now she goes everywhere with me. Not gone, just free, like Easter come early.
XO,
Erin
Want more tools for practicing purpose?
To find God in this day and age requires some serious grace—and mindfulness. Enter Steve Wiens’ gentle but radical new book, Shining Like the Sun, that takes you through seven mindfulness practices (attentiveness, ordinariness, simplicity, rhythm, delight, conversation, and restoration) to get unstuck from the striving and fall back into the present. Buy two—one to gift, one for you. #SupportAuthors
If Jesus is, right now, Resurrection and Life then that means those of us who follow him and his teachings are compelled to work toward Resurrection and Life for all peoples. One of my favorite nonprofits, Circle de Luz, is working to support Latina girls and their families through the coronavirus crisis and beyond. You can become a donor, mentor, or volunteer by clicking here.
I don’t know the best way to give away what I don’t need during this time but I tried the Venmo-ing random strangers thing last week in celebration of my book contract with Penguin Random House. Stay tuned to follow my unfolding story. And if you know others who want to explore the spirituality of the childless, childfree, and improbable families, please tell them about #GoodforYouNews!
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