We go on

Jerome K. Jerome said, "They are superior to human beings as companions. They do not quarrel or argue with you. they never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearnce of being interested in the conversation."

In the past four years, Mary and I have lost a home due to Hurricane Katrina, but we believed Paul when he said God turns everything to the good for those who love him. We found another home, not a house but a home, but we lost close contact with our kids if we ever had it.

I lost my Mom three years ago in December. Shanna lost her husband, Danny, the following May. Mary lost her dear beloved Buttons, our cat of 18 years, last year. I lost my career to the turns of a ravaged economy, by my choice, but it is gone, anyway. And now, while away on a trip to Israel, I lost my best male friend, the best dog I ever had in a large group of wonderful dogs, Frankie.

Life, someone tells me, is about loss: how you deal with it when you inevitably have it. I guess that's true. If so, I'm terrible at it, life and stuff. I'm devastated, once again, and I can't (literally) quit crying. I know I'm an adult, and the aches and pains of my body tell me I'm an old one at that. Yet I'm crying like a kid again just thinking about my dear Frankie.

In the Message, Job says: Human life is a struggle, isn't it? It's a life sentence to hard labor. Like field hands longing for quiting time and working stiffs with nothing to hope for but payday. I go to bed and think, 'How long till I can get up? I toss and turn as the night drags on -- and I'm fed up.

"God, don't forget that I'm only a puff of air," Job cries to the sky. "And so I'm not keeping one bit of this quiet, I'm laying it all our on the table, my complaining to high heaven is bitter, but honest. Are you going to put a muzzle on me, the way you quiet the sea and still the storm?"

Honestly, I was hurt most that I wasn't there when Frankie died. I wasn't there to hold him as he took his last breath. I'm fully wracked with guilt that as smart as he was, he might have wondered 'where is he? Where is my master.' And I wasn't there. I wasn't. For all my talk to him about how much I loved him, I wasn't there when it counted most.

Then I thought this: God must have wanted me to go to Israel for a reason, for if Frankie had been diagnosed with cancer two weeks earlier, I would not have gone. For some reason the vet missed it. Maybe I'm actually supposed to have gained something for this trip other than bitter memories of grief.

And then I thought of the book the Shack, which if you haven't read it you've missed greatly. The bottom line of a man's grief in the book is that he wasn't able to save his little daughter in her greatest moment of peril and fear. That she died alone.

And Jesus tells the father, "She didn't die alone. I was there with her to her dying breath."

Frankie didn't die alone. As maybe trivial it is to some readers, if there are some readers, is that God was with him when he passed. God was with our dog Scrappy all those long years ago when he passed, alone.

God was with my mother, with Danny, with all those folks in the stairwells of 911 and in the earthquake in Haiti and with my father-in-law and on and on.

We do not die alone, though we all die.

Through it all, we go on. We pick up the pieces of our grief and ball them together into something we can throw into the sky one day and say, 'Okay, Lord, what next? You've watched me boil down to my core and somehow go on. Now what?'

That's where I am. Not where I want to be, not by a long, long shot. I would rather have Frankie than anything God has for me to do or learn or whatever. I would. I think God understands that and I think probably He grieves with me, even as he is licked in the face by a little black dog that never did anything but listen and love.

Oh but that I could be Frankie to my wife, my kids, my grandkids, my friends, my enemies. What a much better world this would be.