MAIZEY, our black lab mix, runs in the backyard with some of our grandkids last summer.
WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT in what became today, I laid on the floor face to face with my dying six-year-old black lab, Maizey.
I held her cool paws and then her cool ears, trying to heat them with my hands. Maybe if I helped her manage her body heat, I thought, she might find the strength to do whatever else she had to do to make it through the night.
For a time, I watched the rise and fall of her chest, fearing that each breath might be her last.
She will die sooner rather than later
She has lymphoma and it will kill her. When we met last week with the vet at K-State in the heart of Kansas, she said with continued chemotherapy we could hope for weeks or months.
Maizey, the dog we saved 2 1/2 years ago, had not eaten all day. Last night she was having episodes of vomiting and diarrhea. As with my dad, who died of lymphoma decades ago, when you see someone on chemo who becomes deathly sick, you don’t know if it’s the cancer or treatment that’s curling them into a ball.
After about a day and a half with no food, Maizey finally ate something: a fried egg.
What did I do wrong
In all uncomfortable honesty, my theology fails me at times like this.
When life gets especially rough, I start wondering what I did to get on God’s bad side. I’ve been through a lot in my life, but this latest stretch has been particularly consuming. If you haven’t lost a pet, you absolutely cannot relate to what it feels like. It is its own kind of pain, equal to if not superior to the pain you feel when a very close relative dies. That’s because in some ways our pets are closer to us than most anyone.
Maizey will become the second dog we will have lost in the past two years. We saved them both to watch them die. That might be how Job of the Bible would put it.
I’ve been paraphrasing the book of Job for the last few weeks. He lost everything, children and their families, herds and flocks, and his army of servants. My goodness, it is the perfect book for me to be working with right now, while my mother is dying of dementia and after my two younger brothers have died and after a wrenching year with my Casual English Bible® website.
The last 12 months have been the worst year of my career with this website. Everything went wrong. Developers charged for fixing their own mistakes. I had to fire the lead company for blowing up a major improvement on the site. We’re still cleaning up the mess. Contractors delay, delay, delay. I’d give you the full list, but I wouldn’t be able to unwind tonight.
It felt like I had to carry my canoe. But this thing is a barge, loaded.
So I got a colleague to help me carry it.
Thanks to his wife who talked him into it, Layton started as a Georgia peach of a Troubleshooter, which is a cool title. But in function, he’s helping me manage the site and the contractors who are helping us fix problems and make it an easier site for you to use.
When theology fails us
Here’s how my theology fails me. I know the end of Job’s story. The whole point of it is to show that bad things can happen to good people.
So my troubles shouldn’t make me feel badly about myself.
But we so judge and guilt each other throughout life that I think it slowly indoctrinates us. It embeds us with the false idea that bad things that happen to us are of our own doing. We think we deserve what we got. And we feel others are paying the price for mistakes we’ve made. That makes the pain all the worse.
Some people say they don’t struggle with this kind of thing. They say they don’t worry and they are perfectly holy because they’ve devoted their lives to God.
I know some of these people. I wouldn’t trust them with a sharp stick at a wiener roast.
The problem with theology
It’s not that theology is wrong. It’s that theology is not strong enough to form an impenetrable wall between each of us and the people in our lives with their bad advice or a warped sense of who we are.
I would hate to think little Maizey is going through this because of me. But in my worst moments, sometimes I wonder about that. That’s when I have to throw a rope onto my theology and haul myself back to safety. For I know in my heart what is right. But sometimes my heart has a hard time getting through to my head.
So if you think to pray for me, pray for my head. It has always been my problem.
There’s no easy fix to my head. But I’ve found during these recent, rocky months that I can let my heart sing to my head. I can’t play the harmonica well. But I feel it well. Yesterday I played my heart out and cried till I had to pull the harmonica away from all the wet draining onto my lips.
I don’t know how it helps, but it does. Self-administered music therapy.
My kindergarten grandson, with one of the biggest hearts I know, says we need another dog. Maybe so, but right now, Maizey runs the day and the night because we promised to give her all the life she could live. That’s our gift to her. Life, within the limits of her quality of life.
Her blood work came back today.
- White blood cells (which fight infection), 1.0, compared to acceptable range of 4.0-15.5
- Neutrophils (first line of defense against bacterial infections, wounds, inflammation) 350, compared to acceptable range of 2,016-10,600
She has almost nothing to fight off infection. My wife, a retired nurse, and our local vet as well were shocked by the report. The hospice nurse next door asked my wife, “Is she still home with you?”
Last night was hard, but morning light brought a better day. For supper, I gave her some steak. If that was a bad idea, don’t tell me.
Now for a change of tune.
A Happy song, Down at the Green Shack
Our grandkids gave us what’s coming on May 23.
I’ll be releasing to the public a second song. I wrote it for and because of that kindergarten grandson I mentioned earlier. And, brace yourself, I’m doing the singing. One reviewer on Groover said I should have hired out the job. “Too late, and you know it,” I thought. But she may have been right.
Down at the Green Shack is a joyful, playful song celebrating the kind of silly, wholehearted love you share with family and close friends. It’s built for singalongs, with repetitive, catchy lyrics and nonsense phrases like ‘Ooh Wah Wee ooh Bay He’ that kids love to echo. The mood is upbeat, affectionate, and fun.
If you have a Spotify account, you can pre-save the song by using the link below. That means you can get the song dropped freely into your library of songs the moment “Down at the Green Shack” releases.
The day it releases, I’ll premiere an accompanying music video, which allows you to hear the entire song and see each one of my grandkids briefly, but the dancer a lot. I asked her to dance to music, which she did. I paid her in kindness points…grandparent currency.
Whether you’re on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, or other music services, you can find the song here, get a sneak peek, and follow the link to your provider to get the song: Down at the Green Shack.
It’s not what most would consider a spiritual song. It’s for wholesome fun, which makes it spiritual.
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