On the Occasion of My Dog’s Death

The line between healthy grief and outright masochism can be a thin one. At least that’s been my experience as we bade farewell to our beloved family dog, Magnolia. How else to explain my habit of ringing the doorbell when I get home just to bask in the misery of its failure to summon my bellowing friend? Or why do I spend the occasional night, drink in hand, looking at pictures of her while listening to Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes”? (That song is brutal on a good day.) I’ve also taught my kids the admittedly sappy game of pointing to every Magnolia tree as a token of our loss. We live in Georgia; these trees are everywhere.

A friend—no dog lover himself—once described Magnolia as having kind eyes. It was true. She also had an outsized bark that led strangers to expect a massive German Shepherd, rather than the fifty-pound bundle of nerves that greeted them with sheepish curiosity when they entered our home. She was also a strikingly beautiful dog, fawn-colored with the statuesque head of a Weimaraner. My wife brought her home from a shelter when I was on a work trip. I returned to find a scared puppy hiding in her crate. I remember asking out loud, “Will this dog ever wag her tail?” And then one day my wife descended the stairs and Magnolia flattened her ears and her little tail started thrashing. When our children eventually arrived on the scene, she proved to be as patient as she was gentle, though she did develop a habit of filching their snacks in her twilight years. As my sister would say, “She’s retired from being a good girl.”

My kids are naturally curious about the eternal fate of our beloved pooch. Will we ever see her again? Will she look the same? If not, will we recognize her? Will she recognize us? As it happens, I do think we’ll see her again, but I’m hard-pressed to provide the kind of details they crave. Kids are never satisfied with platitudes. It’s one of the many reasons they’re such blessed misfits among adults. Not only has Magnolia crossed over. She’s managed to go bounding straight into the troubling territory of heaven.

“Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace./I wanna see my Savior’s face,/’Cause heaven is a wonderful place./I wanna go there!” So begins a song from my childhood. The trouble with heaven is that we don’t want to get too specific, but we also don’t want to get too vague. No kid can desire a placeless place, but if you ruthlessly hammer home the fact that heaven bears no resemblance to anything we know here on earth, that same kid might well grow into the proverbial adult who prefers a lecture on heaven to crossing the actual pearly gates. In this sense, to exclude a deceased family pet is to exclude a vital part of a child’s world. Worse, to drill this message into the heart of a child is to cultivate lifelessness in their soul, and if heaven is anything at all, it’s filled to the brim with life.

Still, we get into trouble when we try too hard to locate heaven on a map. Down that road lie many traps—sentimentalism and kitsch on the one hand and idolatry and utopianism on the other. But we don’t want to dissolve it in the acid of over-spiritualization either. Heaven used to disturb me as a kid because, the opening children’s song notwithstanding, it didn’t seem like any kind of place at all. I felt I was being asked to get excited about some evanescent realm that was alien to everything I loved—the rich smell of grass in the summer, the big blue sky, the brush of my cat against my leg. Was it really a mark of spiritual maturity to outgrow my love for all these earthly things? In his Prelude, Wordsworth said the earth “is the place in which, in the end/We find our happiness, or not at all.” Belinda Carlisle says much the same thing in “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” admittedly in more colloquial terms.

Maybe we can make more headway if we think about Eden. W.H. Auden believed it was the duty of poets and critics to be forthright about their idea of Eden, since it constitutes an integral part of their aesthetic vision. True to his skills as a poet, Auden’s own description is replete with everything from landscape and climate to language and architecture. Personally, I always come up shorthanded in these exercises. This might have something to do with my background as a third-culture kid with no real homeland of my own, but I suspect the real problem is that I’m often “in my head” and have a tendency to drift through my physical environment like a Victorian ghost. There’s a story about Vladimir Nabokov quizzing a student about the type of tree outside his office window. When the unfortunate girl drew a blank, this imperious devotee of details replied that she would never be a writer. The story used to produce real despair in me. I desperately wanted to be a writer, but if someone repainted the walls in my office it’d be a miracle if I noticed it within a week. If Auden (or Nabokov) cornered me and asked me to describe my Eden, I might mutter something about the ocean or the mountains and then realize with horror that I was just describing a generic vacation spot.

Addressing the troubled hearts of his disciples, Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:1-3)”

Jesus is talking about heaven and he uses the word place with all its specific hazards. It’s obvious that he’s not talking about a timeshare, a cruise, or an all-inclusive—all of our late-capitalist gropings for paradise. But he’s also not talking about a final destination. I think heaven is a kind of blessed waystation—the site of our fellowship with God before the divine consummation of history. Though we certainly don’t spurn heaven, we do await a new heavens and a new earth.

We may not be able to locate heaven on a map, but we can get a lot closer to a new heavens and a new earth. After all, we have before us a vast and teeming world. We know full well that it’s not all susurrous meadows and babbling brooks. Forget the fearsome symmetry of a tiger, how about the grotesque anatomy of a cockroach or the alien visage of an angler fish? Eat your heart out, H.R. Giger! Yes, our Lord made the galloping stallion, but he also made Leviathan. We may need a Wordsworth to sing nature’s praises, but we also need a Darwin and a Lovecraft to capture its wild and unwieldy dimensions. Look at the world one way and the view is majestic. Look at it another way and we see something closer to cosmic horror. Am I saying that the wedding supper of the lamb will also be swarming with flies? Not necessarily, but I am saying, however clumsily, that God is infinite and that the uncanny exuberance on display in our present world is only the tip of the creative iceberg. “I wanna go there!” Maybe a better line would be, “Buckle up!”

All that to return to the question posed with great emotional urgency by both of my children. Will our dog be present in the new heavens and the new earth? Put it this way: I can’t imagine a restored world without Magnolia in it.

Image Credit: Cameron McAllister