Wednesday’s Child: Death

CAVEAT LECTOR: This post is more intense and personal than the ones I usually post on the blog. If you find scenes of animal suffering traumatic, you may want to sit this one out.

I hate death. Actually, that’s not right: words cannot capture the depths of my hatred, or the width of it, or the height of it, or the brightness of it, like the inside of a lightning bolt or a fresh wound. I’ve known that since I was old enough to realize how inadequate language was as a bridge from my interior world to other people, or even from that world to my own understanding of it.

I don’t fully know why I hate death, but I know part of the reason: I hate endings. People aren’t supposed to end; stories aren’t supposed to end. Nothing I love, nothing good, nothing beautiful, is supposed to end. I’m more convinced of this fact than I am of my own existence. I demonstrated (more like dramatized) that for the first time at the age of 5 when my mom took me to see Disney’s Cinderella in the theater. As the credits rolled, I started screaming–actual screaming, in a movie theater, at the end of what’s supposed to be one of the happiest stories on the planet. It took my mom a while to get me calmed down and figure out what the actual heck was going on (sadly, this was not an unfamiliar task for my mom), but when she could get words out of me, here’s roughly what they were: “It ended! I don’t want it to end!”

I still feel the same. I’ve gotten better at hiding the screaming as an adult, of course: I don’t do it (at least out loud) at the end of stories or movies. I do scream when people or animals die, and I won’t ever stop because it’s wrong. I won’t stand for it, ever. If I could turn myself inside out, if I could die to kill death, I would in a heartbeat.

If I’m being totally honest with you, and myself, this is most of why I’m a Christian. Sure, I was raised in a Christian family, sure Jesus loves me, absolutely. But here’s the crux of the matter: when my father told me, probably not long after the Cinderella incident, that (a) I was going to die someday but that (b) Jesus had beaten death, he had died horribly on the Cross and then three days later walked out of the tomb, and if I put my faith in Him, I could walk out of death the same way, I signed up on the spot.

Why am I telling you this now? As you’ve probably guessed from the picture up there, last week I had to put my dog, Rye, down. There was no question about it: he started whining and pacing the day before; he wasn’t eating; he couldn’t stand for long and his head drooped. When I took him to the vet they found tumors on his spleen and liver. Keeping him alive meant keeping him in agony, and that wasn’t an option. Still, watching the life snuff out of that little body like a candle flame, watching his white furry belly rise and fall and then…. Man. As a lifelong dog owner, this was by no means my first rodeo with euthanasia, but it never, ever gets any easier.

Rye, buddy. As anyone who ever met him will tell you, he wasn’t just a dog, he was a blithe spirit. Whatever he did, whether it was running down a trail barking at the top of his lungs or staring into your eyes like Kaa from the Jungle Book (“Trusssssst in me….jussssst in me….”), or killing a chicken (or 8), he was all in. If you haven’t heard it BTW here’s the song I wrote for him: “The Ballad of Rye.” His passing has left a big hole in the energy of the house that Tali and I keep falling into: she checks all the rooms for him and then sighs and lays down with her face to the wall; I burst into tears when I see his favorite sheepskin to lie on, or his collar. He was one for the ages. He was just a little guy.

Here’s the hardest part: his passing wasn’t entirely peaceful. Though the vet certainly didn’t intend it, something went wrong with the first injection, the one that was meant to make him fall peacefully to sleep in my lap over 10 minutes or so. Suddenly Rye was screaming and howling and writhing and snarling and trying to bite the vet and the vet’s assistant like a wild animal in a trap. I had never once seen him like that, not in his entire life. I had never seen him in so much pain. Thankfully, whatever nervous reaction was causing the agony lasted only a few seconds; then he was in my arms and cuddling and giving me nose boops. The rest of the procedure went as peacefully as expected and hoped. But those few seconds will stay with me the rest of my life–not because I’m traumatized or I think Rye’s last moments on this earth were awful and it’s the vet’s fault or my fault but because that’s exactly how I feel about death. What I could never find words to express, Rye captured perfectly in those few horrifying seconds with his body and his voice.

I hate death. I’ll never stop hating it. I’ll never buy stories about how death is natural and good and so we should accept it. Bullshit. People, animals, anything you love and that loves you isn’t supposed to end; it’s supposed to go on forever, changing and growing, maybe into new forms, who knows? Not me. All I know is that death is wrong.

You might not agree, and I might be wrong. None of us alive right now knows what lies on the other side of death because we haven’t been there. Whatever we believe about death and what comes after, it’s an act of faith.

You know who does agree with me, though? Jesus. In the Bible story of Lazarus (John 11), he shows up at the house after Lazarus has died, and his sister Mary falls at his feet wailing, “If you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” Jesus’s reaction to those words is usually translated something like “And he was deeply moved and troubled in spirit.” But “deeply moved” is a euphemism at best for the original Greek hebrimáomai, which means to snort like a bull, to gasp, to scream at someone. Jesus hated death. It was a perversion of his Father’s creation, in which everything beautiful and true and good and loved went on forever as it was meant to. He hated it so much He killed Himself to defeat it. That’s why I’m Team Jesus in the end: final score Jesus 1, Death 0.

A clinical psychologist would have a field day with this essay, I have no doubt. They would hypothesize that childhood attachment wounds and the resulting fears of abandonment and annihilation predisposed me to accept Christian doctrines of salvation and resurrection. Sure, whatever. Here’s what I know: I told Rye as he was falling asleep that final time that I’d be there when he woke up. Here’s what I hope: that my friend Jen’s dream will come true, and when I get to Heaven, Rye will be running up the hill, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to greet me.