Rest in Peace.

I spent last night awake in bed, crying. My sobs shook the bed but Davis slept through them so I wept alone. And so far this all feels so fucking cliché that I might as well start describing the saltiness of my tears except here’s the part where I tell you that I was crying because a dog I never met died yesterday.

The story goes a little something like this from what I can gather from second hand information from a brief phone call with my mother: Katie, my baby sister, had gone out for the night leaving her husband caring for their 2 year old daughter. At some point in the evening when his back was turned little Sophia threw Bella down the stairs and the puppy’s heart stopped pounding on impact. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even in the same city. But the story has my mind flooded with images. This little puppy laying still, a confused toddler wondering why the doggy won’t play with her anymore, a father who can blame no one but himself, pounding on the chest of this lifeless body trying to revive a silent heartbeat.


Katie blames herself for going out. Then there’s my brother who had been watching Bella until a few days previous thinking she was too young to be around the house with a small child yet but went against his gut instinct and left her there. He told himself he was just getting too attached and had to face the facts that he had gotten the dog as a gift for my sister’s family.

So I cry. I cry not only for the loss of this puppy but for the tragedy of what if. The inevitable place we all resort to when bad things happen. The circular track I know my sister, her husband, my brother and yes, perhaps even my young niece are likely running laps on. This is a painful place to be. What if I had done this, what if I hadn’t done that. Things would be different. If only I could do it again.

But we can’t undo death no matter how hard we try. We are left with the confrontation of how frail this thing we call life really is. Sometimes it feels like God is a toddler with chubby fingers just waiting to throw us down some stairs. So we hold our breath and pray. And that’s all I’m able to do tonight. Just pray for them because I can’t be there and I can’t tell them it’s ok and it wasn’t their fault and that they had no way of knowing. I can just send a message out into what often feels like an empty void to something, somewhere, this God I still somehow believe in against all odds…please hold them. Please, be the comforter they need. I don’t know what else to do. There is nothing else to do. I don’t understand this and I know it has caused so much pain. This may not be well-written, beautiful or eloquent but it is raw truth. Because all I am learning from these experiences in life is that I don't have a fucking clue about anything. So I cry, and pray, and write. This is all I have, brokenness and hope and a need to share that. In this I find the continuing paradox of hope in despair, of strength in weakness, of realizing how tiny I am. This is the beautiful terrible mystery of life.