George Remembered

Wolf and lamb will graze the same meadow,
lion and ox eat straw from the same trough,
...Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill
anywhere on my Holy Mountain," says God. (Isaiah 65:25)

Since I had to put down George on Friday April 10th at 3:30pm, I have experience wailing episodes.

I have been in dog rescue for just over a year. Prior to that, I really wasn’t into dogs at all. Never thought about them, was never around them. I really didn’t like my dog as a kid much and felt almost no emotion when he died. I happened to be away for that summer back in college and after 14 years, Scampy just couldn’t hold on any more. I never shed a tear for my childhood dog.

My neighbors back in California had a dog named Joey. One day I saw Caroline running to her Nissan truck with Joey in her arms. He was about to live his last day. This couple had no dogs for over four years and then got Cooper, a Cocker Spaniel.

I didn’t care for Cooper at first because of his high pitched, wailing bark…especially at my bedroom door at 5am!

Over the years, when they would come home from work, they greeted the dog by calling him, “boy” or “my baby boy.” For some reason this annoyed me. I thought to myself that this is yet another couple who have no kids and are humanizing their dog. The dog has now become a child substitute.

Life can be funny.

All these years later, I have joined the club.

During my George wailing sessions, I cry out for “my baby boy.”

It usually starts like this. I am doing my thing in the house or when I am driving and a memory will hit out of the blue. The memory quickly turns to emotion. Like being sick and feeling a heave coming on, I can either try to hold it in or let it fly. In this case, I let it fly and take it wherever it goes.

Let me say this here…the difference between men and women in this one particular area of life is like salt and pepper, cuffs and links, apples and oranges.

As a man, crying as a result of emotions is much harder than getting bit by a dog and dealing with physical pain. As I type, I still have swollen fingers from the three recent dog bits, a back tailbone injury, some type of cough and chest thing that won’t go away, a neck pain, the pressure of starting a new job, and difficult boss. This I’m used to!

I’ve experienced several wailing sessions. I thought I was over them until tonight. I was watching TV with Albert and Sally and felt tired. I got up to go to bed and the first wave of memories hit me. I thought about George’s face when I walked around the hall corner, George sitting on my bed, alert with ears up. I always thought he looked so regal and dignified like this.

Now the memory turns to emotion. This is the difference between George and almost all other emotions. Rather than the “angry” re-route taking over, the emotion of sadness blasts through to tears. If I stay in the emotion, it grows like a volcano.

As a younger man, I would never allow this to happen…but then again, maybe the loss of a pet would have trumped trying to control the emotion. The fear of “where is this going to take me” would almost always take over.

Not this time.

Rather, I just let it flow and allowed the emotion to rule over the rational. I cried for what seemed an hour, probably much less, and kept wailing, “I miss my baby boy” over and over again. The tears eventually turned to laughter. This is the amazing turn of events.

In the past I would have edited or controlled the emotions. Because of the powerful loss of a dog, I did not and experienced the pain turn to joy.

Sure, I read about this thing, heard testimony from others, but it was as impactful as seeing a lady cry over the loss of her baby at a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. I felt for her, but it was in between bites of my Subway sandwich before I flipped the channel to watch an episode of King of the Hill.

This is what I call the head-heart gap. Knowing and experiencing can be two totally different realities. I think many men think they “know” because of the rational, but they do not. It is like looking at a picture of a sunny beach verses lying in the hot sand at Malibu. Maybe this is why men are so drawn to pornography. It is clearly not reality, but they make it reality in their mind and live in fantasy.

Who knows how many “George moments” I will have? All I know is I am not going to edit them, but let them flow out of me to dignify the experience.

God will work His way through all of this and teach me what Jesus experienced as He took the pain of mankind into Himself on the Cross. Jesus did not run from the pain, but embraced it fully. This was not an intellectual or academic theological discussion, it was true reality internalized.

Just my thoughts for the day.

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