Goodbye Ruby Tuesday

We said goodbye to our beloved Ruby on Tuesday.

We had thought (hoped) we were battling arthritis in her shoulder joint. We had thought (hoped) we were winning that battle. She was almost twelve, but we hoped (really hoped) for another year or two with her.

It turned out to be bone cancer.

We had a lovely last day at home with her on Monday, a holiday. On Tuesday we said goodbye.

I have loved and lost many dogs over the course of my life.

Every dog is different.

Every grief at losing them is different, too.

Ruby was special for many reasons. She was from the start simply the sweetest. One of the staff at our veterinarian’s office goes on and on, and has from day one, about “sweet Ruby.” (Just look at her baby pics!) We called her “Sweetie” as much as we called her Ruby.

Ruby was extra special because we almost lost her ten years ago when she went missing and was gone for four days. Local folks from all over—and people all over the internet—looked and prayed and hoped with us to bring her home. And we did.

#weprayedRubyhome

Losing Ruby then was more traumatic for me than getting hit by a bus. I am not kidding. The memories from those days of looking for her are still traumatic. The joy that came when the call came from a stranger who found her is something I can’t put into words but that I still feel deep in my bones and in my soul.

When she was missing, I prayed to God—begged and begged—not only to bring her home but specifically that I would get to see her grow old.

He gave that gift to me.

We got to see her chin grow white, her eyes grow cloudy, her gait grow halting, and her affections grow sweeter and sweeter. She had been a rascally, stubborn pup. She hated to come inside and would often drop to the ground, roll on her back, and have to be dragged in. But more and more as she aged, especially in the last few weeks and days, she just wanted to be near her people. And to get as many cookies as she could out of us. She drew nearer and nearer to us as the end of her life drew near.

When she came home to us all those years ago, she was injured and traumatized, and it took a long time for that trauma to heal. The other injuries never did heal completely.

In that, Ruby showed me before I knew I needed to learn it what trauma is, and what healing does and doesn’t look like, and what grace and mystery there is in it all.

God didn’t have to answer my prayers the way I wanted him to. But he did. And since that day and to this day, Ruby is for me a reminder of his love. Of the fact that not one sparrow falls outside the Father’s care (Matthew 10:29).

In 2012, I participated in a roundtable at Christianity Today addressing the question, “Do Pets Go to Heaven.” I take hope in the words I wrote then and still believe today:

When I was young and gnostic, I was certain that pets do not go to heaven. I didn’t know I was gnostic, of course. I simply thought that life on earth was about bicycles and ice cream and books and not saying certain words or smoking behind the barn with my cousins.

Heaven was about being with God and angels singing and seeing great-grandma again and not being in hell.

You only got to heaven if you were saved, and I hadn’t seen any animals go to church, let alone go forward during an altar call. In the old days, I was told, a nearby farmer used to ride his horse to church, where he’d hitch her up to the iron rail that still stood outside the one-room country church in Maine where my family worshiped. I never imagined a horse coming inside to get saved.

Yet the Bible teaches that God does save animals. For example, God brought Noah two of each kind of living creature in order to save them from the Flood. God chastised reluctant Jonah about the need to save not only the human inhabitants of Nineveh, but also its many animals. Such salvation is not, of course, quite the kind invited by the altar call. Even so, it should not be overlooked.

God not only saves animals. At times, his covenants include them. God’s covenant with Noah included “every living thing of all flesh” (Gen. 6:18-19, KJV). In Hosea, God proclaimed a covenant “with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground” (2:18, NIV).

When God made a covenant with one of his chosen ones, he often marked it by assigning them a particular name: Abraham, Sarah, Israel, Jesus, Paul. God told Adam to name the animals and, in so doing, Adam reflected God’s acts of naming. When we choose to take into our household creatures that share with us the breath of life and bestow them with names, perhaps we enter into a kind of covenantal relationship with them too. To echo C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, perhaps when we name animals, they “become themselves” and our salvation “flows over into them.”

I have put away my childish thinking about heaven. Scripture describes eternity not as an ethereal cloud-top existence, but as both spiritual and material, just as our life is now. It is a new heaven and a new earth (2 Pet. 3:13) where “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). As foretold in Isaiah, animals will be there. “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat … and a little child will lead them” (11:6). Perhaps God will honor my acts of naming the animals by bringing Gracie, Kasey, Myrtle, Peter, Oscar, and so many more there, too.

Goodbye, Ruby. You made the world so much sweeter.

Your life bears witness to the sweetness of God because he made you and all other creatures to share this good world with us.