simple phrase

We have been living in a difficult season for awhile now.

Some days are really hard.

My Love will come home and I share with him the struggles I went through.  He gets to hear all the raw emotion and sordid details.  Maybe a week later I might sit down with a friend and recall the same experience with less passion.  Perhaps a month later I will update a relative on the phone and again talk about that day weeks ago in just basic facts.

With each passing day that overwhelming moment in time gets shorter and shorter.  The emotions felt and the memories relayed get foggier and less significant.  

Recently I have heard several people share their testimony and it struck me how much life must have been lived in just a single statement relayed.  How many tears shed, knees skinned, checks bounced, dinners made, sins revealed, fears felt, forgiveness given, miles driven, hours worked, prayers lifted and years lived all wrapped up in a simple phrase describing a whole season of their life. 

"During our marriage, we lived in Germany and California before spending the last seven years in Virginia."

13 years full of all kinds of memories.  13 years of God trying to mold us to look more like him.  13 years of building this family. 

It hasn't been easy.  Ever.  But somehow I find both grief and comfort in knowing that all that we are currently living and walking through will one day just be a few short words in a brief story of our lives.  A story God is writing and knows the ending to.

radical love

Her text came on a Tuesday morning.

"...my dad died last night..."

I lost my breath for a moment and then my heart burst into a million pieces for my friend.  She had already grieved the loss of her mother before we met 13 years ago and I couldn't even begin to imagine the pain she would be feeling with such unexpected news.

It didn't take long before I got the crazy idea to go to her.  By some strange and divine appointment, My Love eventually supported my plans.  After playing out each scenario out loud, the best travel option was decided for me to drive there with our four happy little travelers.  It was going to be a spontaneous 700-mile adventure.

We decided to tell my friend of my intentions to come for her father's funeral.  Plans had been made and accommodations booked.  And as we predicted, she insisted I didn't need to make the trip and would rather us come visit later on after the shock had worn off.  She wanted to have something good to look forward to.

"Ok," I said.  "I can respect that."

I hung up the phone and turned to My Love and said, "She told me not to come but I'm going to anyway."  And by another act of God, he was still ok with it.  My Love's travel points paid for our two night hotel stay and a friend was willing to help out with the dog while My Love worked.  It was time to pack for our road trip.

In what was essentially a grand gesture of God's love for my friend, I drove through four states with no expectation of spending any real time with her.  I was merely going to give her a hug and show my moral support by attending the funeral.

I loaded up the kids in the minivan at 2:45am on a Monday and arrived at our final destination in a small town in rural Indiana 13 hours later.  The kids took a swim in the hotel pool and we ate dinner locally before calling it a night.

The next day we made our way to the funeral home prior to the Catholic Mass being held at a church nearby.  I saw her from the back in an adjacent room off the main hallway and I gently touched her arm.  She turned toward me, jumped back with a gasp and covered her mouth trying to hold back tears.

"I didn't respect your words," I said.  "But sometimes a girl has to give a friend a hug."  She burst into tears.

We hugged and cried and hugged some more.  She held the baby and snuggled each of my older children as I in turn hugged on the two of hers.

"How long was that drive?" she asked worried about all the trouble I had gone through for this moment.

"It doesn't matter," I reassured her.  "Sometimes you do hard things for people you love."

More tears and hugs.

The service was beautiful.  Even though I had never met her father, I felt like I knew him.  What a sweet man.  My friend looked in my direction as she walked down the aisle following behind the casket to her seat.  In that moment as she blew a kiss my direction with tears streaming down her face I knew in my heart I was right where God wanted me to be in this world.  We visited with her and her family briefly a few more times before it was already times to say goodbye.  In God's grace, the four children had been perfect little travelers.  We packed up the van and took one more sleep before starting our 700-mile road trip back home to Virginia.

As I drove on the beautiful roadway that is highway 64, I couldn't help but think about how radically God loves.  And now that I knew I was capable of being used by him to show love in a big way, it was now time to allow his radical love to flow through me in my own home--toward my husband and children.

goodbye bentley boy (part 2 of 2)

The drive seemed so short.  Through the tears we shared stories of our Boy.  "Remember when we picked him up from the breeder?" I said.  We laughed thinking about the tiny puff ball that he was at 8 weeks.  We had brought our huge wire crate in the back of the Volvo to pick him up.  He looked so tiny.  "Yeah," My Love said smiling.  "He threw up in the car and I had to pull over to clean it up."  We both laughed.  Then silence and tears again.  We recalled such sweet memories spent together as a family with our Wups over the last seven years.  Road trips, hikes, camping trips, bed and breakfast get aways.  How could we even make new memories in our little family without him in it?  It seemed impossible.

As we pulled up to the vet's office, I was weeping uncontrollably.  We took a minute kissing him in the back of the car before stumbling into the office.  People sat there with their pets smiling and laughing.  The clip board required us to sign in with a space to fill in the reason for our visit.  I couldn't bring myself to write it down. They brought us into a room right away.

We took care of some logistics and then spent the rest of our time with him petting him and kissing him and crying on him.  We kept telling him how much we would miss him and what a good boy he had been.  He was laying peacefully in My Loves arms when the techs stepped out for a minute and a sweet song came to mind.  A song we have sung to our human children since they were babies called Snuggle Puppy.  Through tears, My Love and I sang it to our furry firstborn on the floor of the vet's office.  

The vet came back in and it was time.  I won't share details but it was terrible.  His spirit left him and I couldn't bring myself to even look at him after that.  I was doubled over wailing and yelling about the obvious realization that had just happened.  My Love had to help me to the car as we exited out the back door leaving our boy behind.  There were more tears as the car felt extremely empty.  And then it was like the tears were all gone.  I don't remember crying again after that.  We talked more on the ride home and felt emotionally drained but the grief morphed into something else.  We had just about gone through all the stages before this day and found ourselves just missing his presence.

We drove up to our house just the two of us and thanked our neighbor and friend for blessing us with such a precious memory.  We had both been there when Bentley was welcomed into our family and we were both with him at the end.  I can never repay her for that gift!

In the midst of our sorrow, there was God's overwhelming grace wrapped up in a precious baby girl asleep in an upstairs room.  During the time that we lost our Bentley Boy, Sweet Pea's presence in our family became a soothing balm to our aching hearts.

That Tuesday night, My Love and I were just numb sitting next to each other on the couch while the TV played.  He was really gone.  I had asked friends on Facebook to share stories of our sweet dog and we spent the rest of our night smiling and laughing as we recalled his crazy antics.  He was loved well by so many.  

Good bye Bentley Boy!  When we brought you home in 2006, you made us a family and we are better for knowing you.  We miss you terribly and wish we had more time before you had to go.  But oh how sweet the memories will always be in our hearts!

(February 2014)

before the end (part 1 of 2)

Our next door neighbor offered to come stay with the kids on that Tuesday evening so I could be with My Love.  What a blessing!  No hard goodbyes in front of the kids.  It was bad enough I broke down the day before after making the worst phone call of my life.  "Mommy's OK," I reassured them as they came to comfort me.  "Are you sad about Bentley?" he asked already knowing the answer.  "Yes, buddy.  But God can heal my heart," I said.  Did I just schedule that appointment?

It was just four months before that we even noticed a change in Bentley's behavior and demeanor.  We took him to the vet inquiring about his recent pee accidents in the house.  They suspected a bladder infection and prescribed antibiotics.  It didn't work.  After a series of more tests, we pursued a second opinion and felt more confident with the care he was receiving at the new vet's office.  More tests were done.  His symptoms continued to develop and worsen.  At some point we came to the decision that we could spend hundreds of more dollars just to confirm a diagnosis that we already knew we would not choose to treat, or we could accept his assumed illness as it was.  Brain tumor.

At the end he was down to 64 pounds I think even diligently eating his regular two meals a day.  My heart sank the day I noticed he left a few morsels of his breakfast in the bowl.  That was SO not our boy.  It had been weeks since he ate something off the counter or even off the floor.  His legs were weak and he refused to climb any stairs.  He was going blind and walked into walls and tripped over toys.  He incessantly paced around the house every evening and when he wasn't doing that he was sleeping.  He continued to have accidents.  My Love came home before us on Valentine's Day to find Wups had pooped in the house and blindly tracked it all over the family room.  Caring for him became so stressful trying to anticipate when he would need to go out to pee and literally having to carry him back inside.  He would slowly wander in the front yard and down the street before he heard our voice calling him back and he would try to follow it.  He was disoriented.  No leash necessary.  We hadn't gone on a Family Walk in quite awhile. 

The Monday I made the call I could tell he was done.  When I took him outside he would walk just a few steps and then lay down in the grass.  It was a sunny, breezy day so at one point I just lied down with him spooning my furry firstborn in the front yard.  It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever shared with him as I  watched his fur blow in the sunshine.  No photo was necessary.

My heart was breaking.

Wups had been sleeping in a crate when we were away from home and at night for a couple weeks.  Monday night we brought him to bed with us and he slept for a few hours right between us before he woke up anxious.  It was beautiful.  My Love put him on the floor next to his side of the bed where he would normally sleep and he stayed there all night.  It was so nice having him in the room with us again.  

When Tuesday morning came, every thing about that day was excruciating.  Knowing the exact time caused me to count down the hours with such pain.  I was extremely irritable with my innocent human children wanting to spend as much uninterrupted time with Bentley as I could.  It was his worst day yet.  When he came inside from not going pee, he stepped just inside the front door and laid down there sleeping for the the rest of the day.  My poor Love had to spend the day at work.  While the kids were "napping", I once again just lied down with My Boy and pet him.  Every once in awhile my weeping would startle him to sit up and I would try to calm him back down.  Five more hours.

I spent part of the day removing some of Bentley's items from their normal places.  As hard as it would be to come home and see them missing, I knew it would be even harder to see them there empty and unused when we got back that evening.

For some crazy reason My Love got home later than usual from work that day.  His alone time with Wups was limited.  Eventually our neighbor came over and the kids said goodbye before running off to play.  My Love carried Bentley to the car and lifted him into the back of the Volvo.  Was this really happening?  The first few minutes were driven in silence with bursts of weeping from both of us.  With each mile that we drew closer to our destination, my heart sunk deeper in my chest...