​38. A Bitter Relief

I woke up at 2 AM crying.

I miss Roxie.

She died Christmas morning of last year. Months leading up to this, she was enduring bouts of what seemed like seizures. Her body would freeze for a bit and then she’d come to in a dazed-like state.

I remember one night going outside to find her frozen body on the grass. She was yelping, squealing through her shut snout, and I lay my head on the ground next to her.

“It’s okay,” I said because that’s something you say when it’s not.

I felt her breath and her stiffened limbs and studied the way sin had traveled all these years to this very moment when I got the opportunity to watch it destroy something I loved.

Something God made.

Her body relaxed, and I held her close. I held on to what nearing the end feels like.

The morning she died was a bitter relief. You don’t want what you love to die. But you don’t want it to suffer either.

Sometimes, I’m the worst person in the world. I think of everyone I don’t like and wonder why they’re still here taking up oxygen and my dog isn’t.

Like I said, the worst.

I think God has reminded me too many times what a gift this has been. To love something so raw and watch it work itself back into His sovereignty.

I can’t control anything at all. And that is perfectly okay.

I try to find the verses and passages that say Roxie will be in heaven with me or the new earth once my Christ comes back again.

I’m not having much luck.

And I suppose that’s another point, too. Worship the Creator, not the creation.

Give your whole heart to those taking up all that oxygen.

And be thankful you ever got to know such beauty in the first place.