Chip died last night. He was a Teddy Bear Hamster with white and gold fur, a little pink nose and a stubby little tail that bobbed back and forth before disappearing into your pocket, pulled along by tiny tender feet. Even more significantly, he was the best furry friend my eight-year old daughter could have had.
I cried. Is that weird? Embarrassing? Absurd in a world marked with so much actual tragedy, so much more significant loss? "I'm a stupid suck," I remarked to my wife as we fell asleep last night, shortly after the interment.
But it was not (just) Chip that I grieved last night - it was my daughter's grief and a loss of childlike innocence. This was her first encounter with death, with separation from a loved one, with ending.
She held him on her lap for two hours before he finally stopped breathing. She didn't want him to die alone. At one point she cried out to us from across the house and we were sure that he was gone. But he wasn't. She just needed someone beside her, to walk with her on this path, strange and sad.
I pulled them in close and we talked about Chip's many adventures - toilet-paper-roll mazes, sand castle fortresses, daring escapes, happy reunions at the end of a school day. Her eyes brimmed and overflowed with tears and confusion as his thinning frame heaved with agonal breaths. And I could hardly speak.
As her mind spun against a sense of helplessness ("Can't we do something, daddy? Oh please. He's done so much for us, we should do something for him.") and as she was swept along with the unrelenting passage of time ("I just wish we could go back in time and cuddle again.")
As she struggled with guilt ("I don't know if Chip knew how much I loved him." or "I can't even remember what he looked like when he was well.")
As she peered for the first time into the impenetrable shroud of death ("Is he sad that he's dying? Will I ever see him again? What does it feel like to be dead? Can't we get him back? I just want Chip, though.")
And I grieved. Cause now she knows. Not just from Bible verses and Sunday School lessons, now she knows. Chip was like a biopsy of a cursed creation. No one grieves for the small sample and the cancer it contains. They grieve for the diagnosis it reveals. The whole is sick and life is perilous and fragile. And now she knows. And that is both good and sad.
Because here's the thing. Even if we try to make this better, even if we rush out and buy a hamster to displace her loss with furry scampering cuteness, she will never again hold a little rodent without the knowledge that one day she will have to say goodbye. The squealing, hopping joy that she experienced when she first unwrapped her Chip in his colourful cage, will never again be so pure. And as losses pile up and that knowledge intensifies, I fear she will become more and more like me. Childlike wonder, unsullied joy replaced with a guardedness that colours all of life's best moments, all my dearest relations, all of the heartiest belly laughs. Guarded now because of the knowledge that, like Chip, this too shall pass. It must. It is perhaps an unavoidable side effect of passage through life. That like me, she will become unable to fully enjoy any moment because lurking at the fringe, is the knowledge that it must surely end. Change happens. Separation is sure. Grief is guaranteed. Life, as a series of tiny deaths. Death is indeed the final enemy, but it casts a long shadow across our lives. Even as I write this, I am fielding calls from staff and nurses who are attending to my patients who are struggling with their final breaths.
The timing was perfect and providential. She discovered his failing form when she came home from school. By bedtime, the process was complete. She got to spend time with him before he died and when she was spent with sadness, he let her rest. The other kids had just been tucked into bed and we got them up to say goodbye. They made a beautiful pink box (I'm sure he doesn't mind) and they all agreed that he looked cute even in death. We went out to the garden at the front of our house and made a hole under the tree where our girls love to climb and play. We all shared a favourite memory and thanked God for the blessing that Chip was on our family and for giving us furry friends to look after. We placed him in the hole and replaced the dirt overtop ("I bet it's really dark down there," said one of the younger ones - they all grapple with this in their own way).
When we turned around there was a brilliant rainbow in the sky. Not a full arc, just one arm of it. It seemed to point right down on the spot where Chip was laid and Livi has taken comfort in that beautiful moment - even painting a rainbow on his tombstone. Now, I am not one of those guys that needs to read God into every coincidence - time and eternity will reveal where His hand was most active on my life. But although I know that the rainbow resulted from sunlight refracted through tiny raindrops, it also reminded me of God's goodness and grace. It reminded me of another diagnosis revealed in Chip's biopsy. That we don't grieve alone. And we don't grieve forever.
"But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it (Matt 10:29)." The context of this verse implies that this knowledge of a sparrow's passing is more than just an "accounting" sort of knowledge. Jesus has just been declaring how much God cares about our lives and emphasizes the point by describing His knowledge when something as small and seemingly unimportant as a sparrow (or a hamster?) dies. He cares.
The biopsy points to another body of work. That God hears our cries and comes. That He enters our world of loss and separation, shares in the grief and was Himself separated from His well loved Father. The biopsy reveals that the world is indeed broken. That we are right to groan and to grieve even the smallest, furriest losses. But it also reveals that He grieves along and will one day set all things right. Childlike innocence, unsullied joy will have their place in my heart once more and in hers. Every tear will be wiped away. The final enemy has already been defeated and one day we'll see it and know it to be true. Truer even than my daughter's most recent realization.
In the meantime I will press into the arms of a Father who knows and encourage my children to the same.
But I'm still a stupid suck.
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