A Eulogy

Songs are kind of hard to sing today. My dog, Dandy, my friend for the past fourteen and a half years, died today. My dad cried, and I love him for it. I'm sure my mom and my brother cried as well. It's only been in these past few years that I've realized in full exactly what she meant to me, and why I like dogs in general a great deal. Our relationship wasn't really a challenging one, because she didn't ask for much, besides table scraps. But, I think, that was the thing that made her friendship so meaningful to me. She asked nothing of me. She merely enjoyed my company when I was there. Such a rare thing in a person can be learned from a dog. And today, she teaches me one last lesson. Mortality. A lesson that I learn bit by bit as folks I know and love die and walk through a door that is not mine to walk through just yet. Dandy teaches me that life is precious, and the door to True Life is even more precious. I don't particularly know about animals and heaven. She was a creation of God like me, and I know that she and I understood each other like few can. She, a patient one that was always pleased in the deepest sense to see me, and myself, a person that usually desperately feels the need to be wanted - we were a team of the most fitting kind. Either way, whether she's with Christ, the Creator, or not, I have lessons to learn here that I cannot fully fathom.

I usually feel differently about death than folks around me. I don't know whether I bottle my emotions or that I'm just less expressive of sadness than others. It makes me sometimes feel guilty that I don't weep and don't say the things that others say. I do know that I'll miss my friend, though. She struggled valiently for over half my life to be my dear and often companion, and now her fight is done, won with all the glory of the setting sun. Good dog.