Missing Owen
July 17, 2013
There are two things I've said "never again" to
more than once. Every time I've moved, packing up hundreds upon hundreds of
books, I say "Never again," vowing to die in whatever four walls
currently surround me. And every time I bury a dog I swear, tears streaming, to
never love (and so risk losing) another.
I
kissed Owen goodbye on Monday. He came to live with me six years and a few
months ago, when I wasn't certain I was done grieving another four-legged friend
named Chester. Owen was a beautiful boy: well behaved, affectionate, a great
companion and an-ever ready traveler. He was a fixture on the back of the
sofa, a space he claimed early and never released. I didn't mind.
I wrote
two books (The Sacred Ordinary
and Treasured)
with him curled up under my desk, and he appeared once with me on
video, too, at the producer's invitation. Off-duty, Owen
slept--and snored--on the foot of the bed each night--eventually migrating up
to the pillow next to my head and settling there. His big, brown eyes were the
first thing I saw each morning.
For the
last three months, Owen suffered hurt after hurt, indignity after indignity. He
retreated in pain, becoming less and less himself. Saturday we reached the
point of no return. Resigned to the fact that I could no longer help him, I
promised not to hurt him anymore.
As we
sat waiting for the end in the veterinary exam room, he crawled up in my lap
and licked the tears off my face as they fell. It was the most engaged he'd
been in weeks. Minutes later he stopped breathing with my face right next to
his. "Good boy," I whispered to him. "You're such a
good boy."
I loved
Owen every day he was mine...whether he was sick or well, playful or
played-out, scruffy or sleek, convenient or inconvenient. I loved him because
he was mine...and when he became less and less himself, I did not love him
less. Maybe more. Maybe, just maybe, I loved him with the faintest resemblance
to the determined, no-matter-what way that God loves me.
I pray
that Monday I loved him rightly and well, even doing what it broke my heart to
do. But tonight, I'm missing Owen...and I don't think that will change anytime
soon.
C.S.
Lewis wrote, "Love
anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make
sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap
it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements.
Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that
casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken;
it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love at all is to be
vulnerable."
Never
again? I'll never say it again. And I mean it this time.
We love, because He first loved us. (I John 4:19)
© Leigh McLeroy, 2013
"Speak
what you feel, not what you ought to say."
The mystery of the heart: I love
this even through the tears of remembering the loss of my ever faithful
companions throughout my life.
It is indeed better to have loved
and lost than to never have loved before. Be it human or animal, giving
one’s heart away only makes it grow in depth and richness where it would have
never grown.
Jeanne
