They Said It Was Just a Dog

Somebody said it kindly. That is what makes it hard to be angry about.

It was meant as a proportion. They were trying to help, in the way people do, by putting the thing in a frame where it would hurt less. And what came out was a sentence with the word just in it, and you heard the word just, and something in you closed.

And after that you stopped mentioning it. Not deliberately. You just noticed, in about the second week, that you had started saying you were fine when somebody asked, and that you had begun to feel faintly embarrassed by how much of your day this was still taking up.

So now you are carrying a real grief and an apology for having it, and the apology is heavier than people realize.

He keeps them

There is a line in the Psalms that I have carried to more grieving people than almost any other, and it is a very strange picture.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Put my tears into thy bottle.

It is a picture of collection. Of something being kept because it is worth keeping. Not counted in order to be assessed, and not weighed to see whether it was justified. Kept.

And notice that there is no qualifying clause anywhere in it. It does not say the tears that were about important things. There is no threshold in the verse, no category of grief that qualifies and another that does not, and Psalm 56:8 was written by a man in a very serious situation who nevertheless did not think to specify, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person notice an absence like that when they have been busy disqualifying themselves.

You are being kept rather than assessed, and there has never once been a threshold your grief had to clear. Psalm 56:8 has tears collected without a single condition attached to what they were about, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach somebody who has started apologizing for their own week.

Two things I am not going to do

I want to be plain about the shape of this, because articles about this subject go wrong in two specific ways.

The first is comparison. I am not going to tell you that this is as valid as any other loss, and I am not going to tell you it is different from one either. Both of those are the same move: putting your grief on a scale beside somebody else's. The scale is the problem. Psalm 56:8 does not operate one, and the Holy Spirit has never asked anybody to justify a bottle.

The second is the question about where animals go. You may be asking it. A great many people ask it and then feel foolish, and the feeling foolish is worse than the question.

I am not going to answer it, because Scripture does not, and because a person who tells you confidently in either direction is telling you something they do not know. What I will say is that the asking is not silly, and that the creature was His before it was yours, and that where it is now is in the hands of somebody who made it on purpose.

You are not being graded, and the asking has never once been foolish. The written word says are they not in thy book, which is a question about keeping rather than about qualifying, and the Spirit of God is the one who can hold a person steady inside a question that does not have an answer in the text.

Say the name

Now the thing I actually want you to do, and it is small and specific for a reason.

Say the name out loud. Then tell one person how long you had it.

The reason is that grief that nobody counts starts to lose its details. When a loss is acknowledged, people say the name back to you and ask about it, and that repetition keeps the shape of the thing. When it is not acknowledged, the whole thing lives inside one person and quietly compresses.

Saying the name out loud is a very small act of refusing that. And saying the length of time to another person, which is a fact rather than a feeling, is a way of putting the size of it into the room without asking anybody to agree that it was important.

Nineteen years is nineteen years. That is not an opinion.

You are allowed to say it out loud, and the name has never once needed anybody's permission to be spoken. Psalm 56:8 has God keeping the record so that a person does not have to hold it all alone, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when somebody says a name into an empty room.