The Dog Under the Cedar

He buried his father in 1998 and his mother in 2011 and he did not cry at either one.

That is not a boast. He would tell you flat out that he does not know why. He stood at both gravesides, in a good coat, and he did what a man does, and he shook hands afterward, and he went home and did the evening chores, and both times he thought, distantly, that something in him was not working right.

Bess died in March.

Fourteen years. A red heeler cross with one ear that never stood up properly, and a habit of getting into the truck before the door was fully open, and about the last four months she could not get up on the porch on her own and he had been carrying her up the two steps at night.

He dug the hole himself under the cedar at the edge of the near field. He was about two thirds of the way down when it happened, and he has not told this to another living person.

He sat down in the dirt with the spade still in the hole and he cried for something like twenty minutes. Not a few tears. He came apart, out there, on his own land, at sixty three years of age, over a dog.

And when it was done he stood up and finished the hole and filled it in and walked back up to the house, and the thing that has been on him since is not the dog.

It is what it means.

Because he did his mother in 2011 with a dry face. And he can do the arithmetic as well as anybody. Twenty minutes for a heeler and nothing at all for the woman who raised him, and there is only one conclusion a man can draw from that, and he has been drawing it every day since March.

Something is wrong with him.

If anybody has ever sat down in a hole they were digging, stay with me. There is one line in Proverbs that takes that arithmetic apart, and it is going to take some weight off.

Scripture puts an animal into the description of a righteous man

Here is the line, and it is short, and it is in there on purpose.

A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.Proverbs 12:10

Regardeth. The word underneath it means knows. Attends to. Keeps in mind and takes account of.

And look at what it is being used to distinguish. That verse is not a footnote about animal husbandry. It is a test of character. It puts a man's conduct toward an animal in the same sentence as the word righteous, and it puts the opposite in the same sentence as the word wicked.

God is on record, in the book of wisdom, as taking notice of what a man does with a creature that depends on him.

So there was a man carrying a heeler up two porch steps at night for four months, and heaven had that filed under righteousness.

You are described by that verse rather than accused by it, and you were inside it every one of those nights on the steps. Proverbs 12:10 is the written word putting the care of an animal into the definition of a righteous man, and the Spirit who breathed that line was under the cedar with a man who could not finish digging.

And it is not the only place. The Lord says He knows every fowl of the mountains, and that the wild beasts of the field are His. He asks Jonah, in the last line of that whole book, about much cattle. The sabbath commandment includes the ox and the donkey by name, in the ten commandments, in the middle of the law.

You have a God who names animals in His own commandments, and you were never fussing over something He does not count. Psalm 50:11 says the wild beasts of the field are mine and God says it in the first person, and the Holy Spirit did not put an animal into the fourth commandment by accident.

The arithmetic is wrong because grief is not a scale

Now let me get straight at the sum, because it has been running since March and it does not hold.

Twenty minutes for the dog and nothing for his mother. Therefore he loved the dog more. Therefore something is broken in him.

That is not how any of this works, and here is why.

Grief does not come out at the moment of the loss. It comes out where the ground gives way. A man can stand at a graveside in a good coat with two hundred people watching and every muscle in his body doing the job he was raised to do, and nothing comes, because that is a place where nothing can come.

And then, thirteen years later, he is alone under a cedar with a spade in his hand and nobody within half a mile, and the ground gives way.

What came up out of him under that cedar was not one dog. It was 1998 and 2011 and every winter in between, and a man who has never once in his life been in a room where it was safe to make that noise. The dog opened the gate. The dog did not fill the field.

That is not a fault. That is a body doing the only thing it was ever able to do, on the first day it was ever able to do it.

You are not a man who loved a dog more than his own mother, and you were never given a scale to weigh those two on. Nothing anywhere in the written word ranks one grief against another or measures a man by where his tears finally came, and the Spirit of God does not read a dry face at a funeral as a verdict on a son.

Nobody gets a vote on the size of this

Now the other half, and it is the half this whole site exists for.

He has not told anybody. Not his brother, not the man he has coffee with, not the pastor. And the reason is that he already knows exactly what would come back.

She had a good long run. Fourteen is a great age for a heeler. You can always get another one. And underneath every one of those, quietly, the ranking: this is a smaller thing and the reaction is larger than it warrants.

That ranking is not from God and it never was.

There is nothing in Scripture that sorts losses into the ones a person may grieve properly and the ones a person must keep in proportion. There is no schedule of permitted griefs. There is a verse about tears going into a bottle, and it does not ask what the tears were for.

You are permitted to grieve that animal at exactly the size it actually is in you, and you were permitted to on the day you sat down in that hole. Psalm 56:8 has the tears counted and bottled with no qualifying question asked about them at all, and the Holy Spirit does not sort a man's grief into the parts He will take and the parts He will not.