Jada
There are heavy hearts in the Donovan house today. Sometime in the next 24 hours we anticipate that we will be putting down our sweet dog, Jada. Jada is 11 years old, and she came into our family as a puppy when our oldest daughter, Mabel, was just 6 months old. Our girls have no concept of a life without Jada in it. Jada enjoys each of our girls and has loved to play with them in the yard. And our girls all love Jada, too. Very much. While Jada has been a special dog for all of us in our family, she has always had a special bond with Leanne. Jada is Leanne’s dog, and we all just get to enjoy in second place.
Six months ago we took Jada to the vet, on account of some sudden breathing challenges she was experiencing. After doing an x-ray, the vet diagnosed her with a tumor on her lung. We believed then, that our time remaining with her was going to be measured in days or weeks, and so we began preparing our girls for the soon-coming life without our dog. Many tears were shed as we wrestled with the idea of Jada’s life being shorter than any of us expected. Wanting to make the end of her life the best we could, we began feeding her canned dog food (we’ve always been a family that fed our dogs from the big Costco dog food bags). I have joked often over the last six months that feeding her this expensive dog food ($3 a can!) is what gave her a new lease on life. And now that she was going to live, we could barely afford her:).
She has lived a happy last 6 months, eating stinky canned dog food, going on short walks, playing with our girls in the yard, and being a steady and happy part of our family life. She’s even lost much of her hearing, so her experience of the many booms on the 4th of July was almost no big deal for the first time ever. There continued to be some evidence that she was slowing down, but if you saw her, you would have never known she was unwell. It was a blessing for all of us to get so much extra time.
Last Thursday night, though, a switch seemed to flip in her mind. We don’t know if it is a result of cancer spreading or from something else, but suddenly she became inconsolable. She has remained such since that night. The only moments when she isn’t worriedly pacing the house are the few moments she sleeps. There was medicine procured from the vet, in hopes that it might help, but that hasn’t seemed to make much difference. She has slept very little over the last five days, and her constant motion in the house has meant that Leanne and I have slept a lot less than preferred, as well.
Tonight we will celebrate her as a family, though I don’t know how mentally present she will be with us while we do that. And over the next 24 hours there will be plenty of tears from all five of us as we say goodbye to our family dog. Do you suppose God cares about these kinds of griefs? He does. He certainly does. He cares about all our grief and pain. Psalm 34 says that God is near to the brokenhearted. The loss of a pet is by no means the greatest pain we will endure in this life. But to acknowledge this grief doesn’t trivialize other griefs. Rather, it reminds us that death, in all its forms, was never God’s design, and that there is an eternity where death is no longer a part of the story of our lives. And in the meantime, whatever griefs we are experiencing, we have a God who promises to walk through those griefs with us. And so we’re counting on that for our family tonight.
Pastor Ryan Donovan
Categories: Evergreen Connection