My kids went with me to the market last Sunday, July 29, 2012. If you know anything about life in the province, Sunday is market day: so many people, so many wares, so many hawkers. You can’t hope to get near the market except on foot.  So we walked to market, my kids and I.

We chanced upon a man with a basket full of puppies.  I would have gone on past the puppies but my kids stopped to admire them.  “We can get two puppies, if you like,” I said. Immediately the two kids got up and began walking away. “I thought you liked puppies,” I said.  “We can get two; they can’t cost that much.”

“They remind me too much of Ghost,” said the girl. “That one,” pointed my boy to a dark puppy, “reminds me of Coffee.”

My brother-in-law gave my kids 2 puppies last May.  The kids took care of them and enjoyed the puppies until they died on the second week of June. The puppies had diarrhea and they wasted away for days before dying within hours of each other. When my kids came home after school, they had to dig a hole in the backyard to bury their puppies. They had to scrub with bleach  the area where the dogs died. For days after the puppies died, my kids were forlorn.  They sighed all the time.  They put away the puppy brush, the towel, the leashes and the collars.  They kept saying, “I miss Coffee;”  “I miss Ghost.”

I wanted to rent a DVD of Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-award winning movie with Helen Hunt, As Good as It Gets.  There’s this scene in that movie that Jack Nicholson was mourning over a dog as he was playing a sentimental tune on his grand piano and then he started laughing to himself muttering “All this about a dog…” I thought, and I was wrong, that my kids’ grief over the puppies was a trivial childhood crisis. They were just dogs, after all.

I told my kids in the weeks that followed that there were puppies for sale at the Arranque Market.  We pass by the Arranque Market on Recto every week when we go to Ongpin to see the Chinese herbalist.  The kids didn’t even want to talk about it. I must have been repeating myself about the puppies at Arranque  because my daughter said, “Mom, you don’t seem to understand, we don’t want other puppies, we want our puppies.  We want them back. We don’t like dogs in general, we like Coffee and Ghost.” So I let the matter rest.   A month has passed since the dogs died and last Sunday, I thought they were ready for new puppies. Apparently, they were not.

My son said, “I’m not going to get another puppy and watch it die.”  So I said,” The next puppy may not  die like Coffee, maybe the next puppy will be stronger, better able to resist parasites and disease.  Maybe you’ll be a wiser pet owner and you’ll have had more experience.  You’ll care for them better and the dog will live a long life.”

The girl (so quick with repartee) said, “So that what?  They’ll grow up and eventually die as well? No, thank you. It’s just leaving off grief for another day. Dogs die and you don’t want to love a dog that will eventually die.”

What was it with those puppies?  They were just mongrels.  They weren’t even that cute or smart.  And it wasn’t like the kids didn’t know about death.  So many stray cats have made our driveway and backyard their home and those cats had kittens that have died all over the place.  They know about death.

My daughter said, “Ghost wasn’t just a puppy, he was my puppy.”

Ah, so we get deeper into the matter: the kids have made an emotional investment on the puppies. It didn’t matter that the puppies were stupid ugly mongrels; the puppies have managed to endear themselves to the kids.  Those puppies mattered to them: they occupied a space in their lives and carried weight in their minds.  The puppies’ death left an empty space. And the empty space is specific: it cannot be filled in by just any other puppy.

Sometimes I am afraid for my children: they feel too deeply about things.  Other kids their age seem to flutter through life like butterflies, going from bloom to bloom.  Not my kids.  Their rambunctious wit and glib tongue mask sensitive souls. Then again, don’t we all mask sensitive souls? Don’t we all pretend to roll with punches while our hearts are often marred and patched up because we feel too deeply about things and hold onto people and things too tightly? Living things die. We will all die. That is the risk we take when we allow ourselves to care for another living person:  the person we care about will die.

They were just puppies, I suppose, but to my kids, the puppies were an object lesson on death and loss, on heartbreak and keeping the faith.  It was a lesson re-learned for me.  On August 5, our family will mark the 20^th death anniversary of my brother, Jonathan. He died at age 6. His death left a gap in me, too.  His was the first death in our family.

At the time that Jonathan died, all I could manage to say to God when I prayed was, “Lord, I know that someday, I will be able to thank you and praise you for these dark days.”  And I was able to do that eventually. I gained the knowledge that death serves the purpose of making us long for our heavenly home.  The lesson did not take away the pain, of course, but it made me better able to manage it. It allowed me to long for heaven because that is where Jonathan is. Does it still hurt?  Yes, it hurts to remember Jonathan every year. The only difference is that the pain is now mingled with hope. I have hope that I will see Jonathan some day.  And the hope is not based on some religious mumbo jumbo.  It is a hope that is anchored on the Eternal God who made our eternal souls. We were made to fellowship with the Eternal God. And to do that, we need to shed our dying bodies.

Death and loss happen because we need a constant reminder that this world is not our home.  We are not supposed to be entirely happy or comfortable here.  Death and loss make us long for God who is the permanent home for our souls where there will be no death or dying, no pain or tears, no sickness and no more night. Our impermanent and ephemeral lives make us long for the Eternal, the Eternal One who doesn’t change. The death and loss of people we love need to drive us for solace to the Eternal God.