Essay 1 – The loyalty and love of a dog

There is an old Chippiannock cemetery near the banks of the Mississippi River. I visited the gravesite this year, taking a small detour on my trip to Chicago. The graveyard is an old historic Civil War cemetery and reflects the past practice of making a graveyard resemble a forest glade - a place of eternal rest. In between the shadows of sprawling oak trees there are acres upon acres of tombstones in the shapes of obelisks, circles, crosses, broken trees, seeing balls, and angels.

I was there, however, in search of one particular 130 year old tombstone- the memorial of a dog named Rex who mourned the dead.

This statue of a dog is alongside the graves of a brother and sister, Eddie and Josia Dimick who died on the same day back in 1878 from diphtheria. At the time of their death, Eddie was five and Josia was ten. Imagine the grief felt by their family, as they buried not one but two children. Their grief was not uncommon. Chippiannock Cemetery is filled with the graves of children. The 1800’s were tough. Childhood illness made large families small and small graveyards large.

Eddie and Josia Dimick had a beloved dog who lay with them during their illness. After their death, he followed the funeral process as the buried the children. For the rest of his life, Rex would walk to the graveyard and lay next to the children’s graves until nightfall when he would then head home. This dog mourned and pined for his beloved children until the day his own death. The parents of Eddie and Josia were so moved by his love and loyalty that they commissioned the statue to honor him.

I had a dog like that. He was a stray found hanging around a local church. Our elderly next-door neighbor Dorothy adopted him and named him “Pete”. He was a mutt – part Labrador and the rest, just a mishmash of colors. He also had a high-pitched irritating ‘yelp’ instead of a bark. But he also had a big heart – it actually saved his life.

Every day he would dig under the fence to get to our yard, and would yelp when Dorothy tied him up and he heard our voices. For some reason, Pete adopted us as his family, instead of Dorothy. We didn’t want to encourage Pete’s so we wouldn’t let him come into the house, but if he was able to sneak in, he would hide under a bed. In order to find whose bed he was under, all you had to do was walk in a room and say, “Petey, I love you!” His tail would immediately start wagging and thumping onto the bed boards. He couldn’t help giving himself away and out he would go. I couldn’t get mad at him because all he wanted was to be with us.

Winter was hard that year – full of Northwest rain and snow. Pete spent the entire season near our back door curled up in a snow bank under a Douglas fir tree waiting for us to come out to greet him. Dorothy grew frustrated with her failed attempts to keep Pete out of our yard. One day she called us to say that because she could not figure out how to stop Pete from coming into our yard, she was going to put him to sleep.

When my son Andy, who was about seven at the time, heard the news he came to me devastated and broken hearted. With tears in his eyes he said, “Is is wight that Petey dies just because he wuv’s us?” Damn. I called Dorothy and told her we would adopt Pete and welcome him into our home. Thump, thump, thump.

We had Pete for twelve years until the day he died. In the final minutes of his life, when I saw the spark in his eyes fading, I leaned over and whispered into his ear, “Petey, you had one purpose in life. That was to love us. You have done your job well. Rest well my friend.”

With that, he arched his back and died. (Note: my daughter Ali was coming home from college around 2 am that evening. Thinking that she may want to say goodbye to Pete, I left his body in the living room for her. In hindsight, my consideration was not appreciated. She woke me with a shriek when she found him. ) In the morning we buried him under the big leafed maple tree.

As the bumper sticker says “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” In doing so we also become the person God calls us to be. There is a lot to learn about loving God from watching how dogs love us. In a way, we are God’s dogs. God desires from us the same things we desire from our dogs: loyalty, love, playfulness, companionship, and someone always excited to do our bidding.

God gives us free-will so that we can chose do his bidding. We are not forced into love. We are not chained in the back-yard or kept locked up in the house. We are not electronic toy robot dogs, unable to think or act. Instead God gives us the ability to think for ourselves because only then is our obedience a genuine expression of our love.

They are one of the only pets that know their own names and come when they are called. I love dogs. I see the thumbprint of God in the joyful eyes of my current dog Maggie when she sees me grabbing the truck keys. A road trip! Thump, thump, thump. She is always excited to go with me. As soon as I roll down the window, she sticks her nose into the air, closes her eyes, and breathes in deeply, smelling whatever smells she can smell at 60 miles an hour. Her ears flop back, her lips tremble and she gets an expression that is suspiciously like a smile.

Maggie’s now an aging black Labrador, with a square head and a graying muzzle but she still gets hyper when she greets you – a full body twitch of wagging tail and pushing nose. And she yelps the irritating yelp that Petey taught her. She is so excited to see us – her soul is complete again.

I trust God looks at me the same way that I looked at Pete or Maggie, or that the Dimick parents looked at Rex; that my heart is as pure and as loyal as a dog’s. That I have been adopted into the family of God and can live in the house of God. That I can wait faithfully under the tree to greet him every morning. That I am excited to go with him in his FORD truck and take great pleasure in the smells of creation from the open window. That I know his voice and come whenever he calls my name.

Is it any coincidence that the words good, God and dog all are spelled with the same letters? I don’t think so. I love God. I love dogs. They make it easier for me to understand the heart of God.

-Peter Illyn