Fenton’s Doing His Best Poops Ever

I loved my dog.  And when he died earlier this year after fourteen years of faithful doggy service our house lamented for some time. My son, having grown up with the dog, was bereft. He missed a day or two of school and went around the house in that first stage of grief.

“I can’t believe Miloh is dead!” he’d exclaim, at random moments in the day.

I took the dog to the vet myself, after a couple of days in which the pain killers chased the pain with all of the success of the dog chasing a ball in his last year or so. In other words, the ball won.

I hoist Miloh onto the cold gurney. Gingerly, as he was in pain. Dogs have high pain thresholds,  so even while I wrangled and manoeuvred, he was at his respectable best. Right to the end.

We had signalled to the vet a few months earlier that we might be on that trajectory. But every time that event seemed close, we shied away. As you do. For your sake, though not necessarily for the dog’s sake.

Yet it was here. And now. And between my tears I managed to hold his paw as the nurse filled the big needle with the green stuff, and I brushed back the fur from his eyes and watched.

I watched as death took hold of him almost instantaneously. As his eyes glazed over. And just like that, a life of snuffles, wagging tails, growling, pooping and peeing and barking at the window to my shouts of “Leave it!” was in the past. His spirit returned to the ground.

I once wrote an essay for the Nature Conservancy Australia’s “sense of place” writing competition ($5000 prize and a slot on the ABC Book Show) about how life-changing my dog had been to me. Especially as we bought him just after I had recovered from life-threatening illness.

I wrote about how he became a comfort to me as I recovered, and how we tramped through the bushes up near our property in the Perth hills. I was one of the five finalists, and got a trip to Sydney, and I have to thank the dog for part of that!

So having put the dog down, I came home in tears that day, as they prepared to cremate him (my in-laws loved my dog and asked for his ashes), ready as ever to blog about it. It would be something about the death of my dog and what that meant about life in general and God and dogs in particular. It would be great.

And my pen was poised. That is, until a social media post came up that stopped me in my tracks. A social media post that sent shock waves around the Christian community in Perth. A good friend involved in church planting, blogging and ministry in Perth, wrote to explain that his beloved son had drowned just off the coast while free-diving.

To say that this hit so many people in our city hard is to belittle that event.  My friend’s son was well known, lived larger than life, was talented and took huge bites out of life’s apple. So to read this, and then go along with his family on that shocking journey as my friend wrote about it, hurt our collective heart.

Still does. The fear of “what if that were me” gripped so many of us. I don’t know how we would have coped. My friend still writes publicly about this and how this tragedy has shaped their lives and his faith and the depths it has taken him to. God is still there and my friend can testify to His faithfulness. But gee, who ever gets over this?

And it was on that day that I decided I could not write about my dog. That though I loved my dog he was just a dog. And here, some seven months later, I cast a mind back to my dog and his doggy ways and can enjoy those moments.  And move on to perhaps even another dog.

There’s great joy in having a dog. But to compare the grief between losing a dog and losing a child? Not even close.

Yet even yesterday, someone with children was commenting to me about a relative of his who has no children, and never really wanted them, asking if having a dog was like having a child. As if!

Our modern West is shying away from having children. There are a number of reasons for this. One – and it’s a primary one – is that we don’t value children in the way we used to. If children are a blessing from the LORD and you don’t believe in the LORD, then children can easily become a curse. Have easily become a curse.

Children will get in the way of a meaningful career or a meaningful relationship. They will get in the way of a better climate. They will get in the way of a mortgage.

And that’s another reason people don’t have children. Or at least not too many. Our economic machine has pushed many younger people to the limit. Having more than one child is now seen as too risky. It’s either two children OR it’s a house of your own. It can’t be both. I understand that.

Yet at the same time that we have diminished children we have elevated animals. That’s part of our post-Christian context too. The Bible puts children and animals in different categories. The Bible does not demean animals. They are, after all, God’s creation.  But they are not made in His image. We are.

But if you don’t believe that. And if you think that children are a risk in the way that I have described above. And if your relational life is such that you no longer hold to how the Bible explains male and female, and children being the happy byproduct of a married relationship, then a dog just might do it for you.

I (illegally) took the photo at the top of this post while driving the car in crazy Sydney traffic. We have just moved to that great city and I was on my way out to the Northern Beaches as they are known, and had just reckoned with the Harbour Bridge traffic, taken a wrong turn and gotten stuck at a set of lights that were red faced and stubborn to move.

And it was there I saw Fenton on the side of a bus.  I grabbed my phone, risking myself a fine in the process, and the rest is Pulitzer-prize winning history.

Now I have removed Fenton’s actual photo to protect his privacy (just jokes), but the anthropomorphic nature of the advertising struck me. Here is a dog who has been elevated to the status of a child. His poops, his life-changing food!  Life-changing no less! Oh and his parent. All on display.  Fenton is living his best doggy life now.

And a word about the location of his owner: Surry Hills. The progressive, sexually liberated, inner city of Sydney, where -upon staying there some time ago for a week or so – and walking through it, realised that there are more dogs than kids. And that people stop to talk to each other’s dogs. And that dogs walk into every shop on leashes with impunity.

Of course it’s just an ad. But like all ads it’s picking the zeitgeist. It’s not shocking or transgressive. And every dog owner in the West (and it usually is in the West) smiles a little because they – like I – know how important a dog can be in one’s life.

A church musician who does wedding music as a side hustle told me on the weekend that he had just played at a wedding in which the happy couple’s dog was featured in every photograph. Every photograph. The dog was spoken about as if it were their child.

One wonders what will happen if the dog dies. Which it will. The musician told me that the dog was already ten years old. It might have four years left. 28 doggy years.  And what then? Can another dog fill the void? Would a child?

I don’t say these things mockingly. Just to point out at the very time we’re not even replacing the humans we have in this country – or indeed across much of the developed world – we are elevating non-humans.

Post-Christianity increasingly sees no difference between a dog and a human in terms of what it can do for you, its worth and dignity, and its ability to provide meaning and purpose.

Of course much of that is in the West. The dog food on offer in the bus ad would look a good option to many a human who is starving across our world today. Life changing even. Best poops ever!  That’s the promise.

Do yourself a favour. Go watch that sobering and amazing movie Children of Men. See what happens when the world not only stops having children, but can’t have children. Not quite the same as dogs.

And I sit writing this blog post seven months out from my own dog dying, which shredded me for a couple of weeks. And I still think about him. But I sit here knowing that on that exact day he died, I read the terrible news about my friend’s son. And I know that it’s not the same.

My friend wrote this just recently, as the very proof it is NOT the same. Oh, and just to twist the knife in, his brother died a few months later. It’s poignant and real and grief-stricken. Just like so many of his other posts the past seven months. In amongst it all, he says this:

I am aware of & feel for others in pain much more than I ever did before. In fact I sense that if you look closely (and you want to see) everyone is carrying something. We carry a lost son & brother, but others live with a failed marriage, a severely disabled child, a legacy of abuse… and so it goes on. There are very few people who go thru this life unscathed, but I am not naturally drawn to delve into this more pained side of a person.

The death of his son plumbs a depth that I don’t think we can imagine. Yet he holds onto God. It changes him in so many ways and I suspect will keep doing so, until the day he dies.

And every time I read his musings on this, I make a promise that day to hug my own lanky lad, and hold his slender shoulders and plant a kiss on the black curls of hair on his head. And pray. I still can hardly bear to read my friend’s blog posts because of the referred pain they give me.

Oh, and lest you consider me churlish, my friend ends his latest blog post with this:

Oh – and we now have a puppy called Tahnee who is a Retriever cross Border Collie. She has brought an immense amount of joy into our home. I don’t think she would have come along had Sam still been alive, (he brought enough ‘puppy energy’ for all of us) but she has been a sheer beam of light in herself. I never thought we would own another dog, let alone a puppy, but here we are with no regrets.

Children are a gift from the LORD, and the pain when the gift is taken away so suddenly must be dreadful. And dogs too are a gift from the LORD – not the same, not as important and not as life-changing, no matter what the advertising says. And no – not quite as dreadful when they are taken away. Just a little bit dreadful.

Maybe some day Fenton’s owner, Meghann, will realise that too.