This week was one of the more difficult weeks in my life.  My great companion of thirteen years, my dog Woodrow, succumbed to a nasty cancer of his spleen, that like a thief in the night, stole without warning our living bond.  Clinically the event was perpetrated as the result of a spontaneous rupture of a malignant hemangiosarcoma, but it presented as internal bleeding,spontaneous deterioration, and the acute need to make a rapid and very,very painful decision.  Like the warrior king he always was, Woodrow fought the vicious foe tenaciously for several hours.  He would not let his warrior heart give in…

I had to do it for him, to end his suffering.  The battle lost, the warrior king was at rest for the ages. His best companion’s deep suffering continues.

Above is the king at the height of his powers. An exotic mix of Golden Retriever and Chow, he carried the dual personality characteristics of beauty and beast.  Rescued in his youth from a kill shelter in Idaho, he maintained always the frontier spirit of the West in his soul.  He was a throwback. Self sufficient. A hunter. A loner.  He liked being outside in the elements when other wussified dogs of the suburbs to which  his rescue delivered him headed in doors at the first weather.  He would go on vision quests, long walks which irritated the neighbors and brought him in a precarious love hate relationship with the local constabulary. He did not suffer fools, neither dogs nor humans.  If a stray coyote sought to take over the territory, Woodrow made sure there would be none of that.

He brought an intense bond with his owners in that it was easy to see there was nothing to own, only life to share.  He did not whine, and he took care of his own wounds – the occasional untoward moments in life. A missing canine.  Facial scars from raccoons. The stiff gait of many a battle.

He also let you know he was your wing man.  Always by your side. He deeply enjoyed human contact, and showed real gratefulness for the comfortable life he ended up achieving through rescue, released from the wild, difficult, unknown world of his youth and the harrowing experience of the shelter.

He was strong and beautiful, but as life does to us all, he was slowly and insidiously drawn  down by the ravages of age.  The hips stiffened, and the massive shoulder muscles weakened.  He no longer could run, and progressively getting up and down became a daily challenge.  He had become the Lion in Winter.  In his last year, he would still guard his territory from the porch, surveying his domain from his padded bed – weakened, but still not suffering fools such as the UPS man.  The body began to deteriorate before the final insult, but the warrior heart remained strong and the deep eyes always burned with the fires of the ancient eternal soul within.

The night of nights came for Woodrow, as it must inevitably for all of us.  The stark rupture from the bonds of life to the vagaries of death is the essential moment that reminds us of the precious gift that is life.  In this same week, we are confronted with our modern culture’s confusion with the gift.  We note society’s faux outrage with a hunter’s kill of a somewhat domesticated lion in the country of Zimbabwe that dominates people’s emotions internationally.  The people of Zimbabwe are confused as to the intensity of the emotion of people for a lion they did not know, in a country where lions kill people every year, and other animals every day. In the same week, we are exposed to moral emptiness of a bureaucratic  human extermination process run by Planned Parenthood, exposed by video to be actively selling late term aborted fetus body parts for profit, taking care not to damage the “crop”.  The latest video identifies the horrifying reality that in some cases, the execution is not fast enough, and the fetus escapes the womb fully formed and viable – what used to be universally recognized as a human baby.  No matter. The baby is “harvested” anyway.  Society, unable any longer to sustain a soul, unable to understand the life creation process stands mute.  As the Nazi monster physician Joseph Mengele ominously and presciently was quoted,

” The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

We have progressively lost our wonder of the miracle of creation, God sent, with natural order of things a struggle to be mastered and the awesome beauty and diversity of life to be celebrated. To live in a world where humans become divisible consumer products and animals strange objects of worship demeans the entire constellation of the sacred gift of life.  The universe has balanced it all, the joy and tragedy, struggle and triumph, wonder and loss that makes the idea of living on a fulfilling one.  We can only hope to be worthy of the miracle and live a life totally respectful of it.

Norse legend suggests that for Woodrow , as one of God’s creatures, his time on Earth done, a lush meadow awaits him between this world and the next, where he can be young and strong again, body  restored to its majesty.  There he can wait, until one day he notes a familiar scent, lifts his eyes forward, and leaves the pack behind. And comes running to me, joy thus restored and the universe now healed… and from that point, together,  we cross the rainbow bridge, to our shared eternal destiny.

Were it to be that the universe indeed worked that way, that would be all right with me.