Lily: The Labrador-Sized Hole in Our Hearts

It was a year ago today that Melinda and I had to put down our beautiful yellow Labrador, Lily. Below is the message I sent to friends a few days after. It's been a sad year. We still haven't gone to retrieve her ashes:

All:

Please forgive the impersonal salutation. We’ve got sad news that we’d rather talk about with you personally, but we wanted to notify as many people as possible sooner rather than later. It concerns our beloved and beautiful 10 ½ year old yellow Labrador, Lily, whom we had to put down last Friday.

Some of you already know the story: Lily, a very athletic dog that even at 10 people called “puppy” as she trotted around Tarrytown, swam in the lakes and ran with me in the Rockefeller Nature Preserve, went in for a routine checkup about 10 days ago. The vet discovered a sizable mass in her hind quarters. He operated for a biopsy the next day. Last Friday the final lab report came in, showing an incredibly aggressive form of cancer that usually takes a dog within one or two months. For Lily it was much faster. In one week the disease spread through her body like a forest fire. Tumors that hadn’t been evident on Wednesday were consuming her belly on Thursday. On Friday morning she was in such pain she was crying even while lying down.

Now, only we are. We put her down around 1:30 that afternoon.

We’re grieving tremendously, more than I had even imagined as she got older and I would occasionally think of the inevitable day that arrives for animals that typically have one seventh the life span of their owners. To paraphrase a line from Jerry Maguire, this dog “had us at hello.” When we picked her from a litter of five puppies at a Brooklyn brownstone in 1996, all but one was scampering all over the yard. Lily came over and sat on my foot. “Uh, We’ll take that one,” we said, and thus began a relationship that had Melinda and me set up like bowling pins from day one. It got deeper and deeper with the passing years, and now suffice it to say there’s a Labrador-sized hole in our hearts.

Even as I write this I realize how melodramatic that may sound to some of you. We know that dogs are not people (even if couples with no children are especially inclined to treat them as such). We know that this dog had a fabulous 10 years, and that of the 3800 or so days that she was part of our family, only 7 of them were bad – a ratio we’d all welcome for ourselves. We know that even now, some of you on this distribution list are dealing with matters far more grievous than the loss of a Labrador. More important, we know that God, in His time, will not just heal this and far more profound pain, He will swallow it up, and in the “new heaven and new earth” make our everlasting joy even bigger because of it.

But painful it is right now, and for that, we ask for your prayers. I still have to make a living – pray that I can get through work days without falling apart.
Pray that Melinda can get through that time in the early evening before I get home that she and the pooch she called “my best girlfriend” would particularly bond. Pray that it would continue to draw us both closer together.

Friends, thanks for listening, and thanks for your prayers. We’ll be okay, all the faster with the concern of folks like you.

God bless.

Love,

Rob and Melinda
P.S. If you write back, don’t stop at condolences. Tell us what’s happening in your lives.