"Well done, good and faithful..."

It is a Lenten morning, foggy and dank. It is the kind of morning she would love to be out in - when the snow melts and uncovers all those smells and memories from a former season. Our dog is dying. She looks out the window, strangely-tilted head bobbing.

The fog floats over the park, across the ball field, across the places where squirrels tease and possums run. A few geese are returning to the pond, reminding me of Joyce Rupp's poem in Praying our Goodbyes.

We got this strange-looking three-legged dog at the local shelter. "We have to take her - no one else will want her." The plaintive cry of the 11-year-old soon turned into, "We have to take her now - everyone else wants her!"

We pitied her, assuming she would be clumsy and slow and needy.  But taking her to a friend's fenced yard to enjoy some off-leash time, we discovered our error.

She could run like the wind, criss-crossing the grass in a wild dash that inspired her naming..

"She's so graceful!"  "That's amazing!"  Incredulous, we repeated those phrases as we watched, and her formal "Amazing Grace" (awkward to call out in the street while walking her) became, simply, "Mazie."

Her softest-fur-in-the-world caught a thousand tears from scores of griefs. The dying and deaths of parents and sibling and friends. Lost loves. Illness. Change. Bitterness, regrets. All. All. But also unbounding joy. Leaping with pleasure, Snoopy-like in a rapturous dancing twirling of delight. Glee at outrunning us, the last thing we see as she escapes; tongue flapping, eyes maniacally telling us - "you've been had..." All. All.

Mazie was a mystic, able to read us like an open book. She would stand in the middle of the kitchen when there was tension or sadness in our household, and look from one face to the other, communicating understanding, and empathy, and grace, begging us to be our best selves. She measured the spirit of everyone crossing our threshold, and was seldom off the mark.

She was with us for almost our entire marriage, with Jacob through his teen years. In her youth she was strong enough to pull him on his skateboard - until the local police officer put a halt to their neighborhood joyrides..

She would not eat until we sat down and started our meal. Willa remembers a time I was away and Jacob had moved on to college. Willa sat to eat; Mazie stood by her bowl, waiting. Willa finally realized what was holding up the meal... only after she said grace out loud did Mazie begin to eat.

Mazie was the pastoral care minister of our neighborhood. Willa took her to visit flood victims and workers - she always sought out the ones most in need, people we hadn't noticed. Exceedingly patient with tiny children in the park, she allowed them to face their fear and awkwardly pet her. Then, by visible example, she showed them that you don't need all your parts to be whole.

I wrote the opening words of this article a year ago, when we thought Mazie would die within days. She fooled us again, and lived another year, almost to the day of her stroke last March. In that year she taught us much about life, aging, disability, and dying.

Many people assured us that in heaven, Mazie would get her missing leg back. Willa insisted Mazie wouldn't need that leg in heaven any more than she did here, and recalled our late friend Nancy, who " was born with a foreshortened arm. It ended at the elbow with a stump of a hand. She always bristled when some religious person reassured her she would be whole in heaven. She said she already was whole. And she was."

So I quit wishing a new leg for Mazie, and wished instead for her a leg of lamb...

Now she is gone, and we have felt bereft and disconsolate, crying in this huge Lent-like void. We find ourselves bewildered by the sudden change in our 14-year routine. Death and grief do that - strand us in the wilderness for a while. That's where we are - in the "be-wilderness" of loss.

Mazie belonged to so many more people than the three of us. She was not a servant, nor a pet, but a spiritual companion who pointed the way for us..

On an achingly beautiful day in March, we said goodbye for now. Only remnants were left of the snow she loved to bound through, biting at it and burrowing her snoot to search for God knows what.

She was stuck at the end, stepped into a thin place but unable to cross through and out of it - circling, circling, always clockwise, searching for God knows what. She took me back to the deaths of my parents, the times they lay in the thin place and waited, as we kept watch.

We keep watch during Lent, hoping, hoping, every year, that it will turn out all right, that Easter will follow. 
It always does, thank God.

We believe in the resurrection, 
but does that include dogs?.

That, indeed, will be heaven.
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This article was first published in Iowa Connections April 2011
the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa 

Helen Keefe is a research assistant at University of Iowa Hospitals and a member of Spiritual Directors International. Senior warden at St. Luke's Church, Ft. Madison, she and her wife the Rev. Willa Goodfellow live in Coralville, IA with the memory of their mystic wonder dog, Mazie.