Zoe Update, Jan. 18, 2014

Dear Family and Friends, For your loving support and kind and encouraging words, I thank you all. Although I would like to respond to each email, call, or note individually, so many have been coming that I will write a circular memo, and post it as a blog on our website. On the day that cancer was diagnosed, the vet said that Zoe could live a couple of weeks to two months, but yesterday she noted that such is merely approximate. There were times yesterday, as we walked perhaps our favorite place for walks—Black Eagle Memorial Island in the Missouri River—that I wondered if Zoe could live longer than two months. But then came a walk late in the afternoon in Castner Park in Belt. Without giving disturbing details, suffice it to note that her stool and vomit showed a great deal of serious illness in her. Although Zoe drinks water, she is not eating, or rarely and very sparingly. What she eats, gets regurgitated. Given her failing condition, death could come very soon. Whether or not she is in pain, I do not know. Her abdomen is swollen. Given evidence, I think that cancer has strongly invaded her digestive tract. For the first time in Zoe’s life, I feel her shoulder bones and spine right beneath her beautiful black coat. This energetic, strong, massive Labrador is withering away. There is an issue about the dying of one’s dog (or cat) that needs to be addressed. As someone said to me recently, “She is only a dog, not a human being.” And that is true. Zoe is “only a dog.” But we are only human beings, and not dogs, and surely not gods. The larger issue here is one which needs to be understood: The nature of one’s love is not determined so much by who or what one loves, but by the one loving. A good human being loves another because it is good to do. As Thomas Aquinas did not tire of writing, “God loves us, not because we are good, but because He is.” Divine love is not thwarted by a lack of response in the ones He loves. My love for Zoe is not just “for a dog;” my love for her is an outflow and an expression of my love of God, of beauty, of goodness. Zoe is a creature of God, and in loving her, I am loving the Creator, or goodness itself. By faith, I see all of reality manifesting the Creator. In short, love is in the lover, not necessarily in the beloved. Hence, when you love, you love, despite the weaknesses or flaws in the one you love. My love for Zoe is more alive, more intense, more genuine, than my love for many human beings. Why?  Because I have long chosen to love her as well as I possibly can. That she is a dog, or my dog, is not essential to this choice. Love is its own reason and cause. As we all know, when you love another, you suffer with and for the one you love. That is an essential part of love: to suffer with and for. One can wish that it were not so, but it is, given our creaturely, vulnerable existence. Truly to love another is to accept their sufferings as one’s own, to bear with them, to undergo what they undergo, to the extent possible. That choice does not depend on one’s species or character, but on love itself. We are all experiencing, in one degree or another, what I am now going through with Zoe, because all of us are vulnerable creatures in various stages of dying. That may sound blunt, but it is true. When someone we love is near death, the whole process is condensed, and especially poignant. In choosing to love another—human or animal—we are accepting the process of sharing in their living, and in their dying. To refuse not to suffer with and for another, including in their “passing away,” is to refuse to love. Being willing to experience their dying with them is an essential part of love, a price of love, if you will. And remembering them kindly and lovingly, after they die, is a necessary part of love. To choose to forget, to “move on,” to let love die because the beloved died, is a betrayal of love. Genuine love is forever, or it is not genuine. Love transcends death, and “love is stronger than death.” To love another is already to share in the process of passing over from life in this world, limited and fleeting, to life itself, to that which some of us call “God.”  To love is to share in God’s love for the creature, and it is to share in God’s process of immortalizing his creatures. To love is truly to live: to live in Life that knows no death. Zoe means Life. It is the Greek word for true life, divine Life in us, and not mere passing, biological life (bios). When I named my dog, “Zoe,” I did so to honor the One who is Life. Why? Because I experienced divine Life in her. My beloved Zoe is dying here, and will have life only in and because God is Life. In the words of Christ to us creatures, “Because I live, you will live also.”  That is an ultimate divine promise meant for each and for all; it is true because Truth speaks it. In deathless Life I place my trust, even as I see one I love so dearly being overcome by death here. That is the choice of faith and hope, and above all, the choice of love: “to love with a love that is more than love.”  To love truly is to share in the Life of God, whether we know it or not, “believe in God” or not. Some have “faith” without love. The true friend of God, known or unknown to that man or woman, is the one who chooses to love truly, even unto death. For “God is love, and he who loves lives in God, and God in him.”