My earliest memory of a pet dying was my speckled hen who lived in the coop behind our old house. There have been so many since then…the first bottle lamb, Chucky, when his stomach grew fat and swollen; Hip-Hop Peep. the one-legged chicken we buried under the pine trees with a wooden grave marker that has long since been removed; Emily, my sheep of nearly ten years who we split open in an emergent C-section even as she took her last breaths; Kitten, my tiny little lamb who I found stretched out in her pen one morning with a coyote bite to her neck; each of my dear, soft chinchillas; and every market lamb I auctioned off at the May Fair to be butchered. I am certain I cried for them all.
But now I wake up in the middle of the night to soft, wheezing breaths coming from the box near the kitchen stove, interrupted only by dim, painful cries. It was not so much a baa for help as it was gasping inhalations…suffocation.
Jon had predicted the little lamb would die tonight. Though her twisted legs had seemed to grow stronger since we had begun to bottle feed her and train her how to walk, she had spent the day turning limp as a ragdoll, and by afternoon you could feel the life slowly seeping out of her.
I climbed down the ladder from my lofted bed and picked up this tiny lamb in my arms, cuddling her gently against my chest as I had done a thousand times in the week before. But this time she did not nuzzle me back. This time the life was nearly gone from her limbs, and I could feel her convulsing in a sudden desperate need for oxygen.
“Dad….” I called down the hallway as I stroked the little lamb’s soft head, “ Dad, she’s hurting. What should I do?” He too gets up, joining me in the kitchen. We beckon Jon also, inquiring if perhaps it is time to put her out of her misery. But before the gun has been retrieved I feel the last gasping breaths come…softly, slowly, strength dispersing from her as easily as air leaking from an inner tube of a bike tire, and soon her small head too is limp and resting gently on my arm.
No breath. No pulse. No heartbeat. No more suffering.
And so we three stand in the kitchen, me with a dead lamb in my arms, and of course the tears come…because I am a crier. I feel silly…ridiculous really, because this is just another lamb.
I have seen many people dying and die over the last year, one even as I held her hand in mine own. I remember very specific details about each one. How the first one died at 13:21. How the husband of the second one wailed and called his beloved nickname for her over and over again, violently in the end, in an effort to get her back. The third, how his hair reminded me of Einstein’s and how his wife broke down in an anxiety attack just watching him fade away. The fourth, not much older than myself, strangled himself with his own seatbelt under the oppression of drugs. And the list goes on…
Death is a part of life. Just as much as birth is. And yet it is something that no matter how many times I see it, I will never be able to accept it, because as Dad tells me, “You just love life too much…”
And this is true. I don’t think that I will ever stop finding pain in death…at least I pray that I do not…whether it be in animal or human; timed rightly or wrongly; of someone dear or a complete stranger; even as I go to medical school within the year or perhaps 30 years down the road into my practice…I pray that death still stings, because when it stops stinging (in this world at least) I have forgotten the beauty of life.
So I lay here now thinking that death is not beautiful. If life is beautiful and death is the absence of life than how can it be? How can it be when it is takes the life of a 15 year old kid with a bullet from his peer’s gun? How can it be when it steals the dreams for the future of the cancer patient? How can it be when it leaves behind the family in pain and agony despite a long-lived life? How can it be beautiful?
Except…except, as I hold this tiny lamb in my arms, I am suddenly reminded of the death of another suffocating lamb. Not the lamb that I gently rock now, standing in the kitchen in my pajamas, but the Lamb that holds me. The one that was nailed to boards, a crown of thorns placed on His head. Who was mocked and laughed at…as also He suffocated…as He also gulped for air with soft painful pleas for mercy. I can feel His deep painful breaths as I felt my own lamb’s in my arms…His rib cage expanding back and forth, sputtering coughs as His lungs pleaded for oxygen, the painful piteous cries that also must have escaped His lips. And this was beautiful. Perhaps not beautiful in the moment. But beautiful in its result.
Beautiful because for once death did not lead to the absence of life. But the death of this suffocating lamb (The Lamb of God) lead to the abundance of life.
In that moment, His death meant our sins were abolished. It meant we were freed from having to suffocate on that cross ourselves…though we deserved it with every ounce of being. And that is beautiful!
Beauty in the suffocating Lamb of God.
“The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” – John 1:29
“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body, but made alive in the Spirit.” – 1 Peter 3:18
God is good!
2/12/2018
Proverbs 19:21 