We buried her under an oak tree, but I can’t get to the mailbox now without seeing her crushed there on the driveway near the cherry trees. Our sweet little black and white dog, Mercy. It happened a week ago and my heart still aches.
It was the afternoon of Lacy’s graduation. We picked cherries along our driveway with the boys running around. The dogs running around. Everyone eating cherries and telling stories until my dad towed a utility trailer down our drive. Right in front of us the trailer ran over Mercy. This little dog we named Mercy because six years ago she replaced another little dog run over in our driveway. A rat terrier puppy named Belle.
“I’m done with little dogs,” I said to Scott after we buried Mercy with the sun hard upon our shoulders. The boys’ tears soaking my jeans. Soaking my T-shirt. Soaking my soul. “I can’t take losing these little dogs any longer,” I said.
“Your dad was driving slow,” Scott answered.
Slow. That’s how I’m healing… Slow.
I see Dad in dusty cowboy boots kneeling in the gravel keeping his hand gently on Mercy until she died.
I stood behind a cherry tree with the boys begging them, “Close your eyes. Don’t look. Please don’t look.”
I didn’t want them to see her dying. Didn’t want them to share in such sorrow. But at four years old, G2 already knows how to share. At Mercy’s grave, he breaks into song. “Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.” G2 sings it again and again and the wobbly words wrap my spirit like a bandage.
Later that evening at Lacy’s graduation, I can hardly contain myself. Life is a lance going right through me. Lacy growing up. Mercy in the ground.
The memory of losing Mercy unfolds every time I walk past our cherry trees. And yet, I remind myself it was Mercy. Not G2 with his wispy blond hair and wide blue eyes telling me every day now to watch out for moving vehicles.
“They’ll run over you and you’ll die,” says G2, holding tightly to my hand. Before Mercy, G2 wouldn’t listen to me about the danger of automobiles. He ran out in the street without a care. Now he’s the traffic cop of the family. Perhaps Mercy’s death has saved G2. Or one of our other sons from such an accident. I don’t know. But searching to make sense of the pain, I know this: God has used death before to bring life. Jesus crushed on a cross… the cost of mercy.  

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” Hebrews 12:2.