On Losing a Puppy, Seeing a Planet, and the Peculiar Nature of Winter Rain

Rain by Vincent Van Gogh

I took out the Christmas trash last night, the bin overflowing, the recycling container filled to the brim. Evidence of many blessings. The rain made the night even darker, the pavement jet black, the streetlights straining and glaring. I parked the trash cans at the top of the drive, walked in under the porch, and then stood there for a moment before going inside, listening.

The rain sounds different in the winter. In the spring the rain is light and airy, and it bounces off the softening ground like a blessing that keeps coming down. Summer rain is lazy and warm and plummets in massive, bulbous drops, warm as the sun, in waves that are nearly something you can swim in. Autumn rain is thin and tinny and chill, burying things with its skinny fingers, whispering reassuring promises that the coming winter will not be the end.

But rain in the winter is dreary and full of sighs. It’s cold and glistening and feels somehow final. A gray winter sky is impenetrable, hangs so low you might bump your head.

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We had one clear night this week and it was the night before I took out the trash. This clear night was Christmas night, and Leo and I weaved our way through the unwrapped clutter, out onto the porch to search the sky with his new telescope. We peered at the moon through the trees, oohing and aahing at its craters, its shadows and valleys. At one point we saw the small dot of a satellite pace its way across the moon’s face.

We spotted another bright light in the sky, something that looked like a star, and after a bit of investigation we learned that it was Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, more than twice as large as all the other planets combined. That tiny little speck. It was hard to get into view with the telescope—each subtle shift we made sent our sight a million miles one way, then a million miles the other.

But finally, there it was: Jupiter. We could even see four of its moons, smaller beacons in a straight line out either side. We took turns taking it in, the awe clear in the cold around us. How far we want to see! How ambitious our vision! Through such an incredible distance the past comes to us, and we rarely even look up.

“That’s Jupiter?!” Leo kept saying, amazed, incredulous.

Within a minute or two this incredible planet had drifted out of the lens. We let it go.

A wave of clouds moved in again and swallowed up the planet, absorbed the moon, and we retreated inside, promising each other more discoveries were coming on clearer nights.

A dreary winter rain began to fall.

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If you were reading along last week, you’ll know that our lovely Winnie dog was expecting, and we found out that there’s one lone pup in there. A singleton puppy, when a mother dog has only one puppy in its litter, is rare, and its arrival is littered with possible complications. It seems the most common one is the need for mama to have a C-section, as a lone puppy takes in all the nutrients meant for a larger litter, growing too big too fast.

This is what happened with Winnie and her puppy. She was five days overdue, so we took her in for an exam, and the puppy was far too big for her to deliver regularly. She was scheduled for a C-section later that day, and Maile and I left, waited for the call that she was okay and the pup was okay and all was well.

It’s hard when you know that choices you’ve made have put your pet in potential danger. We sat quietly in the diner and ate breakfast and talked about our hopes for Winnie and her puppy. We planned on keeping the new pup—Winnie could use a companion these days. If it was a boy he’d be George, after George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life. A girl would be Zuzu.

Outside, the dreary winter rain continued to fall in a fine mist, like clouds come down.

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This week, the days between Christmas and New Year’s have been moving deliciously slow. Neighborhood kids are in and out of the house, Lucy and Cade are home from college, Abra and Sam have a light practice schedule, and we finally finished watching Ted Lasso. I’m cruising through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, and last night Maile announced that she had finished reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The ghosts of Christmases past and present are all around us.

It is a year of loss winding down, and a year of hope ahead.

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The vet called a few hours after Winnie’s surgery. She was recovering well.

Her puppy, however, had not made it.

The transition from womb to world had been too much for it, and they had never been able to help it establish its breath or heartbeat on its own.

Would we like to go into the vet’s office to see Winnie once she was out from under anesthesia? Would we like to bring the puppy home to bury it?

Losing a puppy in this way, a puppy we never even held while it was alive, is a strange sort of sadness. It’s not the deep, wracking grief of losing a close, human friend. It’s not the heavy, breathless grief of a miscarriage. For me it is like a dull ache, a sadness for all this beauty and loveliness that could have been.

After visiting Winnie, who would be spending the night at the vet’s, we took George home. He was wrapped in a green hand towel and placed inside a small, cardboard syringe box. His paw prints were the size of dimes. His coat was the same exact color as Winnie’s.

At night, once everyone was home, I went out and dug a hole in the dark December ground. Our little family huddled around it, and we placed the box holding George in it, and I pulled the dirt back into the hole. We said a prayer, because these little animals, even the ones we never get to hold, can take up such a place in us. We thanked God for our feelings, even sadness, especially sadness, and we thanked God for the beautiful hope of life, which in this case was cut short. We thanked God for giving us George, even for only a day.

Fittingly enough, just as we finished and turned to walk back up to the house, a winter rain began to fall.

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And life goes on, doesn’t it?

I took apart the whelping box, the one we had constructed in the laundry where we had imagined Winnie snuggling with her pups. How quickly things can go back to how they were, at least on the surface. How hard we try to eliminate anything that will remind us of the sadness.

Outside, the winter rain has stopped and a slight breeze rustles the last of the still-hanging sycamore leaves. I can hear the kids chattering in the kitchen, and pots and pans bang together as Maile makes dinner. The dryer drones on and on behind me. 2024 lies ahead, and despite all the losses of this year, I am hopeful. Even optimistic. As Michael Singer writes in The Surrender Experiment, “I am so grateful that surrender had taught me to willingly participate in life's dance with a quiet mind and an open heart.” I feel that now. I am surrendered to whatever God and 2024 decide to bring.

A candle burns on my desk, a tiny gift from a friend. The scent of it, for some reason, reminds me of summer.