I had gone to the gym and was in the middle of a class when I got a call from Lee that Grace's kitty, Ferdinand, had been hit by a car and was dead. I could hear her literally screaming in the background while I was talking to him. Now anyone who knows me at all knows how much I love animals and how tender-hearted I am, so selfishly this was bad news for me too; this is the first time I've ever had a pet randomly die versus old age. I bawled all the way home, thinking about how we had just been outside playing with him. (Just a few hours before the girls and I had gone on a walk and Ferdinand had walked along with us. After we turned around to come home Grace carried him like a baby down the street while he purred. We had laughed at him and his sister play-fighting and ambushing each other around the swingset.)
But mostly I cried because my baby was sad. This was really the first true tragic loss in her short little life where she was able to grasp the finality and awfulness of it. And there wasn't a dang thing I could do to "fix" it for her. It stunk, it was done, and she was heart-broken. As a parent, I find this to be maybe the hardest thing -- helping my child to come to grips with the really terrible things about life that are totally out of our control. My prayer was just that Lee and I would know how to best handle all this, being loving while helping teach her some serious life lessons. Once again, while God definitely gave us wisdom, it was Grace that taught ME.
We agreed it was important to let her see his little body, which thank God was possible since he was not too badly busted up. She looked at him and remarked about his "broken head" (there was some bleeding) and put her hands to her face and said "Oh, my poor little kitty!" She cried hard for a few seconds and then, tears rolling down her little cheeks, she looked at Lee and I and spoke with complete sincerity and hope.
She said "Maybe God will come down and scoop my kitty up with his arms and take him up (pointing skyward) and hold him and then when I grow up to be a very old lady and I go to heaven he will be there and I will be happy. Maybe God will take care of him for me."
Now I am paraphrasing, but this is VERY close to verbatim what she said. My four year old, in the midst of dealing with the most horrible thing that has ever happened to her in her eyes, cried for a minute and then TURNED TO GOD FOR COMFORT. Forget whether it's doctrinely accurate to talk about animals in heaven. To me, that's completely inconsequential. My baby knew that even though it hurt, God was there for her. That is mind-blowingly amazing to me.
The rest of the night was hard. The worst part of all this was that the person that ran over Ferdinand SPED up and did it ON PURPOSE, and Grace is aware of this. (What kind of psycho purposes to kill people's pets?) She kept saying over and over "That person did a very ugly thing to my kitty. He was my kittty!" So we tried to help her deal with her anger, while dealing with our own.
Ferdinand's sister kitty, Lucy, kept wandering aimlessly around looking for him. Grace kept reminding Lee and I that she would be lonely without him.
We drove out to Lee's parents place and walked out and buried him out on their land. Grace helped wrap him in a towel and patted him one last time and asked her Daddy to pray. We gathered rocks to stack on his little grave and to mark it so she could come back and "talk to him sometime". She was worried that he would be hungry out there by himself (this was the hardest vein of questioning to answer - concerning the actual death process and what it meant). All the way home, she sang beautiful little songs that she made up about Ferdinand and happy things she remembered about him.
And every so often she would say these two things:
"It's just no fun to have a very dead kitty." and
"Even though he's dead, I still love him very much."
Well said, my precious little Grace. We love you very much, and I think you are a VERY brave, VERY special little girl.
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