have you heard?

I was jogging alone at one of my favorite local parks and saw from a short distance an older gentleman, someone familiar to me over the last couple of years, but whose name I never remember. What I do remember is that he is supposed to be accompanied by his tiny leashed puppy, a small dog with peaked ears and long silky hair, usually wearing decorative kerchiefs, the kind of dog whose courage far outsizes his little body.

As I approached this gentleman, I slowed down and smiled, asking where his little friend was today. Exactly inside the space of the moment it took for those words to exit my mouth, I knew what the answer would be, and I regretted my impulse to speak. I have made this blunder once before, also at this park in fact, and hoped that I hadn’t just laid pain upon his pain.

He stopped walking and shook his head, looked down, and began to tell me the story. As he gained a bit of traction in recounting the sudden loss, he began shuffling forward again. I matched his pace and listened, and he barely looked toward me as he spoke. Thankfully, at least I believed, he seemed to need to tell this story and much more. I hadn’t blundered too badly.

The way his two-year-old puppy died was a complete and sudden accident. He relayed the series of innocuous turns of events that led to the awful moment. His wife went outside early one morning to check her flower beds on an especially pretty spring daybreak, the pup slipped out with her, though he was not supposed to, got excited by something in the road, was too fast for her to catch, then, you know. It happens to so many of us in so many ways, this spontaneous and permanent slip in routine that changes everything, forever. But still, this gentleman relayed the details slowly, as if they were new and novel. Or maybe an echo.

Then he described an attendant sense of relief, that he and his wife had already been feeling guilty for adopting a puppy when they themselves were at advanced ages, well into their eighties. “Would someone else think that the way we spoil him is ridiculous? Would they treat him well, when we’re gone?” I won’t pretend to know this man so well that I can read him perfectly, but I will say that his voice and temperature were warm and unselfish. Wholly concerned, still, for a creature he loved deeply. And that love was giving way to both grief and relief. Re-grief, as our friend Maribeth taught us to recognize.

The story of his pup’s demise and his relief over not dying himself and thereby abandoning his pup blended seamlessly into some really beautiful perspective about the Vietnam War. I was not at all expecting this. In fact, I walked beside him, already feeling like I had trespassed into painful, intimate territory, expecting he would soon dismiss me and want to be alone. But he pressed on, shuffling steadily and not looking my way too often, kind of shrugging his shoulders now and then, assuring me (or maybe himself) that he had seen much worse in his life. In Vietnam, he was a young man and had grown used to both death and the reporting of it. I had noticed his Vietnam Vet ball cap before, but this was the first time we had ever had a full conversation, certainly the first time he shared anything so personal and heavy.

In Vietnam, he was a commanding officer in a communications unit and was responsible for dozens of young men, responsible, in his words, for getting them home alive. He also had to “walk the walk” and keep up the appearance of pursuing for himself a long career festooned with medals and accomplishments, though in truth he was anxious to get home too. As he reminisced, he was unapologetic about wanting nothing as much as he wanted everyone to live. To go home.

He recounted in detail one particular relationship with a young man whose priorities were different. This “boy” wanted to do something worth remembering, something that would earn him a medal. But as his self-appointed protector, my walking partner did everything he could to keep this boy out of harm’s way. Until one weekend when the C.O. was on leave in Hawaii, the unsupervised boy volunteered for a particularly dangerous radio mission and was shot and killed. My friend returned from leave and asked after people by name, gradually noticing the boy was nowhere to be found. “Have you not heard?” Another soldier relayed the sad news. My friend absorbed it, felt guilty for being away, rationalized that it was not his fault, no matter how it felt, and just grappled with all the opposing emotions. It was also his job to notify the boy’s parents.

This brought him immediately back to the present day, to his wife and their shared loss of this beloved, tiny, brave pup. “Of course it’s not her fault,” he said, “but she has given voice to it, I think she feels like it is.” He was wearing sunglasses beneath his Vietnam Vet ball cap, but I could still see his face contort a bit with pain. He shrugged again, but more gently now. I don’t think he was ever being dismissive of any of the intense emotions in any of these well-connected stories; I think he was just shrugging to grapple with the opposing forces. Pain and loss are everywhere, throughout life, and they come to us in so many ways. There is no escaping it, for any of us.

He returned to the sentence, “Have you not heard?” by recalling how often we say that to each other after reading a bizarre news article or seeing an unbelievable report from around the country, around the world. This man, ahead of me in experience by at least thirty years, who has been to war and raised a family and loved people and animals much longer than I have, and therefore lost more than I have lost so far, was admitting he is still susceptible to getting caught in the wrong kind of news propagation. “I just don’t want to do that anymore,” he said. “Have you heard, have you heard, have you heard? Just always sharing bad news.” Shaking his head again.

“Well, I’m sorry for keeping you. Thank you for listening. God does work in mysterious ways.”

I was nearly stunned into complete silence, which you might guess is rare for me. God definitely works in mysterious ways. These were stories he may have needed to tell, but they carried lessons I needed to relearn. I have needed this nudge, this deepening, this perspective, and I stayed by his side just long enough to assemble a sloppy Thank you for sharing that. And yes, it’s so beautiful, God does work in mysterious ways. We will all miss seeing him here, will be thinking of you and your wife. I offered this incredible person barely the basics. But my heart was in my throat, and everything I might have said paled in comparison to the richness of his parallel stories of loss and love. We pieced together a pleasant goodbye, and I jogged away, uphill. An hour later, we crossed paths again at the post office, but we only nodded and smiled.

This happened more than two weeks ago, and I have replayed it in my head every single day since. There was a freshness in this man’s Vietnam memories and some truly vivid pain when he talked about his pup, of what awful things might have happened had this one awful thing not. He glowed with humility and gratefulness for the way God orchestrates things, the way He graces us, and he is so right.

And so I will say to you as he said to me: “I’m sorry for keeping you. Thank you for listening.”

XOXO