I Have Been Here Before
The room smelled like disinfectant. Blood on the floor. The room was freezing, and the only place to sit was a bench against the wall. Dogs barked somewhere in another room.
We took our dog in because we thought she had a UTI. The antibiotics weren't working, and her stomach was bloating. We figured the emergency vet would sort it out and send us home.
The vet took her back, returned, and told us there were four pounds of infection in her uterus. She needed surgery that night. They took her again to prep and draw blood. When the door opened the next time, the vet's voice had changed. The bloodwork showed cancer. She paused, then shared her philosophy on animal life. An animal should have a good life, and if the road ahead held only struggle and pain, continuing was not mercy.
Misty pulled out her phone and started asking questions about every medical term, every option on the table. She leaned in the way she always does when the world is falling apart and her only defense is information.
I sat with my arms crossed. I was somewhere else entirely because I had been in this room before.
Five years earlier, we had walked into a dark room to see a specialist. We already knew our daughter had Down syndrome. It had taken us weeks to process that before this appointment. The ultrasound was not the kind you see in the happy photos. You could see everything. Heartbeat, organs, eyes, blood vessels. The nurse finished and left the room, and we just sat there. Fifteen minutes, nobody talking.
The door opened. Before the doctor even turned around, she said, “We need to talk.”
I froze. Not from fear. I wanted to leave.
Misty pulled out her phone to take notes because the doctor started using medical terms longer than my last name. She asked what every word meant. After 20 minutes, she asked the question underneath all the others: what kind of life would our daughter have?
The doctor said if she made it to term, she would be severely disabled and would probably not live past ten. Then she added that she did not have a crystal ball, but our daughter probably would not make it to term at all.
Leaving that appointment felt like a funeral. We were just waiting. Three weeks later, her heart stopped beating. We named her Sophia-Grace because we wanted wisdom and grace through the death of our child.
Sitting in that vet emergency room, I realized the scene was identical. Misty leaning in, asking every question. Me sitting still, arms crossed, already preparing for what was coming. The same posture. The same roles. The same slow recognition that we were not bringing someone home that night.
So I did what I’ve learned to do with grief. I ran through tomorrow. I wake up, put my foot on the ground, and she’s not there. I make breakfast and nobody’s staring at me, hoping I drop something. I walk through the house, and 75 pounds of her won’t be following me. No barking at other dogs or our cats. Just quiet. Twelve years of presence, gone.
Grief is hard. But running from it is harder because when you run from the pain, you run from the healing, too.
I know because I almost ran. Driving home from one of those specialist appointments five years ago, I hit a red light and slammed both hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t plan what came out of my mouth: “Take this cup from me.” It wasn’t until after I said it that I realized I was praying the same prayer Jesus prayed in the garden. Grief took me somewhere I never would have chosen, and God was already there.
Jesus knew this. When Lazarus died in John 11, he didn’t tell Mary and Martha not to worry. He didn’t say, “Watch this.” He sat in their pain. He wept. He did not call grief a mistake. He treated it as something to be entered, not avoided.
Here is what I cannot stop thinking about. Ten days before we put our dog down, our community showed up in a way we didn’t expect. We held a sale to raise money for our adoption, and people gave so much our house and garage were full. Almost $7,000. Ten days of gratitude, then loss. That’s the whiplash of following God in a broken world.
Ps. 126:5-6 says, “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them” (NIV). I always read that as a sequence. First you cry, then you rejoice. But I’m learning it doesn’t work like that. It’s an overlap. You sow while you weep. The tears and the seed hit the same ground.
As we enter the adoption process, we first have our home study. After that, we get placed on a list, waiting for a child to come into our life. It could be two weeks. It could be a year. The grief is not abstract for us. It has a name. Sophia-Grace. It has a bench in a cold room. It has a house that is too quiet.
But so does the sowing. It has a garage full of generosity from people who believe the next chapter is coming. It has a future we cannot see yet but have chosen to plant toward.
The weeping is real. The harvest is coming. And we are learning that they do not take turns. They share the same ground.
If you are in that room right now, do not rush past it. Stay. Grief is not where God leaves you. It is where he meets you.
