The Empty Spot at the End of the Bed

She died on the Tuesday, and by the Thursday nobody in the house was talking about it much any more.

That is usually how it goes. The grown ups had done the hard part, and the week had carried on the way weeks do, and by Thursday there was homework and a leaking tap and somebody's kit to find.

But at half past seven on Thursday night a boy lay in bed and said, to nobody in particular, that his feet were cold.

His mother said she would get another blanket. He said it was not that.

She sat down. And then she understood, because for four years there had been a warm weight across the end of that bed every night of his life, and on Thursday there was not, and a six year old does not have the words for the shape of a missing dog. He has the words for cold feet.

He had also stopped crying in front of people. Somebody at school had said it was only a dog. Somebody else, meaning very kindly, had said at least it was not a person. Both of them were trying to make it smaller so that it would hurt less, and that is not how any of it works, and all it had actually taught him was to do his missing quietly and on his own.

Now, if you are the one sitting on that bed, the rest of this is for you.

You do not have to explain death to him tonight. You do not have to have a position on where she is. There is one thing he needs at half past seven, and it is not information.

He needs somebody to agree that it is the size it actually is.

Let it be the size it is

Do not measure this loss against anybody else's. Not out loud and not in your head. Grief is not a competition and small people are not helped by learning where their sadness ranks. He loved her, she is gone, and the end of his bed is cold. That is the whole of what is in front of you.

And when somebody says it was only a dog, they are not being cruel. They are doing what frightened adults do with sorrow, which is to reach for the smallest possible container. The trouble is that a child hears the sentence and concludes that the thing they are feeling is wrong, and then they take it away and feel it privately, which is exactly where grief goes bad.

So say the opposite, plainly. She was yours, you loved her for four years, and missing her makes complete sense.

And you are allowed to be sad about the dog too. Scripture never once rations sorrow or asks anybody to justify the size of it, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter for grief exactly this ordinary.

Do not explain the mechanics of dying, and do not reach for sleep as the picture. A child told that death is a kind of sleep has been handed a frightening thought at the precise moment they are being asked to close their eyes. Say died. It is a plain word and small people manage plain words far better than gentle ones they have to decode.

And do not say she was taken, or that God needed her. Both of those quietly make God the one who came and removed the warm weight from the end of his bed, and He is not that, and a six year old will believe you.

What God does with a small sorrow

Not one sparrow falls to the ground outside your Father's care.Matthew 10:29

Jesus said that about a bird sold two for a penny in a market, the least valuable creature anybody in that crowd could think of, and He said not one of them hits the ground unnoticed by God.

What Scripture does not spell out is what becomes of the animals, so nobody honest goes past what is written there. But it says clearly that God is not indifferent to a small creature, and it says something else besides.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.Psalm 34:18

And you have a God who is close rather than sympathetic from a distance. Psalm 34 says He is near to the brokenhearted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that nearness a fact in a bedroom on a Thursday, not the right choice of words at half past seven.

Close is the word to give him. Not fixing it. Not explaining it. Near.

And these two go together, which is the thing that will actually let him sleep: he can be very sad and be completely alright at the same time. Sadness is not damage. He does not have to stop missing her to be well, and nobody is going to ask him to.

And you were not required to have an answer for this. His word says the Comforter was given to be with us, and it is the Holy Spirit who sits with a grieving child while a parent simply stays on the edge of the bed with nothing clever to say.