Sugar Always Helps
On grief, gratitude, and heart of kindness
The dog went crazy, barking to let everyone inside the house know we had activity outside the house. We hadn’t expected anyone to come over, so I figured we got a package. It didn’t seem like I needed to abandon my workout and prepare for a guest. The barking died down quickly, I returned my earbud, and continued to sweat, perched atop the exercise bike.
When my time ran out, I made my way through the kitchen on a quest for a towel and a dry set of clothes. I noticed a box on the center island. The bubble-gum shade called me over. Across the top, in black sharpie, read, “Sugar always helps!”
“Who sent this delicious looking box of cookies?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t a card.”
The dog went crazy, barking to let everyone inside the house know we had activity outside the house. We hadn’t expected anyone to come over, so I figured we got a package. It didn’t seem like I needed to abandon my workout and prepare for a guest. The barking died down quickly, I returned my earbud, and continued to sweat, perched atop the exercise bike.
When my time ran out, I made my way through the kitchen on a quest for a towel and a dry set of clothes. I noticed a box on the center island. The bubble-gum shade called me over. Across the top, in black sharpie, read, “Sugar always helps!”
“Who sent this delicious looking box of cookies?”
“I don’t know. There wasn’t a card.”
Totty
Two weeks ago we lost one of our dogs, unexpectedly. We recently rescued this English Bulldog, and she stole our hearts. She was the most ridiculous dog I have ever met in my life. Nobody could look at that dog and hold back a smile. She grunted, snorted, pranced, and played tug to the death every time.
If you ever lit a fountain on the Fourth of July, you have an idea of the Totty experience. She was loud, demanded attention, sparkled, delighted everyone, and then left before any of us wanted it to end.
My wife joked that I looked happier looking at this dog than I did when my kids were born. She’s probably right. Birth is stressful (even for dads). But plunging my fingertips into the massive skinfolds on Totty’s forehead? Pure joy.
I’ve lived with dogs my whole life. I think maybe I had a span of eighteen months after moving to DC when we didn’t have a dog. That was it. But I never had my dog. Our dogs always gravitated towards my mom or my wife. They liked me and all (loved me and all), but I wasn’t their person.
I was Totty’s person.
Lots of things make her passing tragic. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. She was supposed to be with us for a long time, snuggling with our boys at night (too much snorting for our bed), demanding that we throw a ball for her but protecting said ball (making it impossible), picking up sticks twice bigger than herself, somehow getting her jaws around a basketball to turn it into a chew toy. The whiplash of having all of those moments of joy to have a young dog die makes it hard. But having a dog pick me as her person and having it taken away after just a few months feels especially awful.
The floodgates opened
The next day, between pouring her coffee and taking her first sip, she mentioned to me, “Our friends sent us a Door Dash gift card.” Another friend sent us a gift card to our favorite bakery. We got pretty flowers.
A few days later, I noticed another package on the doorstep simply addressed to “The Karnes Family.” I leaned over to pick it up, and it didn’t budge. Surprised by the heft, I bent my knees to lift it off our welcome mat. When I cut it open and peered inside, I found four DIY stepping stones. I closed my eyes with somber appreciation.
A week later, the kids had tossed another empty box onto the living room floor. “What was in that?” I asked. They pointed to the counter. A big red box picturing a ceramic dog huddled inside of an angel wing sat there.
I’m still torn up about it, and I will be for a long time. But in the horrible and heavy sadness, I can recognize and appreciate the amazing friends who showed up for us, and all of the ways they did.
My in-laws beat me home from the vet, greeting me with a hearty “We’re here to help.” And they did. They helped us dig a new home in the back yard, hugged us tight, and took the kids for burgers so my wife and I could sit vigil at Totty’s grave.
The outpouring of text messages and social media condolences started as soon as we shared the tragedy publicly. People get it. Dogs hold a special place in our hearts, and when we lose them it’s incredibly difficult. More than one person told me they often take the passing of a dog with more difficulty than the passing of a person.
And grief looks different to everyone. My kid’s therapist did a project with him where she gave him an empty glass heart and a full array of bottles with colored sand. He could fill the heart with as much of each emotion as he felt. He filled it with sadness, dismay, happiness, shock, normalcy, and a “little less sad.” Having so many different emotions existing at the same time strikes me as such an honest display, and I’m grateful she gave him the opportunity to turn them into something tangible that I could see.
Nearly two weeks on, and I’m still getting phone calls from friends to see how we’re doing. Not great. The answer is not great. I’m sure they expect to get that answer. It’s the only reason they were calling in the first place.
A few years ago, I read The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. He clearly had kindness on his mind, and his words have stuck with me from the moment I read them:
“For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?”
Everything our community has done (and continues to do!) has been beneficial, unrequired, and unnecessary. And that’s why it touches me so much.
Here’s what you can do
I’m both not surprised and surprised. I’m not surprised by our community’s desire to help. We’ve been through scarier and more life-altering challenges before, and not too long ago at that, and we got an incredible amount of support then as well. When I got a cancer diagnosis, we had specific challenges. We needed help driving the kids around, I couldn’t cook (or do much else) while I recovered from surgery, the house needed a few repairs I couldn’t do with one arm.
This time, I’m surprised by how quickly people reached out and how thoughtfully they gave to us. It reaffirms something I learned during my cancer journey: answering the question “What can I do to help?” is so hard.
It’s an earnest question, and it shows care and concern. It’s a hard question to answer because most of the time I don’t know. I’m a little better with that question now, but only because people who went through tough times before told me what to ask for. Or I got ideas from people who skipped asking and went straight to action.
Something as simple as a Door Dash gift card spared us the energy we would normally put into making dinner and allowed us to direct it towards our grief and comforting each other.
Having someone take the kids out of the house gave the house a peacefulness that opened space to reflect without any distractions. Kids bring a playful energy that’s heartwarming, too. But space is a nice balance. This is now my go-to when my friends go through challenging times.
Phone calls from out of the blue gave me an opportunity to hear a friendly voice and let some emotion go. Opening a thoughtful card in the mail beats opening an electric bill.
We just got this Christmas ornament. We named our dog Totty in part because she looked like a little tater tot. It’s been two weeks, and I’m reminded, nearly every day, about how lucky we are to have an incredible group of friends and family.
Gratitude
So now I’m here, wallowing in sadness and full of gratitude. And I’m going to hold both of them close to me for a while. I’m also going to continue taking moments to express that gratitude. Before I wrote my book, I intuitively knew something I happily confirmed while writing it: Gratitude is an upward spiral. The single act of showing gratitude fills both sides with love and connection.
I’m currently feeling so much gratitude because our people surrounded us with so much kindness. We didn’t need a Christmas ornament, flowers, phone calls, text messages, a trip to the bakery, dinner, or artwork for a grave. And that’s why it means so much.
“…kindness begins where necessity ends.” - Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway.
P.S. I shared this quote from Aaron Freeman when our last dog passed away, and it’s good enough to share again:
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
-Aaron Freeman
P.S. My audiobook, No Silver Bullets, is now live on audible. Get it here.
OR You could read it the good, old fashioned way. Order here.
Fantastic note, Troy! And I'm very sorry to hear about Totty's passing. It sounds like you're surrounded by some very loving and thoughtful friends and family.