Blessed are...

The Summer of Healing I Did Not Plan

Dear friends,

I wanted to come to my Substack community and talk about compounded grief, and about this season that I am still deeply inside. This season of our lives is not at all as we had planned, and for the first time this week, I can see a little light.

I am a public school teacher teacher, and one of the great beauties of teaching is that summer gives me about six weeks to reorganize and re-harbor my life before the proverbial gales of trying to educate 150 teens along with navigating my life hits once again with a new school year. Summertime is my opportunity to dream about what the next year might hold for me and my family, to prioritize, to evaluate, and to reignite all the enthusiasm I have for teaching and life and relationships and faith and community.

This summer was supposed to be that. I had declared that this would be my Summer of Healing. The school year had left me feeling raw. I was still incredibly lonely without Delilah under my apron in the garden. I thought it would be a time of healing the past so I could move more freely into the future.

As I do every summer, I created a ridiculous list of tasks. These were all intentional to foster some center of gravity in my life. I planned to write a whole collection of Substack articles for the coming year. I had a list of 46, timeless pieces that I would draft throughout the summer and then refine as the year went on. I challenged myself to Bible journal every day and really lean into what God had for me. I was going to have the best garden ever because it was already becoming this beautiful oasis of food and provision. The lettuce and bok choy would need to be picked soon. The potatoes would be ready for harvest fourth of July potato salad. I also had plans add to our wilding area. I had planned to do some pressure canning of wonderful recipes as convenience meals to bless my future self when the days became busy and no one felt like cooking. And, of course what would a summer be without some house tasks, so I would reorganize two closets and paint the office.

None of it happened.

The minute we came home from Massachusetts, I got the flu. I was down for nearly two weeks trying to recover. At the same time, our youngest dog, Bruce, appeared to have injured the doggy version of his ACL. We were advised to keep him quiet and give him strong pain medication, so Brucie and I spent our days together in bed, both of us recuperating.

My sister-in-love had to take over my mom’s eightieth birthday celebration because I was not up to doing anything. She did a much better job than I ever would have. Thank you, Melissa.

We took Bruce to Florida with us because something still seemed seriously wrong. We did not realize what was happening until we returned home and it became apparent that his injured leg was not really the problem at all. The doctors could not figure out exactly what was happening, but some kind of infection or disease had taken hold in his lungs.

We had them run test after test, searching for an answer that might give us a way to save him. They did not know whether it was bacterial, fungal, or cancer. They tried powerful antibiotics, but they did nothing. The fungal test would take ten days to return, but they were hesitant to star antifungal treatments because he would get much worse before he would get better. And then of course, the bombshell came that the nodules in his lungs showing up on scans might have been cancer, but he was already terribly weak, and the CHOP protocols would not be an option.

We watched him slipping away over seventy-two hours. On July 3, we had to put him down. He was four years old. George crawled into the oxygen chamber and held him. I rested my head against Bruce’s legs, and we sobbed as we watched the light dim from his eyes through every tortured breath he was trying to take.

We had only just begun learning how to live with the loss of Delilah, my forever dog. Four months later, we lost our sweet baby, Brucie. George and I were sent tumbling into a place that felt gross and uncomfortable and hollow, as though vacancy had opened inside both of our hearts.

We spent the next week mourning all sorts of things. We mourned the second loss of an animal companion in four months. We mourned the financial strain of veterinary hospital bills. We mourned the quietness of our house. (Not long ago, it held six dogs and two cats before my middle son and daughter-in-law move to an apartment with their little menagerie. Now we only have our two dogs, Samson and Daisy.) We carried the guilt of wondering whether we had missed signs, even though seeing them earlier most likely would not have changed the ending. We carried the horror of wondering whether there was a fungal infestation in our ground that could infect our other two dogs, and not knowing where in the world it might be. We walked around the house in silence, occasionally holding onto one another through quiet sobs while Daisy and Samson leaned against our legs.

Yes, this was a summer of healing. But I so often forget that this life is filled with trials and tribulations, and healing is only needed because something has gone awry. I had planned for celebratory healing. I had not planned for an imperfect, messy, painful healing that would leave us with more questions than answers.

It has only been during the last few days that I have felt as though I might have enough emotional strength to accomplish anything. Since I have only five days left before I return to school, I had to sit down and prioritize what I could realistically do instead of staring at the enormous laundry list of what I once imagined I would do.

For whatever reason with all of the tasks that felt pressing, I decided that the most beneficial thing would be to plan the creative Bible journaling study I am leading at church this fall. For some time, I had known that I wanted to study the Beatitudes. I have felt a need to return to the Sermon on the Mount and spend this school year in a kind of self-examination: Is my life reflecting the life Jesus asked me to live?

As I began creating each lesson, I found that God kept asking me to go deeper. It began with the first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I do not know that I could have felt more poor in spirit than I did at that moment. I felt emotionally bankrupt. Here I was trying to prepare lessons that would help a group of women connect with God and with one another, and I was living the words in real time.

Additionally, there seemed to be something almost contradictory in the promise that the kingdom of heaven could be at hand because, in that moment, I felt as though I were living in the kingdom of hell. But I believed that what Jesus said was true. He did not say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for someday they will see the kingdom of heaven.” He said theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom is now.

The verse that follows says: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” I was struggling with how to get out of my grief. I was also struggling to allow the Holy Spirit and the people around us to comfort us within it. We went to church the Sunday after Bruce died. I had posted on social media that we had been forced to put him down, but other than that, we had not really talked to anyone about it. When we walked into the church building, our people immediately came toward us. They surrounded us with love and hugs and comfort and condolences. They did not minimize our loss because Bruce was an animal. They simply recognized that we were grieving someone we loved.

We are still wrestling with the rest of the Beatitudes. There is a certain amount of humility in not knowing the answers and discovering that things do not always turn out the way we desperately want them to. I am desperately struggling in hungering after righteousness, trying so hard to do the right thing, and finding that an emptiness remains anyway. I am certain that the confusion and frustration in knowing that we had to be merciful to our sweet boy and say goodbye will remain for quite a while. There is still anguish that I cannot see where God is working in the midst of any of it. And instead of being a peacemaker, sometimes I want to shake my fist at this life that can be so beautiful and so painful.

But it was the final Beatitude that struck a chord in my soul: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus was speaking of persecution that comes from outside us. But as I sat with those words, I recognized another tormentor.

In this season, George and I have often become our own persecutors. We have spent the last two weeks living inside all the things we should have done, all the things we might have done differently to save him, the anger at ourselves for taking time for granted, and the frustration of our own ignorance.

As a result, my garden is a disaster and probably the biggest symbol of what was happening inside. I have not touched it since early June. We have had few days of rain and I couldn’t even make myself stand outside with a garden hose. We have lost much of the provision and food I thought it would give us for the coming year.

We have walked through our house in silence. We have looked at the incoming medical bills that may take us years to pay and will serve as constant reminders of what we lost in 2026. And yet Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount that we are children and citizens of his kingdom in spite our our doubt, pain, and confustion.

That kingdom of God is not only golden streets and crystal seas. It is not a picture-perfect Instagram reel with angels and harps playing in the background. It is living with the acknowledgment of our spiritual poverty, our grief, and our constant need for humility while life batters against the shutters. It is continuing to hunger after goodness, mercy, and authentic intention in the middle of turmoil. It is continuing in all of it despite persecution, even when we have become our own tormentors.

Many people do not want to live in that kingdom. Most of the time, I reject that notion as well. I want to live in the kingdom of beauty and harmony and serenity. And the heaven I have been taught to believe in is coming someday beyond the pain of life. Heaven after death is the promise that, if I do the right things now, someday a perfect forever life will be waiting for me.

But that is not the whole way of Jesus. Jesus asks us to live these things now. The Beatitudes are not transactional. He says “Blessed are…” not blessed if. He asks us to bring his kingdom now. That means looking beyond ourselves and recognizing that even on our hardest days, we must love one another. We must comfort one another and be light for one another. That is how we are blessed.

Am I there yet? Absolutely not. This is all going to take some time and more healing.

I am still raw and sad and full of questions. But I can live with the confidence that there are still days ahead that will hold both celebration and mourning, and Jesus promises to be with me through all of them.

That is the kingdom I want to live in.