A Mysterious Disappearance

Hon, you’d better come and see this!”

“Don’t bother me now, David, I am up to my ears in weeds in the garden,” Linda said.

“No, I mean you really, really need to come and see this,” I said. I was under the deck gingerly holding up a corner of the canvas tarp that covered our woodpile.

“You look like you’ve just discovered a body under that tarp,” said Linda as she walked towards me from the garden. “Oh my gosh, you have discovered a body! Well, I guess that explains it.”

What the “it” explained was Squirrely’s mysterious disappearance. For more than a month we had been daily commiserating together over Squirrely’s absence. Squirrely had made his presence known at least a couple of times a day by chasing the birds around the bird feeders, leading Addy the Labrador on a merry chase among the spruce trees between our house and the storage sheds, scolding us from just above our heads as we walked out of the house to get into the truck, or just sitting on one of our bird feeders shucking sunflower seeds like some kind of maniacal machine in a sunflower plant. And then he was gone. We couldn’t figure it out but hoped he was well.

Now that we look back on it, the signs were all there as early as the beginning of last March. We chalked it up to some kind of squirrel paranoia. Squirrely stopped his frequent jaunty jog over the path he had worn between our house and his house down by the storage shed. Instead he seemed to hang out 24/7 at the bird feeders on our deck. He would ball himself up with his tail wrapped around his nose in the feed tray of one of the bird feeders and sit there most of the day. We thought he had just grown obsessed about protecting his turf; that he couldn’t stand the thought of one of the woodpeckers getting even a morsel of the beef fat we kept for them there, couldn’t stomach one of the pine grosbeaks getting a single sunflower seed he thought belonged to him. We were kind of irked with him for this new obsessive wrinkle in his personality and so Linda decided to empty the bird feeders a week or two early to cure him of his recent psychotic manners.

But Squirrely just sat on his haunches in the crotch of a branch right above the empty bird feeders. One morning in May I got up and he was shivering on his perch. He was in a ball on his haunches, wrapped up in his tail with his head tucked between his front legs. He seemed to spend days like that. And that is exactly how I found his desiccated body under the tarp in July. He had built a large grass nest for himself out of lawn clippings, stocked it up with sunflower seeds and then succumbed. Strangely, the loss saddened both Linda and me deeply for days.

Dealing with loss is a process, even the loss of a squirrel that was really good at irritating the pants off of just about everyone most of the time. For me, the way I process stuff like this is through story. So when I began to contemplate the telling of this story, I first became aware of the role that denial had played. Any person with one eye and an armpit should have been able to see that Squirrely had been deathly ill when he gave up his frequent bouncy jaunts from his house by the shed to sit all day shivering in a ball on a branch above the empty bird feeders. That awareness of the obvious would not have changed the outcome for Squirrely but it would have removed the mystery concerning his disappearance. And more to the point, it certainly would have altered our response to it.

In our world we have so much loss in our lives to deal with: squirrels disappearing, pets dying, kids growing up and moving away, retirement and the loss of a career, illnesses and the loss of vitality, growing old and the loss of abilities, the loss of a mate. Most of the time I try to live in denial of this. I try and get on with life pretending that the loss isn’t happening, that it won’t ever happen. The problem is, especially as I grow older, the old denial strategy doesn’t really work. At times, particularly in the still of the dawn, it seems to me that my whole life is bracketed with loss. I need a new strategy, one that works like denial never really has.

When I dragged this story through the story that spawns life in me, the biblical story, what immediately sprang to mind was the denial that went on among the disciples around the death and resurrection of Jesus. Repeatedly before the event happened, the gospels tell us Jesus was teaching his disciples about his impending suffering and death (Mark 8:31–9:1). In fact, the gospels say that Jesus made it exceedingly clear. But the disciples continued to live and walk with him in complete denial of what should have been obvious. What would their lives and walk with Jesus have been like if they had listened to his teaching? What would their responses have been to his subsequent arrest, suffering and death?

In other words, what would discipleship have been like if they had listened to Jesus and lived with the truth, all of it, that Jesus was born for them, was going to suffer for them, was going to die for them and be raised from the grave for them, and all this by the design of God their Father? Jesus made this all very clear for them. Denial stole it from them. What resulted was a tragic kind of discipleship that is almost painfully comical as one reads the gospels.

In the end, in the biblical story, the one thing that makes the difference for the disciples is the resurrection. It’s when they personally face and relate to the person of the Risen Christ that the disciples fall on their knees and rise to face the world with confidence. It makes me see clearly that this is the only strategy that works as I face my world with all its loss—a focus on a deep and abiding relationship with the Risen Christ who promises me, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).