Methodius Hayes's journal

Our daughter Bridget got back from Greece on Wednesday, having graduated after five years of studying theology at the University of Athens.

The weather has been unpleasantly hot for the last few days, in the high 30s, lots of thunderstorms around, and little rain. A warning in the newspaper that the heatwave is likely to continue, and you should try to stay indoors, otherwise you'll fry your brain.

Got a letter from a retired Anglican bishop friend, now living in an old age home. He was recently disgnosed as having lymph-node cancer, and has been having chemotherapy. What struck me as sad was that all he talked about in his letter was his health. Suddenly finding himself ill after a lifetime of good health reduced him to being concerned about only one thing.

It prompted two thoughts -- one that good health, which we so often take for granted, is the prerequisite for being able to do so much else. If health breaks down, then there is the danger that we stop functioning in so many different ways. In many ways, health is foundational.

The second thought was the hope that if I ever get ill -- seriously ill -- I won't be like that. I'm writing this partly as a kind of reminder to myself. If that should hasppen, I hope that I will be able to talk to other people about other things. It strikes me too, however, that many of the saints suffered from ill-health, and yet others were healed through them. Perhaps they had reached such a stage of holiness that they were able to imitate Christ in taking the diseases of others upon themselves. And pehaps God gives good health because he knows we are not strong enough to bear illness.

I woke up at 2:00 am, and could not get back to sleep. There was an e-mail message from Ione Evans in New Zealand giving details of a branch of the Green family we didn't know about, so I began entering them in our genealogy program. At about 3:00 I heard strange noises in the yard outside my study window, and called the dogs. Ariel, the older one came to the window, but Alexa (the one in the picture) didn't. I looked out and saw she was panting.

I called them to the back door, and Alexa came, but was walking unsteadily, and shaking, so I woke Val and we tried to find a vet that was open after hours in the phone book, and eventually got one through our vet's pager number. I went to check Alexa so I could describe her symptoms before phoning the vet, and she was dead. She had died just before 4:00 am.

It is rather strange, since she seemed to have no problems before 3:00 am, and yet within an hour she was dead. She was only 5 years old, and a bonsai Alsatian.

The photo was taken when she was 3 months old, on my 60th birthday. We had got her because our two older dogs had died. One, Lucy, had bone cancer, and was euthanised. A couple of weeks later the other one, Gilgamesh, had died with similar symptoms -- panting, convulsions, shivering. But we thought it might be old age -- they were both over 12 years old. The younger one, Ariel, went into mourning. She was so miserable that we looked in the newspaper, picked the first advertisement for puppies that we saw, and got Alexa.

Now she'll be lonely again.