Life After The Third Divorce: March 2016

I had a conversation with a 72 year old lady who I frequently work out with at my YMCA that went like this:

She: Do you get lonely?

LARISSA: No, not really.

She: I date. I want to find a man whom I can marry.

LARISSA: Do you really want the job?

She: (silence with a blank stare)

LARISSA: You understand it’s a job, right?

She: I don’t mind cooking every now and then. But I like to eat out. (with a smirk in her eye) - I am a night partner, you know what I mean, right?

LARISSA: Do you realize that the purpose of marriage is not to get pleasure but to serve the other? That’s what it was designed for.

She: If he is a nice person and is considerate, I don’t mind serving.

LARISSA: You are missing the point. There are no ‘ifs’. It does not matter if they follow through with the commitment to serve you. You are going into a marriage to serve the other. Period.

She: I can do laundry, I don’t mind cleaning occasionally...

LARISSA: Do you know that women in general live longer than men?

She: Oh really?

LARISSA: Which means, the older we are, the less men of the right age are available. Do you want to spend the rest of your life being a nurse to someone?

She: I want to meet someone who is kind, considerate, friendly, and rich.

LARISSA: Men like that are already taken. Only those who don’t want to take care of themselves are out there. That is exactly the reason they are still available.

She: I was dating this guy. We used to talk on the phone a lot. One day during our conversation on the phone I told him that I don’t have any money. He hang up on me.

LARISSA: Yep.

She: I still want to find a nice man to date. Wait a second, (as she glanced at the TV screen) - here’s something horrible on the news!

So, she proceeded watching the news and I could not help but think: Is it any wonder that young girls dream about something that marriagewas never designed to give them, when a mature 72 year old is still thinking about marriage in terms of ‘prince charming and happily ever after’?

Surely, there is nothing wrong with teaching our girls tolook for love in a relationship with a man. But what really the word ‘love’ means in this context? What does it look like?

Don’t get me wrong, it took me a lot of years, three failed marriages, and conclusion that I am simply not a wife material before I actually decided to find out what is it that marriage is for.

You might not know this about me, but I am a Christian, I believe in God the Father who created me for His glory and Who has designed a marriage relationship. He knows exactly what the purpose of that relationship is.

He is the one who has shown me through a very talented pastor what love which we all search for looks like, as it relates to choosing a person to date and to eventually marry, so that children might be born into that relationship and be raised in love.

How I wish that I knew about marriage at 20 what I know now!

I am neither regretful nor desperate.

I have a strong desire in my heart to teach young girls who are around 10-11 years old, may be, what exactly they need to be looking for in every single young man, as they grow into young ladies who’s heads are filled with dreams about their future.

For now though, I will share with you about how love looks like, what became a revelation for me very recently, and hope it will speak to your heart as much as it did to mine.

The most unexpected fact about the passage below is the first way love manifests itself. When I first saw it – I mean really understood what those lines mean, I was completely blown away. I’ve underlined it for emphasis.

Here it is:

1 Corinthians 13:4-7New International Version (NIV)

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I am not sure if you are familiar with this passage of scripture at all, but 3 verses right before the passage above say this (my loose translation): None of our accomplishments matter, if we do not love like that. That’s God’s opinion – as the Holy Scripture is His words.

That statement is so heavy…

I tried to read verses 4-7 from 1 Corinthians 13 replacing ‘love’ with ‘if you are’ and inverting positive statement into negative and vice versa – the conclusion at the end of the passage was shocking – ‘then you don’t love’.

Makes me wonder, what exactly people who marry for love mean when they say to one another ‘I love you’…

Well, I was one of those people – 3 times, so I am definitely not pointing fingers here...

Jak lived in my family since the day he turned 3 months old, 13 years, 6 months and one day. He would have been 14 years old on June 16, 2016.

Here is his picture on his 13th birthday, June 16, 2015

I groomed him that day and right in the middle of the haircut which I admit, both of us always hated to do, he just collapsed because his little legs got so tired. That's when I knew that he would not make it to his 14th birthday.

Back in Russia in 1983-1986 I worked in the biggest library in Perm area in the department of foreign languages and one day I came across a beautifully illustrated book about different pure breeds of dogs. That's when I saw a picture of a Miniature Schnauzer for the first time in my life, and it was love at the first sight.

The father of my children and I had trouble conceiving and wanted children so very much. It was nerve wracking and in October 1986 we agreed that if the next month we were not pregnant, we would get a Miniature Schnauzer puppy. We got pregnant, did not have time and energy for a puppy and now I have two wonderful young people for children.

When after moving to US in 2000 we were 'discovering' the country, and moved for jobs to Alpharetta, we paid a visit to a Petland store where they let people play with puppies in little rooms. Excellent marketing tactic. That's where we saw this little male Mini Schnauzer who all 3 of us started playing with right away. We decided to call him Jack. My husband at the time asked me 'do you want him?' Without a second of delay I said 'YES' - what kind of question that is anyway? That was September 16, 2002 and our new puppy went home with us that evening. Later we found out that his father's name was Jak (abbreviation for Just Another Kirkland - the breeder's family name was Kirkland), and decided to register our puppy with that same spelling.

So now you see how special was my Jak - I waited for him 16 years. He was such a good dog! He loved riding in the car and traveled with us to New Orleans, North Myrtle Beach, Chapel Hill, Englewood, FL.

(Englewood, FL November 23, 2007)

Always waited for me to come home and met me with excitement and a stuffed toy in his mouth ready to play with me. When he was much younger that is. But even a couple of days ago I saw him do the same thing even though he was moving slowly and looked very disoriented being so old, weak and miserable.

He could not clime stairs since September and I carried him upstairs for the night. He moved less and less and stayed in his bed longer and longer.

About five weeks ago when I came home form work I found him completely helpless in his bed, his breathing was shallow and labored. I thought I would lose him that night, but he continued to struggle to breathe and deteriorated it seemed daily. Soon he started having seizures which lasted about a minute but were not frequent. Within last two weeks his condition became significantly worse, and yesterday I did research on pet euthanasia.

I read about making a decision to euthanize your pet on the first site I visited and realized two things:

Jak has run out of life, he had only painful miserable existance left for him
I am the only one who can have mercy on my dog

It is often tempting, at this point, to postpone a decision still longer by deciding to "let nature take its course." Before choosing that course of action (or inaction), however, it's important to understand that, as a pet owner, you have been thwarting the "course of nature" from the beginning. By ensuring that your pet has food and shelter and is protected from predators, you have already guaranteed that nature will not take its course. By providing medical treatment, you have prolonged the life of your pet far beyond what it could have expected if left to "nature." In nature, an animal that becomes too ill to obtain food or protect itself will perish quickly, though not necessarily comfortably.

Nor does nature necessarily offer an "easy" death even if you choose to let it "take its course" in the comfort of your home. An animal that cannot breathe easily, cannot eat or digest food properly, cannot control its bodily functions, and can scarcely move or enjoy human contact because of pain, is hardly dying "comfortably."

I called around and made my choices of places to use services at. An appointment was made for 10:30AM on March 18, 2016 and we had one last night and morning to spend together.

Jak crawled over me in the middle of the night and slept in my left arm pit like he did as a puppy. He spent the rest of the night there with his head on my chest.

Before we left I walked him one last time but all he did was have a seizure once outside ...

For his last meal I hand-fed him steamed broccoli which I only recently discovered he loved and a whole banana. His belly was full. I also gave him a Milk bone treat right before I handed him to the technician at Humane Society, which he hungrily grabbed.

The picture in the car was taken about 20 min before he passed away. When the technician first saw him, she asked if he was conscious - yes, he was, and that's how he looked...

They wrapped Jak's bed with his body in it in their own blanket and I thought it was good that the injection was made without us present.

When we arrived to the pet crematorium they offered us to say good by to the body and actually it felt good to see him so peaceful.

Strangely enough it was comforting to feel his soft warm little body under my hand...

The pic in his bed in a basket was taken at the crematorium before they made a clay paw print for us (my daughter asked for one with just ink on paper, but this is what they do for pet owners). The picture above is how my son and I saw Jak for the last time.

In the last 6 months Jak was very far from being the dog in the video (September 2013), I had to let him go.

I went through his belongings and chose a couple keepsakes. I looked through all of my photographs and put all of pictures of Jak with his Pedigree and his Petco sweater. I paid a visit to his vet and provided them with paperwork for Jak's final services so they can close his file and archive it.

I will ship his paw print to my daughter tomorrow, I am glad that we took both Jak and my new cat Cynthia with us when we visited her last Christmas, when Jak looked like this and did not bother to play with Cynthia.

(December 25, 2015)

(November 2015 with Cynthia, my cat)

I made a decision to write this post because just one picture on Facebook will not be enough for me, I had a very special dog with a very special story.

We all loved Jak very much. He lived with us since the day he turned 3 months old, 13 years, 6 months and one day. He was 13 years, 9 months and one day old.

Here's my sweet loving protective Jak The Schnauzer when he was younger and strong.

Rest In Peace Jaky-Pooh...