Becoming Vanilla Bean

Remembering a friend who taught us to love

There’s a place on the floor of the chancel where a certain dog always came to rest, and now it’s only floor. A dog like that becomes a kind of weather in a room, and when she’s gone this Sunday, you may feel the front pass through, the pressure drop, and the air may seem stale. The sound of her nails on the tile, the warm and uninvited, but desperately needed, weight against your shin while you balance a cookie and cup of coffee, the patient eyes doing the arithmetic of whether the snack in your hand was coming down to her, all of it will go still now, and the stillness will have a sound.

I saw her online before I met a single person at St. Luke’s. I was looking, that year, for a room that might hold me, going from one church’s website to the next with the particular loneliness of a person who isn’t sure she’ll be let in, or if she even really wanted to be. Thanks to a Google listing, there she was, a white dog in a bishop’s mitre, looking out of the screen as if she’d been told I was coming.

I don’t say this lightly: I wouldn’t be sitting in this church without that dog. I wouldn’t be Episcopalian. She opened a door I’d been standing outside of, and she opened it the only way she knew, by being glad I was there.

She hadn’t always been anybody’s dog. Fr. Nick has told it: a dog handed back to Paws Humane Society with no reason given, passed over by family after family, left so long the kennel was the only home she’d known. They gave her the hard cases, the dogs who snapped, the dogs who cowered in the back of the pen, the dogs who’d decided in whatever way a dog decides that other creatures weren’t to be trusted. And she would go in and lie down beside them, and she would stay. She stayed until the snapping quieted. She stayed until the cowering eased. She stayed until a frightened animal remembered it wasn’t alone in the world. The dog nobody kept became the one who showed the frightened they could be loved.

In the spring of 2015, the Hulls brought her home, and she carried the same care into every room of her life. She took in a new dog named Peanut and made him feel he belonged. She kept watch over a dog named Garbanzo and would sound the alarm the moment a seizure took him, before anyone else in the house had noticed. When the Hull babies came home from the hospital, first Andy and then Theo, she took up a post beside them and held it. She had a way of slipping the sock off a baby’s foot, her family’s or a stranger’s, to wash it clean, minding the smallest and least guarded among us the way she looked after every creature she met, gently, and without being asked.

I’ve been told that she was afraid of ladders. Can you believe a creature who could face a whole room of strangers would suddenly lose her composure at a stepladder? She earned her name because somebody looked at her and saw vanilla bean ice cream, and she honored it at coffee hour every Sunday of her life at St. Luke’s, devoted to a fallen crumb the way the rest of us should be devoted to our prayers. She even had employment at the Day School, helping with the children’s chapel in one of the little hats that were her signature style.

This past Sunday, at the nine o’clock service out under the trees of the grove, I got to be the one holding her leash for a bit. She was exploring the way she always did, nose to the ground, on the hunt for anything edible, keeping her own kind of service while the rest of the morning parishioners kept theirs. I didn’t know it was the last time. I’m grateful past words that I had that opportunity, and that it was such an ordinary, happy morning, nothing to it but a dog and her nose and the hope of something to eat.

I’ve loved animals and lost them. The grief of losing a creature who loved you without conditions is one of the truest griefs there is, and it doesn’t leave. It settles in, and it waits, and it rises again when you least expect it, at the sound of a name or the sight of an empty patch of floor. Just this morning when I went to get my car keys off the rack near my front door, I was struck with sadness when I saw her face on the keychain of my St. Luke’s vestry keys. While I stood there, I resolved to find joy in the moments I’ve had with her this last year, but knowing she won’t be there this Sunday is hard, nonetheless.

There’s a line in Psalm I’ve held close since her passing:

Psalm 36:5-7 (NRSVCE)

⁵ Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
⁶ Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O Lord.

⁷ How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

I believe it, and I believe she is held, and I believe the God who made her welcoming has made a welcome for her.

She was here. That much no grief can undo, and it’s enough to turn me toward gladness even now.

She was here, and a woman who’d run out of places to belong found a church because of her, one of a whole string of strangers she drew in, until the parish gave her a place in worship just to keep us coming.

She was here, and creatures who’d trusted nothing learned they could be safe.

She was here, and a family who took a chance on a dog nobody wanted was loved past measure for years.

And the ones she welcomed can welcome others now.

We can watch the door.

We can be glad when a stranger comes through it.

We can lie down beside the frightened and stay.

That’s what she leaves in us, and it’s more than most of us will leave anywhere.

Thank you, Bean. You were a good girl, and you were good to me, and I’ll spend my Sundays trying to become for someone else what you were for me on the days I needed it most.

Vanilla Bean at St. Luke's Episcopal Church