On Friday night, before we headed to Will and Marge Swartzendrubers, tragedy struck the Troyer family. Before I say too much, however, I should give a little background. I have two sisters. One sister, Anne, is eighteen and just graduated from high school. The other sister, Kristin, is eleven and going into the 6th grade. Anne has always really liked beagles, and at some point talked my mom into buying her a male and a female so she could sell cute little beagle pups. (Note: I told her that there would be absolutely no beagle pups until there had been a beagle wedding. I found a copy of the Ministers Manual in the library and during one of my college breaks I married the beagles. There were attendants, wedding gifts, hymns, scriptures, a sermonette-truly it was a beautiful service). At some point, my sister inherited another beagle from a friend who had moved from her farm to an apartment in town where she was not allowed to keep pets. This third beagle, Mandy, was neutered, so she did not pose a threat to the marriage of the first two beagles. The most memorable thing about Mandy was her roundness. If the other two beagles were green beans, Mandy was a bratwurst. Seriously, she was round.
So. We had three beagles, and yes, you should note the past tense. On Friday night, _ an hour before we were to eat, we received the call that no beagle owning family wants to receive; it was a neighbor, saying she’d seen a dead beagle on the highway outside our house. My brother Brett took the call, and when he told me the news, my heart dropped. We immediately took stock of the beagles, and realized Mandy was missing. Poor round Mandy was missing.
Brett, Randy, and I quickly rushed out to the machine shed, grabbed some shovels and a cardboard box. We hopped in the truck, and raced out of the driveway to our neighbor’s property, and sure enough, there was Mandy’s poor, lifeless body. I won’t say much about the details of her death except this: it had been quick, with no suffering.
Brett and I loaded her into the cardboard box. Yes, it took two of us.
Remember, bratwurst?
We drove back to our farm in a state of mourning for Mandy. After some discussion about the best place to bury her, my brother and I decided it’d be best to bury her under the tree to the east of the machine shed. So we drove there and Randy, Brett and I started digging a big hole. At this point, some friends of ours (the children of the neighbor who called us with the bad news) stopped in, because their mom had told about Mandy. By the time the hole was dug, our funeral party had swollen to seven: David, Pip, and Marissa Hochstetler, brother Brett, Randy, Elizabeth and I.
As the de factor pastor in the group, I officiated the funeral. We had a time of singing, sharing, and prayer as we celebrated the life of beagle who had left the earth much too early (note: we didn’t actually sing, although I wanted to). It was a highly moving and emotional funeral, the only exception being when David Hochstetler absent-mindedly spit into the grave. We all roundly chastised him for his disrespect of the deceased, and then we buried her. Finally, my brother and I found some scrap wood to make into a cross, and I wrote her name on the cross, as well as Mandy’s favorite Bible verse. You can read it below.
For this is what the LORD says: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant--to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” –Isaiah 56.4-5
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