Remembering Griffey

Sept. 4, 2025

Today, we said goodbye to our sweet boy, Griffey. Griffey joined our family in July 2016, the same week that Ken Griffey, Jr. – his namesake – was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

He quickly became an essential part of our family and was a central figure in the childhood and adolescence for both Jai and Sidhartha. 

Over the past month, since his diagnosis with prostate cancer, Sital and I scrolled through photos to create a scrapbook of his life. We were overcome by how many of our family memories over the past decade revolved around Griffey. From summer evenings on Cayuga, with Griffey obsessively fetching sticks from the water to snow days on Cottage Place, with Griffey chasing the boys down their makeshift sledding hill, Griffey’s boundless energy marked the growth of our sons from playful boys into serious young men. 

Attending to Griffey’s needs has been an organizing principle of my days for the past 10 years. I was never a runner before Griffey’s bottomless well of energy demanded a daily 5k. My days frequently ended with Griffey pressing a tennis ball into my hand as I lay in bed, ready to go to sleep.

When C.S. Lewis pondered whether dogs go to Heaven, he reasoned that they just might, because of the deep emotional and spiritual connection they form with human beings created in God’s image. “It seems to me possible,” he said in The Problem of Pain, “that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.” I shudder to think that Griffey’s immortality might depend on my own deserving of salvation.

As a consolation, however, Lewis was quite certain that Heaven would include – if not individual dogs – at least the “essence of dogness.” I take comfort in that. If we are lucky, we get one dog in our lives who captures the essence of dogness. For me, Griffey was that dog. If Heaven includes that essence, it will include Griffey.