I stood in a classroom and balled my eyes out in front of a bemused RE teacher ( whose name I can’t remember but who had a very progressive attitude to spirituality and a PhD in theology from Cambridge). I was embarrassed.
“I don’t cry!” I told him. “I didn’t even cry at my grandad’s funeral and that was sad, especially when we drove past where he worked and everyone was standing there waving hankies.”
He nodded quietly and said with his silky smooth chocolate voice that would have made him an excellent vicar if only he wasn’t gay in the seventies, “It’s why we have pets. Just wait until you have a dog.”
He went on to tell me his theory about how the end of a pet’s life and particularly a dog’s, enables us to think about death in a way that is impossible when another human dies. He said that we are much more honest about our feelings because a pet’s death doesn’t make us question our own mortality.
“It’s normal to be sad. You are going to miss your hamster,” he said
I bit my lip, trying not to scream ‘gerbil’ at him but said, “I was going to miss my grandad too but I didn’t cry like this.”
He just nodded wisely and said, “Yes and wait until you lose a dog. You’ll cry more than you do when your parents die. You won’t be able to think about being sad at all then because you’ll realise that you’re next and crying will feel selfish.”
He was right. A few years later, when my Dad was recovering from his first by-pass surgery, I sat in
the middle of the busy road we lived on, bathed in the beautiful blue light of a police car, cradling
the dog in my lap, sobbing my eyes out. I refused to let the vet take him until he was cold.
We can accept that pets are going to die, we can even let them go early, saying that it’s cruel to let them suffer.
Dogs can tune into their owner’s feelings. The beautiful black Labrador in our lives became nursemaid for seven months, fussing and fretting and not leaving Mum’s side. She also grew to the size of a coffee table, as she ate all the food mum slipped her. For a while after, she looked sad.
As a dog walker, you make fleeting connections with other owners. My dog has a fascination for old men in caps and so over the years I have become nodding acquaintances with several old men with dogs. When they die, their dogs come running up to me for strokes and reassurances and their wives can’t understand what is going on until I tell them my dog’s name. It seems that my dog was as popular with them.
Generally, I prefer to walk on my own and not talk to anyone. One of the reasons we chose the woodland burial at the cemetery was that we like to wall our dogs there. If you do see people you
don’t talk because they are dealing with their own grief. Now that we have another reason to go it has
become a favourite walk.
Dogs have no respect for our human conventions of honouring death. How could they? They don’t understand that the conveniently placed stone or carefully planted tree isn’t a place to cock their leg. Digging dogs don’t understand that it’s not a great place to find bones. I’ve seen dog owners shouting at their confused mutts for all these things.
It’s not the animal’s fault. That’s why I was so upset the other day. It had to be my fault. It was the first time I’d cried in the cemetery: usually, holding it together in public. My dog is ten years old and has never caught anything. He can’t catch a ball, a fly, the hedgehog in the garden or even the small aircraft that flies above, doing loop-the-loops on a Saturday morning but not for want of trying.
The established woodland area has become like a nature reserve and sometimes the dog will chase a squirrel to the edge of a tree, or jump as a bird flies past his nose. This time, he saw a rabbit and took chase. Normally rabbits are much too fast and are gone before he has any idea what he is doing. This rabbit decide to run round him in circles and he caught it, shook it like he would his favourite hedgehog toy and stood with it in his mouth looking very pleased with himself. It all happened so fast. I shouted at him to “leave it”, which is a command he knows but he didn’t want to. He wanted to bring it with him. I shouted again, realising that I was too squeamish to try and take it off him. He looked at me and smiled, rabbit still firmly wedged in his jaws. He saw that I wasn’t happy but didn’t want to give up his prize. He looked around for somewhere to leave it. He saw an old headstone amongst the trees. Someone had left a vase of silk flowers next to it. He walked over and carefully laid the perfect, dead bunny next to the flowers and came back to me, expecting a treat. I put him on the lead and walked a little way before I found myself staring at mum’s grave with tears in my eyes.
It made me remember the RE teacher and his insistence that dogs and god were both there to help us deal with grief and that it was no coincidence that they are the same word spelt backwards. Mum always said that religion was a comfort for people who are too weak to get through things on their own, which now that I need a dog, seems a little harsh.
This blog is brought to you by a very tired music teacher in the run up to Christmas. I'm so tired that this morning I thought I saw a thousand Santas running around as I played a defective bass clarinet. I apologise if this current set of blogs are too morbid for the time of year but I did promise I would try to talk about death. Apparently, it's going to be good for all of us.
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