More than just a dog
The one about a family, their dog and saying good-bye
This is a slightly longer read than usual with photos so it might be easier to read in your browser rather than email, thank you!
“We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems
I started writing this on Monday afternoon, a stiflingly hot day with barely a breeze, just the faint shouts from the children in the playground across the road drifting in through the open windows at the other end of the room.
Sitting on the sofa as I do, the kettle to my right, the glass door to the garden to my left I lift my eyes above my laptop screen perched on my lap and see Bella’s dog bed.
It’s empty and my brain tricks me into thinking she’s just out for a walk, but she isn’t because on Saturday evening our 14 years and 4 months old yellow Labrador who we’d brought home as a puppy died.
This is the dog who once inhaled an entire freshly baked banana loaf, who loved her bed in the middle of the house so she could keep an eye on us all, who loved a dunk in the sea, the tarn, any body of water. Who adored a sniffathon whether a simple pavement walk or a romp across the moor.
We knew it was coming. Before my husband left for a week of paddle boarding the Norwegian fjords, we talked about what might happen if Bella took a turn for the worse while he was away. I’m not sure we finished the conversation, talking instead about a time when he was back, thinking we’d have time to make a proper, managed decision about her future. Convincing ourselves we could control, manage her, her body, the end when really what we were doing I guess, was trying to put off the inevitable.
But around 8pm on Saturday evening Bella collapsed on the kitchen floor, her arthritis felling all four limbs. She’d been her version of fine all day with a slow lap of the tarn in the morning, a pootle in the garden in the afternoon, lying in her bed next to the piano opposite where I sit writing this in all the in between hours.
I called a friend who, before I’d finished the sentence, said she’d be straight round with her husband. They helped to carry Bella the 30 plus steps that separate our kitchen from the pavement and transport. I called the vets. ‘Bring her in’ they said, and I did, Bella panting, shaking. ‘The panting is a sign she’s in pain’ the vet told us.
An hour later after phone calls to my husband and our sons my friends dropped me and my 16-year old daughter home, but without Bella.
While walking in circles around the usually busy reception area I’d spoken to my husband, talking him through the options the vet had given me. 1) euthanasia (her word) or 2) administer a ton of pain relief, leave her overnight and see how she was in the morning. Option 1, as hard as it was, was the kindest option.
On Monday morning I collected her collar and the blanket she’d laid on, confirming our wish to have her cremated, telling the receptionist our plans to scatter her ashes at Saltburn-by-the-Sea where she’d enjoyed many a charge into the north sea. This was the one box on the consent form I didn’t tick on Saturday evening; and in the afternoon, sitting on the sofa I start writing this.
I knew it was coming, she was 14 plus years old, but didn’t know how I’d feel, and it turns out, I feel a lot.
Taking her presence for granted
The tears are expected although I cry a lot harder than I’d anticipated but then we’d moved from theoretical end of life conversations to reality in quick time. Her body rightly having the final say, saying no, that’s enough now. My right eye started twitching on Sunday morning, a piercing sinus style headache deciding to join it.
Oh how these animals weave their way into our hearts and the fabric of our lives. Something I knew in theory but I’d maybe got so used to Bella being here that I’d taken her presence at home for granted.
She had a knack of standing across doorways, in front of the oven, the sink, the fridge door. In each house we’ve lived in her bed has been in a spot that would give her maximum opportunity to watch us, to see us. To check us in and out.
There was that time last October when on a regular morning walk she stepped into the tarn for a paddle (as she’d done hundreds of times before) and slipped into an outflow pipe under the tarn. She was stuck for a few hours until rescued by the fire brigade, completely unfazed by the whole experience.
She inhaled food. She’d nose a large red plastic wobbler around the floor that dispensed her cup of kibble in ones and twos to slow down her eating. She’d hide - badly given her size and thumping tail - under the table hoping for scraps of dropped food. She loved sniffy, meandering walks. Her walks covering two, three times the number of our footsteps.
She was a vital part of this family, a mostly silent sounding board for she didn’t really bark, no guard dog despite her size. She’d jerk and run and bark in her sleep, vivid dreams chasing something. Passing her bed, her ears would prick up, twitching with the sound of our soft footsteps. A sign of food incoming maybe? Maybe another walk? Maybe a scratch behind the ear but she never really barked; I mean she did occasionally but it would be random. No context, rhyme or reason but you don’t need to be loud, or to make a sound to feel a presence.
A constant in an ever-changing family landscape
I’d got used to there being fewer humans in the house over the past few years, a changing energy, a different soundscape. The boys leaving home for university, the youngest having a far more active social life than us all put together, but on the rare occasion when I was home alone, I wasn’t.
None of us were. Having the house to ourselves wasn’t strictly true because Bella was always there. If we hadn’t walked past her bed in a while she’d seek us out, nudge a hand, rest her head on our thigh.
I guess Bella tied us to a family life that’s been ebbing away since the eldest headed up to Newcastle for university in September 2021. The house growing quieter, the tent pegs tying us to daily, weekly rhythm and routine of school, work, family life, loosened.
Morning routines were centred on Bella’s needs as much as they did getting the children to school with their book bags and PE kits. Waking up and sliding open the kitchen door to let her into the garden. Retrieving her wobbler wedged with those final pieces of kibble under a chair, behind a door. Her pacing and hopeful standing by the front door, trying to sneak out with the children as they went to school. She couldn’t possibly wait til after school drop off for her walk, and yet she did, wait patiently, morning after morning until it was her turn, nudging her nose into my coat pocket knowing treats lay within.
So so many walks. On beaches, on the moor, around the tarn and once upon a time, way back when she was a pup around Bath Racecourse where she’d gallop with imaginary horses, running her own race for one, never in a straight line.
On Saturday evening two chapters in her life with us kept playing on a loop in my head as I knelt on the floor next to her, her head resting on my forearm. The beach dog walks after mum, dad and grandma died in 2015 when we were still new to family life in Bournemouth, and the dog walks on the moor after I finished cancer treatment and started writing back in 2019.
The beach walks for their simplicity. Do we turn right or left one we hit Alum Chine beach at the bottom of the road? Usually right towards Branksome Chine where we’d veer away from the golden sand and head for woodland shade and texture, shadows and shafts of sunlight contrasting with the sharp straight line of the blue sea sky horizon.
Metronomic walks that gave me a reason to leave the house other than school drop off and pick up and the Tesco run. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other when my world had been turned inside out, back to front. My insides on a spin cycle with grief.
A way of being. A safe way to feel my way back into this irrevocably change world whilst living in a place that was still beautiful but still didn’t feel like home.
Creating new normals one dog walk at a time
We left Bournemouth in September 2017 for Ilkley and trudging through the mud on the moor, much like the way I’d kicked through the sand on the beach, is how I started to root myself physically in this new landscape. In both places, the morning dog walk helping me to give my day a new rhythm and routine. And I thank her for instilling in me a need to get out and move, to get some fresh air in the morning.
Dog walks that I’d hope, with each footstep, would help me to feel like I belonged. That these new landscapes would start feeling like home with light touch social interactions with other dog walkers giving me much needed human contact while the children were at school, my husband out at work.
Working for myself and from home has meant my work, my income has been portable, flexing around each move, but you don’t meet many people sitting at the kitchen table tapping out comms plans and articles.
A writing life created on the moor
The other chapter running through my head on Saturday links directly to this writing life. After nine months of cancer treatment in January 2019 I tracked my physical recovery by the distances I walked with Bella. The paths we took, documented by the photos taken and shared on Facebook, Instagram. My physical recovery way ahead of my mental and emotional recovery.
How do you create a ‘new normal’ when there wasn’t a regular or old normal in the first place? I started with walking Bella.
By the time Covid landed a year or so later I’d discovered the lightness and freedom that came with writing out the thoughts and feelings swirling through me. I guess I was writing for therapy, for catharsis as I marched, and Bella sniffed across the moor.
Once I was free from school drop off, I’d turn on the writing tap at 8am with
Writers Hour and at 9am I’d clip Bella’s lead onto her collar and head out, stopping to tap and type more thoughts into my phone. Bella creating her own sniffing story while I wrote mine.
Some of those notes turned into these posts, memoir writing, all sorts of writing, much of which I haven’t shared because sharing wasn’t the point. Writing was the point. Walking and moving was the point. Bella didn’t know that she was enabling, encouraging this writing habit. She was just happy to be out charging along paths, leaping over becks, sniffing heather and posing for the odd photo.
The thing with having started this on Monday though is that I don’t know where or how to finish it, this slender slither of a reflection of my relationship with Bella. There are 1001 memories, a stack of photos, the children, my husband with their own stories, their own relationships.
What I do know is that Bella’s bed is still by the piano, her water bowl is still in the kitchen. The box with her lead, treats and poo bags still sit by the front door. I hear noises and creaks in the house and think it’s her moving around. It isn’t but the headache has gone, the twitchy eye too, mostly, and I am slowly getting used to her not being in the house.
A New Writing Chapter
Thank you as ever for reading. This writing life including Gently Does It, much like my family life, is moving into a new chapter. I’m giving my Moor Communication client writing some much needed TLC (more on that in due course) and I’m switching my focus from purely memoir and reflective writing to fiction, thanks to the Intro to Creative Course I’ve been doing with Writing Room.
The move into writing fiction in particular is a lot of fun and I’d love you to be with me as I explore this new writing chapter. I’ll still be writing reflective pieces but it’s no coincidence that this move into writing fiction is very much linked to where I am in life too and I need to give myself permission and the freedom to evolve on the page and screen as well as in real life.
If the first writing chapter was about writing for therapy and catharsis, this next chapter is about being creative, writing for fun and enjoyment as well writing to work out how and what I’m feeling.
Many thanks as ever for reading, and I’ll be hanging out in the comments if you fancy a chat!
Harriet
PS as ever all typos and mistakes are mine, all mine.
I knew I'd have a cry reading this, Harriet -- you captured the way our lives are woven around them, enveloping them as they do us, with their love. Beautiful Bella. I lost Skye and Ralph both suddenly, taking them to the vet and coming home alone. It still breaks my heart to think of them, but these days I can think of the fun times more. Sending love xxx
Felt every word of this love x