OCT 30 — I said goodbye to my dog last week.
In truth I prepared another column but the words seemed too bare for my grief.
When you do not seem to have the words, you look instead to those whose words resonate with what you feel; I looked through poem after poem till I found what I needed.
My favourite funeral poem has always been WH Auden’s Funeral Blues but my sadness is tinged a different hue.
Perhaps Kahlil Gibran describes it best:
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. — On Joy and Sorrow
More people than I thought reached out to me to say they were so, so sorry for my loss.
He was, after all, a fixture on my social media and even had a whole column dedicated to him after his mad adventure of being kidnapped and then finding his way back through the strange power of social media.
I’d named him Dagr Nott, old Norse for “day and night” but for short, I called him “Dag”.
It was a silly little joke to let people think I had named my dog “dog”.
He was the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes in the morning.
Ah yes, time to feed and walk the dog.
Then this year, it just became time to “just feed the dog” because he could not go on walks.
Soon as he got even older and infirm, the time to clean up after his incontinence became multiple times a day.
Until one day it was time to take him to the vet because he had stopped eating and drinking.
I had already started missing him even before.
I missed when he would run to the gate excitedly when I returned home.
I missed seeing him right outside my door waiting for me to wake up, which he stopped doing once he could no longer climb the stairs.
I missed him excitedly running into my room, reaching up on his hind legs to paw at the bed.
Let’s go, he seemed to say.
Every passing day, a little bit of my dog died with his failing health so my grief has just been slowly building until the realisation that my final grief was here.
My pets had been my anchor for years — no matter how bad I felt, I knew I needed to get up, to work, to feed them.
To paraphrase a popular saying, you can have many friends in your life, but your pet really only has you.
I joke a lot that my dog loves fried chicken more than anything in the world but I know he would have dropped a chicken leg to try and protect me, because that’s what he did.
He chased away a man harassing me at my front door, blocked any suspicious men from gaining access to the house or me and it did not ever seem to occur to him he was just a tiny 8kg short legged ball of fur.
My brave Dag has even tried to protect his previous owner from her abusive husband, who then slapped him into a table edge, leaving him with a crooked jaw.
Yet my dog was still brave, still eager to live life as enthusiastically as he could manage, taking my cat out for a midnight stroll, escorting me to the train station, stealing all my rugs and sitting on my chair when I was out.
I will miss that zest of life, that purest of courage and most of all, I will miss knowing in life what it’s like to be loved by a dog.
Goodbye, my darling.
I hope wherever you are there are soft beds and lots of KFC.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
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