In the days before my father-in-law’s funeral, my wife and I drive to his cottage in the country with the dogs. Our schedule – shredded and hastily reassembled around events – has a window just big enough to go down there, check on things, do the front hedge, weed a bit. It seems important, even if it probably isn’t.
Shortly after we arrive a visitor remarks on the decline of the old dog.
“Really?” my wife says. “I guess we don’t notice.”
Since we were last here the old dog – now nearly 16 – has certainly become more wobbly, more incontinent and more prone to falling asleep suddenly, in strange places. But her decline hasn’t been steady. She’s also prone to brief episodes where she leaps and capers like a young dog, episodes that are themselves a little alarming.
“Is she having fun?” I say, as the dog runs in circles round our feet. “Does this look like fun?”
Anyway, she likes it down here. She’s been coming since she was a puppy, and she knows her way round. It is possibly more familiar to her than our house, which we’ve only lived in for eight years. The stone floor is remarkably resilient when it comes to chronic incontinence. And the weather is amazing.
In the morning my wife goes out to pick up a few things. I sit at the table in front of my laptop, trying to make a start on a eulogy. The new dog is on the sofa. The old dog is asleep on the floor alongside its bed, as if she tipped over on the way to it, and decided that close was close enough.
It occurs to me that this time last year I was at work on my own father’s eulogy. This affirms my superstition that death has a season, and that season, for me, is summer. My mother died in June; I remember the sound of lawnmowers when I called my wife to tell her.
Later that day, under a warm afternoon sun, I am trying to extract bindweed from a raised bed. It’s a pleasingly thankless task, requiring little thought and carrying no risk of completion. My wife is pegging out some laundry by the back door. A few feet away from her, the old dog is having one of her rare episodes of sprightliness, tearing through the tall grass in excited figures of eight, and snorting with delight.
My wife turns her back for a few minutes, and when she turns around, the old dog is gone. She comes and finds me to ask if I’ve seen her. I haven’t.
The old dog doesn’t wander as a rule, and is most likely inside, fast asleep in some new and unlikely spot. Except she isn’t. Once we’ve checked all the obvious places, we decide to split up. We search in silence, because you can’t call a deaf dog.
I take the track leading away from the house, secretly because I figure it’s the path most likely to lead toward a positive outcome. If the dog has headed this way, I’m sure to find her safe.
But I get quite a long way up the track without finding anything at all. From up there I can just hear my wife’s voice calling my name. As faint as it is, I can tell she has bad news.
In the end the new dog found the old dog, burrowing deep into brambles and weeds towards the bed of a trickling, nearly dry stream, where she lay dead. She was not 30ft from where my wife last saw her. We looked, it turns out, in all the wrong places.
“Oh dear,” my wife says, kneeling on the grass. “I feel so guilty.”
“Me too,” I say.
My wife rings our sons to break the news, and they take it hard. When the old dog was the new dog, the youngest one was only 10 years old. He was given the honour of picking a name. He took my advice, and called her Nellie.
Later I text them all to tell them to check on the tortoise, because as far as I’m concerned death’s season still has some way to run.
In the following days more than one person will offer up the hopeful notion that animals sometimes take themselves off to die. I’m not sure how likely I find this, or how comforting. Other friends suggest that it’s better all round for a dog to expire somewhere it’s been happy, in full pursuit of being a dog, rather than on the cold floor of a veterinarian’s office.
I’ve sat on the floor holding a dog, tears running off my nose into its fur, while a vet administered that final injection. And now I’ve fought through brambles to pull a dead dog out of a stream. And personally, I would struggle to register a preference.