How to Say Goodbye

A recent, painful farewell has encouraged me to take a look at myself and my reactions to things

Hi friends!

Moments of clarity are so rare
I better document this

-Björk, Stonemilker

First, something (else) new from me. A trigger/content warning.

In the past I’ve had mixed feelings about such things. There are times when they’re necessary, I’d say, but recently I think they’ve become a bit overused. If you watch a thriller, for example, there’s every likelihood it’s going to feature moments of tension and high drama, and possibly be a little scary. There’s going to be some kind of crime in a crime drama, and anyone even half-familiar with the genre will know it’s likely to be on the more violent end of the spectrum. So is a trigger warning necessary?

I’d say no, in those cases. But then I’m fortunate enough to have never experienced the kind of trauma that would trigger genuine PTSD, so perhaps I ought to shut up and keep my opinion to myself. However, if something contains material you wouldn’t expect it to, and a relatively large number of people may find that material upsetting, then I’d say yes, it’s only fair to warn people first.

So, here is my warning. I had to say goodbye to my dog , Lola, a couple of weeks ago. For the last fortnight or so I’ve been debating whether to write about it, and in this post I’ve decided I’m going to. I don’t describe any details of how she went (which was calmly and peacefully, of old age) and there’s nothing specifically graphic or upsetting. But, y’know, I do talk about my dog, and how much I loved her, and how she’s no longer around, which in itself is pretty upsetting. For me, anyway…

Lola first came into my life as a puppy. My now-ex partner and I debated long and hard whether to get a dog, and in the end it was me pushing hardest for it. He was still undecided, in fact, when we travelled to North London to look at a litter of newborn pugs, although I knew that as soon as he saw them my job would be done. And I was right. There were six or seven in the pen, a mixture of black and faun, some boys, some girls. One of the black ones nosed their way to the front, eager to see what was going on, and whether the two guys who’d just turned up to have a gawp might be carrying food. ‘That’s Piglet,’ said the woman whose own pet had given birth to these little bundles of mischief. ‘She’s feisty. And greedy.’

Well, we wanted a girl, we wanted black, and we wanted feisty (and boy did we get it). And since we were looking for a pug, we knew ‘greedy’ was part of the package. And when we lifted her up she seemed to like us. So we put our deposit down and agreed that we’d return in a month, when she’d be just shy of twelve weeks, to take her to her new home. ‘Any name, yet?’ we were asked, just before we left. ‘Yes,’ we replied, for this is something we’d decided before we were even certain we were going to get a dog at all. ‘She’s going to be called Lola.’

That was in 2010. My life was very different then. I was working in the health service, as a clinical scientist, and I was also editing a book I’d been writing on the side. I had no idea how much that book would change my life — by the time Lola was a little over a year old I was living in a different flat, had given up work to concentrate on my writing, and had a book in the hardback bestseller lists.

Fast forward a few more years, and things have changed again. My book is a film, I’ve met Nicole Kidman, I’ve travelled all over the world to promote my work and I’m now living somewhere else, with cracks starting to show in my marriage. A few years further on? I’m single again, there’s a global pandemic and not only am I about to move once more, but this time to a completely new city.

I’m lucky, in that quite a number of things remained constant throughout that time. My family and many of my friends, for example. But in a day-to-day sense, pretty much the only thing that was unchanging in all those years, was Lola. Every day, she’d wake up when I did, demand her food in the way that only she knew how (not for nothing was her litter-nickname ‘Piglet’), then spend the day either by my side, or snoozing in the nearest patch of sunlight. She took it easy, basically, with occasional bursts of energy, some begging for treats, trips out for adventures, and plenty of TV time (she loved anything with horses, dogs, people, cars and/or dragons. Anything that moved, basically). During the lockdowns she took to updating my Twitter followers with useful information, such as what day it was, but (spoiler alert) that was actually me; I just thought it might cheer some people up if I posted a regular photo of her, because dogs do that, don’t they? They cheer people up. Or they cheer me up, anyway. Lola certainly did.

And I think she was happy too. I read somewhere that a happy dog will want to be with you, will occasionally get the zoomies (‘cracker-pug’, I called it), and will sleep for up to 20 hours a day. If that’s true, and I choose to believe it is, Lola was very happy indeed, which is all we want for our doggy companions really, isn’t it? (I struggle to say I ‘owned’ Lola. Half of the time I wasn’t even entirely sure who was in charge). Just for them to be healthy, and well fed, and happy. But now, just a few months shy of fourteen years since she came into my life, she’s gone.

The interesting thing though, is that I don’t know how I feel. I’m grieving, of course, and I miss her. But when you decide to share your life with a pet, that grief, that loss, is built into the package. You take them on knowing that, in all probability, you’re going to have to say goodbye to them, too. On one level, I’ve been dreading the moment it was time for her to go for the last thirteen years. I knew it was coming after all, and with each year, each day, each moment, it was only getting closer.

But one can’t concentrate on that, of course. To do so would drive you mad. You’ve got to live, after all. But it was there, in the back of my mind but edging gradually forwards. And now it’s happened, and I’m grieving.

Yet it’s a strange grief. On the one hand, when you no longer have to dread and worry about the terrible thing, there’s a kind of relief, even if that’s because the terrible thing has happened. And having my younger dog, Pebbles, helps enormously of course (and yes, I quite deliberately took Pebbles on when Lola was getting on a bit— I knew I’d want another canine companion, but I also knew that if I waited until Lola’s departure I’d feel I was trying to replace her. Plus, laughably I now realise, I figured Lola would teach the new arrival some good habits. If anything it was the opposite).

But there’s something else, too. I took her to the vets a few months back, when she had a funny turn that turned out to be vestibular (i.e balance problem) but was nevertheless pretty scary. The vet examined her, and reassured me, but we also had a long discussion about the fact that at her age I needed to start preparing, mentally, for the inevitable. We talked a little about what would happen if she had a turn that wouldn’t get better, or when we reached a point that it became kinder to let her go (see how even now I’m skirting the words? I don’t want to say ‘euthanise her’, even though that’s what we were talking about and that’s what we did. I’m reminded that when I was a child my parents referred to it as putting dogs and cats ‘to sleep’ and for a long time I believed that it was therefore possible to wake them up again).

The discussion prompted me to think about how I’d ideally like it to be, if and when the time came and it was a decision I had to make (rather than her going in her sleep, I suppose). And I got what I wanted, which I suppose is part of the reason I’m not as devastated as I thought I would be. She spent a weekend with my parents a couple of weeks before she left us, where she’d have been given lots and lots of treats. Then I got Covid, which wasn’t fun but did mean I basically spent the last week of her life in bed, cuddling her. My friend Charles, who was one of her favourite people in the world, coincidentally visited a few days before she went, and she was as wildly excited to see him as ever, and he also brought another friend round who’d never met her before but whom she also won over. She was arthritic, and I’m pretty sure completely deaf (though could still detect a crisp packet being opened several miles away), but even on her last full day with us she was basically herself, just an older, slower version. When it came, her deterioration was sudden — less than twelve hours — which on the one hand was heartbreaking for me, but on other meant that I knew she hadn’t suffered and had been her lovable, roguish, self right to the end.

And it also meant I got to be with her. I’ve heard lots of stories of pets who finally went when their owners were away, and with a trip to Iceland planned I’d been desperately worried that might happen. And I wanted to be the one who took her, who made the decision, who held her as she went. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to, of course, but it was something I wanted to do. I felt I owed her, in some way. All the joy she’d given me — and others — in this world, it seemed only right that I should be the one to help her to leave it.

And when it happened? There was no pain that I could see, no distress, not even any fear. I made sure I was crouching in her eye-line, so that she could see me. I stroked her gently. She was there, and then, suddenly, she wasn’t. I cried. I held Pebbles who, at the vet’s suggestion, was there too. Then I said goodbye. But I knew I’d done the right thing. It was weirdly beautiful.

But since? I’ve worried. I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot, not wanting to forget a single detail of that dreadful half-hour. But is that normal? Unlike some, who might want to let it go it as soon as possible and never think of it again, I want to remember it all. I feel like I’m deliberately peering into the abyss, or staring into the sun perhaps, almost as a way of anaesthetising myself to it, to rob it of its power to upset me.

Or maybe it’s about what I do for a living. I’m reminded of a writer friend who told me that when a close relative died in hospital, he was there. Devastated, as were the rest of the family who were around the bed. But part of him was also wondering how soon he could make an excuse and get to the bathroom, where he’d write the details in his notebook, capturing them before he forgot them and they disappeared forever.

Is that what I’m doing? Is that why I watched it all; the shaving of the patch of fur, the insertion of the needle and catheter, the drug being administered? I can’t see myself ever writing about it in a novel, but part of what we do is observing, documenting, feeling. Does that make writers emotional vampires? Am I a terrible person? Or is it just because I owed it to my faithful companion not to turn away at the end, when she needed me, not to try to forget her last moments? I wish I knew the answer. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Anyway, goodbye Lola-pops. I’m going to miss you.