That thing about grief

We’ve been here before. Sitting on the floor together, holding our beautiful brown eyed boy between us while the cannula goes in. He stopped wagging his tail a few minutes ago – he’s been so pleased to see us after a couple of hours at the vets, but now he’s gone really flat. And then the vet squeezes the syringe and his legs go, and we lower him as gently as we can until he’s lying on his side, and he stops that painful breathing where his abdomen seemed to shrink into his chest, and he finally looks at peace for the first time in weeks.

We’ve been here before because only six months ago we had to say goodbye to Luna, the gentlest, friendliest and prettiest dog we’d ever known. It was a different room, but the process was the same. Six months on I can remember every single detail of the last thirty minutes with her – the sound of her breathing; the bright yellow blanket against the thousand shades of shiny brown fur; the faint smell of disinfectant against her warm breath; the hardness of the cold floor against her soft coat; the look in J’s eyes, blurry and blurred as we said our goodbyes. 

Luna was a truly lovely dog, friendly, affectionate and always, always, happy right up to the end. Her only real vice was to be driven by food, to the point where she became a menace off the lead in summer if we were walking near any picnics. Even then, she’d charm her way into a gathering, like she was working the room at her ideal outside party, before seizing a sandwich or a piece of chicken while me or J ran as fast as we could to catch up with her.  

Solomon was made of different stuff. It’s clearly wrong to put human conditions onto an animal, but it’s hard to describe him without using words like complex, nervous and needy. His grandfather had been a Crufts champion – not much of a boast for Solly, as I think he had several hundred cousins – but he had an air about him that was almost regal. His favourite pace, somewhere between a walk and a run, was an elegant trot, back straight and head high with plenty of leg lift, as if he was next to the Hungarian royal carriage. 

There’s lots more I could write about both of our wonderful dogs, but that’s not the point of this blog. When we came back to the house this evening, properly empty for the first time ever, all energy had just disappeared from the house and from us. Solomon had taken that away with him, and both of us just felt empty and really, really tired. 

Having said which, it’s 3:30am now and I can’t sleep, so it’s a different sort of tired to normal. This is also a place I’ve been before – when my dad died, I woke up at 3:30 every night for months. It got ridiculously predictable so I bought a job lot of 1930’s British crime fiction books so I could have something non stressful as a distraction. As a result, I now associate that period with some of the most awful and convoluted writing I’ve ever read, but it did the job – we all need distractions at these times. 

Through some stuff that I’ve worked on over the last ten years or so, I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about grief and loss. I did a bit of work way back on the stages of grief, and I thought that it would help with those conversations. It did, insofar you could put a name to a feeling, but it didn’t, in that it talked of stages in a cold, sequential way, going from denial, anger, bargaining, depression to acceptance, in a nice orderly fashion. And it doesn’t work like that in practice. My dad died six years ago last month – there’s a part of my brain that is still in denial, a part that searches for him every time I see a crowd of people, and another part resisting acceptance, and in the few months after he died, all of those emotions were muddled up in a black fog of desperate unhappiness. And that’s unhappiness, not depression- it’s the emptiness that I mentioned earlier, where your head is full of competing thoughts but your gut feels empty. 

When my dad died, my dear friend C told me how he’d felt a few years earlier when his father had passed away. ‘It’s like you never think you can be happy again’, he said, and he was so right. That’s exactly how I felt, and my feeling was triggered by some pretty strong memories. On the day my dad died, I got a phone call from my mum in the afternoon, and we drove the six hour journey to the care home (in five hours flat), so I was privileged enough to be with him when he passed. Hands down the most awful day of my life, and for months afterwards I was back in the that room in the care home, remembering every single thing, at 3:30 every night. 

And (this is the important bit), I couldn’t think about my dad without that image of that moment in the room coming into my head. So all of the great memories I had of the kindest man I ever knew were locked away behind that obstacle, and I couldn’t get at them. Over time, your brain works out how to get past the obstacle and get at the good stuff – you don’t need therapy for that, you just need the time to learn how to think differently. Nowadays I can think of him without having to go to that awful room.  If I need to give myself a bit of a kick to be kinder or more motivated or thoughtful, I can have a bit of a conversation with my memories of him before he was ill, and it’s a comfort that I didn’t think I’d ever have. And when I think of Luna, I can think of her with her tail frantically wagging with happiness, or kangaroo boxing with Solomon, or running on the harness, both of us getting slower on every run. And soon I’ll be able to think of Solly without going to his room; being mildly grumpy when he saw a fox or a squirrel or a pigeon in the garden; getting really excited at a knock on the door and beside himself if it was someone he knew; or dragging me along on a run at breakneck speed. Or just lying down in the evening in the most uncomfortable position ever, just so he could put his head on a nearby lap.

So it was with my dad (although it took ages), and so it was with Luna, and so it will be with Solomon, and so it will be with every missed being that leaves that hollow gap – we’ll still trigger the awful moments but we’ll learn to get around them to remember the good ones as well. And I wanted to write that down because it might help some people to know about the good bit afterwards. That’s all x