Goodbye, old friend

08/12/2006

We had been expecting the call; my stomach tightened. “This is Dr Scott, I’ve finished with Tom.You may come as soon as you like.” His tone was ominous, this was it. My wife and I went tight-lipped to the car.

The traffic was maddening. Yesterday when I took Tom in I was there in no time at-all. Today every car in front – Toyota or not – had the gait of a JCB. Still no words passed between us. My wife’s frequent squeeze of my left hand said it all.

Tom was our nine year old black labrador. For the past six weeks he had been vomiting with disturbing regularity and had been admitted to the veterinary hospital for a barium meal and ‘scoping.’ Test after test by the local vet had eliminated most possible causes but one worry remained. And that was the big one.

Dr Scott pencilled an outline of Tom’s stomach, highlighting the area of the growth. His tone was again ominous. “It has such a hold that frankly...” I shut my ears to more, exchanged glances with my wife then asked Dr Scott if he could do “it” now. He nodded.

Two students carried Tom in on a sheepskin as Dr Scott made ready. Even though still groggy from the sedation he managed a defiant whisk of that ubiquitous tail a final lift of his impressively broad head and a look from once coal bright but now fading eyes which surely said “I did my best to tough it out..”

Faced finally with the clinical facts we had come to anticipate, the decision had not been difficult – but its effect was devastating. As its reality hit home the imperturbability of the worldly 60-plus year old gave way to the silent sobbing more usually given to an emotionally stunned child. Walking hand-in-hand to the car we were joined in a dread of returning home. No distinctively deep bark as he heard the engine, no thrust of head at one end and frenzy of tail at the other as we battled through the front door. Home would be empty and eerie. We pulled off the road and without thinking it through began a familiar walk along the riverbank.

What a mistake.

This time, thirty yards or so in front were no periodic ear-cocked searching-eyed “are they still coming?” rearward glances from a tail-erect big black dog.

Four months on that immediate pain has gone albeit a momentarily numbing bleakness can so easily be triggered, usually when some hitherto small thing prompts an awareness that when Tom was alive his “being there” was so casually taken for granted.
That and the other inevitable components of bereavement are surely no less heartfelt than had he been a much loved human being. But in more balanced moments I readily recognise that my wife, who gave Tom to me when a puppy, is right that we should highlight the pleasure his nine very full years brought us.

Memories such as the panache, marvelled at by the onlookers, with which he took in his stride the noisy helicopter ride from Penzance to the Scilly Isles; then of his apparent attempt to dig up Tresco’s beach in one go. Of that idyllic June day walking the coast-line of Iona when seemingly he and I had the whole world to ourselves.

 

Of the time he had us in stitches when he made as if to tip-toe over the room floor so as not to disturb a grandson’s Lego. And especially of his regular-as-clockwork roll on his back at the bedroom door each morning – four legs in the air – making his statement that whatever that day had in store for us HIS downside definitely was on the up. A feel-good friend, every day the same.

Thanks old friend, thanks a million.

 

John Staddon