One hot and windy night Harry, our beautiful dog – he of the huge heart and stupendous bollocks – just keeled over and died. My heartbroken husband buried him in the back garden, and the next morning explained very gently to our children what had happened. They were utterly mesmerised.
‘Where is he now?’ our son asked at last.
‘I buried him in the back garden,’ said my husband. ‘Should we go and put some flowers on his grave?’
‘No,’ said our son. ’I think you’d better dig him up. It’s breakfast time.’
Not much understanding of death, then.
About a week later, a concerned fellow parent at nursey came up to me:
‘Your son told me his dog was dead,’ she said. ‘So I said, ‘’Is he in heaven?’’ and he looked at me as though I was completely crazy and said, ‘’No, he’s in a hole in the back garden.’’’
So not much understanding of God then, either. Oh, the guilt of being a secular parent. What the hell is one meant to do about death and deities?
My husband and I had a brief discussion (as parents, there is no other kind) about Life, Death and the Whole Damn Thing. I spoke eloquently about the Meaningful Christmas. He countered with the Freedom of the Guilt-Free Existence. I mentioned the Pomp and the Piety and Arcane Expectations of Organised Religion. He elegantly massacred the Paffy DIY At-Home Tailor-Made Yuppie Spiritual Kit. I recalled a girl in Class 1 with me, raised as an atheist, who wrote with her pen in her fist rather than between her fingers. I felt these Facts were Related. He pointed out that I was Off My Head. I constructed a careful position about Conscious Suspension of Disbelief. He sliced through it with a lethal blade made of Meaninglessness and Moral Vacuums.
All this took about three minutes, and I hope you don’t understand it, because we didn’t either. But I think in the end Religion won, although I wouldn’t bet my afterlife on it. Anyway, we decided to start mentioning God every so often to our children – you know, sort of casually bringing Him up in conversation, as one does. You can tell we’re novices, though, because my son is now under the impression that ‘The god’, as he calls him, lives in the cable station at the top of Table Mountain. Apparently He shares this prime real estate with Jesus and Frida Kahlo.
I’m not entirely sure what Frida Kahlo is doing there, but what I do know is that Mary does not live in the cable station. I imagine she and Diego Rivera have got things to do, places to go.
Anyway, according to the gospel according to my son, The God, Jesus and Frida Kahlo frequently go for a walk in the evening, and when they do, they leave the light in the cable station on for when they get back. And occasionally they have friends over for dinner – Mary and Diego? – who arrive in the cable car. All in all, they seem to have rather a social time. Sometimes, when the spirit moves him (or, in this case, when the Spirit moves Himself), The god sits happily on a rock and throws snowballs at the clouds to smite them and break them apart so that the sun can shine through. Messing about with the weather is more or less what The god’s job entails, which seems to me – and I may be way off beam here; it’s been a long time – to be a pretty good summation of the old testament, what with all those floods and fires and volcanoes and things. Look, as a world-view it may be unlikely to gob-smack the major theological philosophers of our time, but it’s a start.
The only problem with all this is that it means we can never go up the mountain again. It may be a bit too existentialist to confront a three-year-old with a drafty docking area when he’s expecting a warm and happy home, resonant with the happy laughter of an unholy trinity hell-bent on doing a spot of snowball-smiting. And anyway, at this point I’m not sure I could deal with the disappointment myself.
Ah yes, I wish my dogs would be so kind as to ‘go gently into that good night’. Not for me. Last night we had to put Zorro to sleep. So named for the little mask he had around his eyes when he was 6 weeks old, the rest was all spotty with silky black ears. His brother Pongo (we have a thing for vowels and kitchy movie names) left us 2 years earlier in similar fashion, they both lasted almost 14 years, quite a feat for a large breed dog.
It’s a heartbreaking thing to do and today I have the scratchy, puffy eyes to prove it. More so, because we had a dry run two weeks before. The Person Formerly Known As Our Vet left his practice early and inexplicably missed our appointment. There was nothing to do but have a snotty, tearful conversation over the phone about upping his dosage. I could have killed. The vet, not the dog. Having prepared myself (or so I thought) for the ordeal I had taken nearly half a bottle of rescue remedy and a tablet I had left, which my mom thought would help me through my dad’s funeral. That was two years ago. The tablet however was still potent. I was cool as a cucumber the whole of the next day. And plotting.
But I digress. We didn’t have a formulated plan on how to tell the kids (6 and 4), so when we returned sans dog the eldest wanted to know where he was? I said that he was really old and hurting, that we had spoken to the vet and that we had him put to sleep and that was why I was looking so sad. A red, blotchy tear-stained face with runny mascara is apparently par for the course in our home as she didn’t comment on that. She wondered aloud whether all the kids in heaven were now playing with him (such a sweet child). I agreed that that would be a perfectly lovely thing for him to be doing and in the next breath that same sweet child wanted to know if we could buy another dog. So much then for a mourning period.
There will be no other dog. Not for a while. Besides, there is now a cockatiel in the house, a messy, inquisitive little thing. And I hear they can live up to 32 years if they follow the right diet. I might be dead before the bird it seems.
Just not the same though.