Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  Funny how things turn out.

  I arranged to take Mimi, who was now twelve, away to a country hotel for the weekend. She put on make-up for our posh dinner and fell excitedly upon the glitzy shower products. I almost didn’t want to darken the atmosphere by raising the subject of loss. But I kept remembering what an ex-boyfriend once told me about losing his mother as a child, how he longed to know every detail, his need to make sense of it. I kept being told that it was important to share the difficult truths about Rach’s death with Mimi rather than shroud everything in nostalgic vagueness. We discussed it over dinner and both had a little cry. It felt cleansing and I was relieved that I chose not to run away from it.

  My mum had made memory boxes for the girls, on the advice of a children’s bereavement charity. They were filled with letters from Rach’s friends describing her, mementoes from her childhood and anecdotes written out on cards.

  ‘Thank goodness no one ever made a memory box for me,’ Mum said, and we both pondered what that might have contained. Deportation notices from the Egyptian embassy, prescriptions for amphetamines and legal advice about bigamy. Less a memory box, more a police evidence file, perhaps.

  I tried to think of things that would lift Mimi’s spirits. Jane arranged for her hairdresser to dye the tips of Mimi’s hair pink, and I brought her huge piles of make-up samples from the beauty cupboard at work. ‘L’Oreal Paris! That sounds posh,’ she said, seizing upon a £2.99 hairspray and ignoring the Chanel eyeshadow palette.

  She once told me that her only dream in life was to meet Justin Bieber. I wasn’t sure I could make this happen – and even if I could, he seemed a bit unpredictable behaviour-wise. She was also a huge fan of Rihanna. So I raced into action when I found out that Rihanna was an upcoming guest on Jonathan’s chat show. I talked to him and phoned his producer, Susie, and his celebrity booker, Sam. ‘Look, I don’t suppose there’s ANY way …’ I had never believed in angels – but I did after they quietly managed to sort it.

  Mimi and I were trying hard not to stare open-mouthed at Rihanna’s glossy and powerful legs escaping from a tiny tiered skirt as she shimmered her way towards us. Her hair was in blonde ringlets, poking out of a baseball cap. She brushed some strands out of her eye with lethal-looking black-tipped nails.

  Her publicist whispered in her ear briefly as we stood in the studio corner watching her dazzling approach.

  ‘Is this Mimi?’ she said, crouching down to envelop Mimi in sweet fragrance. ‘I’ve heard all about you, Mimi. And I hear you’re an incredible little girl, you know that?’

  I stood there as she engaged an awestruck Mimi in chat. And then I went and spoiled it all by doing something stupid like crying. I wiped away the tears but it was useless. Rihanna sees all.

  ‘You’re her aunt, right?’ she said, rising up to stroke my cardiganed arm. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ she said, looking momentarily confused about causing tears instead of the customary smiles.

  ‘I honestly can’t thank you enough,’ I said in clipped tones, compensating for my temporary loss of British reserve.

  She nodded and smiled at Mimi. ‘Shall we go for a little walk?’ she said, placing fingers glinting with gold jewellery inside Mimi’s hand, as they wandered towards the green room, phone-wielding entourage scurrying behind.

  You often see those pictures of people battling hardships meeting their heroes – pop stars leaning over hospital beds in expensive knitwear or footballers with starched kits posing alongside children. To be honest I’d always viewed them with incomprehension. Cynicism, even. Like meeting a famous person was going to change anything. How would encountering privilege make your pain better in any way?

  But I thought about Mimi going to school tomorrow and I realised that in some small way, this had temporarily shifted her story. For a day, at least, she wouldn’t be the girl whose mum died. She would be the girl who met Rihanna. So I got that whole hero meet-and-greet thing, now. Maybe it was a reminder that there was still joy to be had despite this bad thing that had happened. That tragedy didn’t have to be the only thing that shaped you.

  I had always been a bit meh about Rihanna. Not anymore. A few weeks after our encounter I heard someone half-heartedly weighing up some boots she was wearing, assessing her photo in a magazine. ‘Not sure those boots really work,’ they eventually offered. I think they’re still recovering from my response.

  I found it comforting going to Rach’s house. It was exactly as she left it, the prints she lovingly framed, the wedding photos above the fireplace, the worn-down fabric on the sofa arm where she would place her laptop and Earl Grey tea. With Giggle at her feet, staring longingly at the forbidden land of the sofa.

  ‘Giggle! Get down from there!’ was still being shouted, just as it always was, and he responded as he always had, with the calculated doe-eyed look of the confidently irresistible.

  I hadn’t expected Giggle to be so important to the healing process. But back then I didn’t know all the science behind dogs. That stroking them helped to lower stress hormones and release cuddly happy endorphins, oxytocin and serotonin. Getting these little doses of loveable energy from him felt like a shot of anti-depressant. He was just so consistently joyful and silly and familiar. Everything grief wasn’t.

  I couldn’t help feeling that Giggle seemed to be experiencing his own form of loss. Friends had mentioned him whining at Rach’s coffin during the funeral and even now, he sometimes curled up outside Rach’s bedroom, head slumped on his paws like an exhausted train commuter table napping. Every time he raced to greet the doorbell or circled Rach’s spot on the sofa I wondered what he made of her sudden disappearance.

  ‘Do dogs mourn their owners?’ was definitely something I had never predicted typing into Google one day. (But in fairness nor was ‘I talk to my dead sister’).

  It turned out there was a fundamental difference between the way dogs and adult humans grieved. Dogs are emotionally and mentally wired to live in the eternal present with no sense of the future. So they experienced loss as a sustained forlorn waiting rather than a permanent absence. Basically, they never quite give up on the idea that the person might return. So as far as Giggle was concerned, Rach lived eternally in the now. Her current absence had not drawn a line under her entire existence. To him, she would always be a part of our lives. And I liked that idea.

  Giggle also reinforced routine, a foothold you cling to when you’re buffeted around by trauma. He was the embodiment of Adam’s ‘Life Rolls On’ T-shirt. It was a delicate high-wire act, mourning someone. Respecting grief without falling into an abyss. People say there’s no way round it, you have to walk through it. So I tried to accept the unheralded moments of raw distress, which often arrive when you least want them to. During a brunch with the radio-show team, when the menu started to swim. Or at a screening of ET where the tug of nostalgia erupted into anguish. Even the simple question, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ sent me into panic, as I weighed up whether or not to burden a stranger with my tale. But grief had the power to block out the light so completely that you became accustomed to its dark familiarity. Which meant you had no option but to cling to the routine of daily life.

  Giggle’s predictability felt incredibly reassuring. You knew he’d react with greedy anticipation before every meal. He never turned down a walk. He would always try to jump onto the furniture, no matter how many times he got knocked back. His was a solid, unwavering presence. The symbol of a life with roots – the tiny heartbeat at the core of the dog families.

  I loved it when he licked my nose with his pink tongue, his two wonky teeth poking out from his Gruffalo underbite. Sometimes he would leap out of my lap if he heard a noise in the garden, shifting into the code-red mode of a secret service agent. There was no transition from our peaceful sofa moment to sniffing around the flowerbeds, ears pricked, head twisting to check out swooping birds. Oh, you’re still in SOFA world, his eyes said, with the condescension of a child finally abandoning its parents
at the school gates. What about all this exciting shit happening out here?

  ‘People always talk about living in the moment. But they rarely do,’ the intensive-care consultant had told me. But watching Giggle racing from one fresh experience to another, I realised that dogs really did possess this gift. A stern word was instantly forgotten with the promise of a walk; the sofa would always be his Camelot, no matter how many times he was told his name wasn’t on the list. This was why dog trainers explained that it was pointless to reprimand a dog for a mess on the carpet. They were fundamentally unable to link that thing they did five minutes ago with you being cross now. Dogs could not exist in anything but the moment.

  Sometimes, sitting with the girls, I was hit with a sense of the injustice that Rach wasn’t watching Bertie take her first steps. Or enjoying Mimi discovering Fawlty Towers on YouTube. I worried about having meltdowns in front of them but tried to remember some good advice I got from Alun, my radio-show colleague, who lost his dad as a child. ‘Their mum died,’ he said. ‘It IS sad. Hiding grief tells them it’s wrong to be sad.’

  So I tried to be honest with them if I was having a moment. Tell them I was just thinking about Rach and how much we all missed her. Mimi always reached out to hug me, as Giggle clambered up to join us, licking away the tears with an impressive thoroughness. I’d never quite worked out what prompted dogs to do that. Was it genuine empathy or just because they liked the salt? My head told me it might have been the salt in Giggle’s case – he really was a greedy bastard. But my heart couldn’t help but hope that maybe he was just looking out for all of us.

  I wanted to get a puppy. My mum was an enthusiastic enabler, although she frowned slightly at some of my choices as we looked through galleries of Pomeranians and Malteses and poodles on her computer. ‘Oh, darling, do be careful with little dogs,’ she said. ‘Some of them look like they belong to those nasty old women who still say “the coloureds.”’

  I researched the chow chow, those gloriously regal, cinnamon-furred Chinese dogs, with blue tongues and sloping eyes that made them look permanently grumpy from interrupted sleep. There was a litter due shortly, I discovered. I wanted to call mine Septimus. ‘Sounds like a nasty infection,’ laughed a colleague.

  ‘These things?’ said Frank’s partner, Cathy, when I showed her a picture. ‘They’re fucking MASSIVE!’

  Jane’s dad, Stu, was very wary. ‘I knew a chow chow once. It was a real asshole.’

  Choosing a dog was a bit like sharing prospective baby names – everyone had their own history with a spiteful Naomi or a Liam who stole their lunch money.

  But it wasn’t everyone else that stopped me from taking the final step and welcoming Septimus the ‘real asshole’ into my life. It was me. I did what I had always done with decisions involving definitive life choices – stall. I preferred not to address the real reasons behind those breezy deadline extensions. Even though I knew exactly what they were.

  When you defined yourself entirely by how you relate to others – the daughter of two impressively noisy characters, the sister of an even-tempered guardian, the friend of driven outliers – it was impossible to know what your own world looked like. So you stood aside, witnessing everyone else building a life filled with things that shaped them.

  Maybe it was enough to get brief hits of dog ownership through Giggle. I would leave it a bit, until the time was right.

  But there was a funny thing about the right time – it never came.

  Chapter Ten

  February 2014

  ‘Darling, are you on your way to work?’

  ‘I’m so late, Mum! Can I call you back?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘Is it about your Whistles jumper? I’ll drop it off—’

  ‘Darling, it’s not good. I’ve got sodding motor neurone disease.’

  A bus juddered to a halt right by me, its noisy engine drowning out the teenagers swearing and shoving each other. The doors concertinaed back with a hiss as the driver glanced at my frozen form. With an irritated sigh he manoeuvred his huge red chariot back to his journey.

  Sodding motor neurone disease. Of course that was how she would break the news. A baked potato left too long in the oven got the status of ‘fucking buggery bollocks, this is a disaster of the highest order!’ But a fatal degenerative disease was only a ‘sodding’.

  I knew she wanted to give the diagnosis the contempt it deserved, denying it the honour of anything more than a mild swear word. The defiant optimist again. I had challenged her over this approach to Rach’s diagnosis. But that was not my right, now. We were no longer helpless witnesses to horror, navigating it together. Now it was her story, so she got to decide the tone.

  I sensed that she didn’t want me to collapse. So the only vulnerability I revealed was by lapsing into the use of the word ‘Mummy’, something I hadn’t done since childhood. I was drawn suddenly to its cosy intimacy. ‘Muuum!’ was what we shouted down the stairs when we had no clean pants. Or what we said with a sigh when she used phrases like ‘Brillo pads!’ several decades after their use ceased to be acceptable. ‘Muum!’ was hurled impatiently during a Trivial Pursuit game when she insisted with tipsy defiance that Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon were ‘Merry Christmas, everyone!’

  It didn’t feel right to use the dismissively adolescent ‘Mum’ today.

  She had told me not to go with her to the hospital appointment this morning. We had been to so many over the past two months. ‘It’ll just be more of the same endless tedium!’ she assured me. I felt terrible that she had had to absorb the first impact of this news alone. I thought of her making her way down the hospital steps with this sentence suddenly laid on her shoulders.

  ‘We’re getting like the bloody Kennedys, darling, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  I tried to mimic her spirited stoicism, reaching for the sort of comforting phrases that people use to accompany bad news even if they never quite believe them. ‘At least we know what it is now,’ I said.

  But we both knew that actually, the ‘not knowing’ was a period we would look back to with misty water-coloured nostalgia, compared to what was ahead. During our various conversations with neurologists, MND had been mentioned as something they were keen to rule out. I knew it was not an easy way to go. It meant the gradual loss of speech, movement, swallowing and finally breathing. It also moved fairly quickly. Stephen Hawking’s story was greeted with weariness by consultants as they patiently pointed out that he was a medical outlier who defied the odds.

  It felt almost laughable that fate would have the sheer balls to strike when we were still reeling from the last disaster. I had always sort of assumed your future was overseen by a rational show runner. One who would dismiss the plausibility of another central character being written out so soon after the previous end-of-season shocker. It seemed our one had lost it, and decided to wrong-foot the audience entirely. ‘Hang on, what if … we threw those characters another sucker punch? When they’re still on the ropes? That’d be a finale.’

  Though perhaps I should have seen this latest twist coming. ‘Do you know, darling, sometimes I feel I’ve sort of given up a bit since we lost Rach,’ Mum told me a few months after the funeral, as we climbed the hill up to Sainsbury’s. ‘I know that must be hard for you. I’m sorry.’

  I had felt the rush of triggered childhood shame. Of course she had given up. She had been left with the crappy black swan. But I forced myself to sit with the discomfort and just said, ‘I know. I kind of have, too.’ We had both on the surface been managing to trudge through each day, but with a vaguely wounded resignation, like the last couple at the dance marathon, half-heartedly dancing on, not wanting to let the other one down.

  I’d had a sense for a while that something wasn’t quite right with Mum. She had started to drag her feet oddly, lose her balance, slur her words a bit. At first I just thought she was hitting the Prosecco a bit too hard, self-medicating. And
not eating enough. I had no idea that losing her footing as she put tinsel on Justin Bieber was a sign of something sinister.

  But then things rapidly got more pronounced and we decided to investigate, re-entering the world of hospital waiting rooms and lanyard-wearing consultants.

  ‘It’s detective work really, you have to eliminate the suspects!’ a consultant neurologist said, smiling and furiously making notes with his fountain pen.

  ‘You’re like Sherlock Holmes! No morphine addiction, I hope,’ my mum replied, with playful theatricality, not anticipating his reaction – which was an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Miserable old bastard,’ she muttered on the way out. ‘Sense of humour nul points.’

  ‘Nul points’ was another one of her slightly obsolete ‘Brillo pads’ phrases that Rach and I teased her about, a cultural throwback to Eighties Eurovision Song Contests.

  As her symptoms progressed over the next few months, we didn’t address the emotional implications of her diagnosis. ‘I am not going to stick to the script that has been written for me. I refuse to be gloomy!’ she said, throwing herself into practicalities, making her will, selling her house, asking me to look into a care flat for her where she could have twenty-four-hour help. ‘I’ll ham up the limping when we visit so I can jump the waiting list!’

  She told me that she wanted to stay close to Rach, and by some miracle the following month I found an independent care flat close to Highgate Cemetery. She bought fresh white linen for her special hoist bed, which she called ‘very Playboy Mansion!’ and filled the stark medical bathroom with antique fragrance bottles. She decorated the living room with a collage of Rach and a mountain of toys for Bertie’s visits. By the time she moved in, she was dependent on her wheelchair, which she threatened to decorate with gold baubles at Christmas.