Bel Mooney - Goodbye Pet & See You in Heaven: A Memoir of Animals, Love and Loss

She might have had months left of her dog-years,
but to be who? Shed grown light as a nest
and spent the whole day under her long ears
listening to the bad radio in her breast.

F ROM M ERCIES BY D ON P ATERSON ( B . 1963)

I F YOU ARE wise, you prepare for a long time. After about nine years not a day passed without the awareness chiming, like the sound of a small brass bell in an Eastern temple.

Ping just there, at the edge of the imagination.

The tiny alarm that warns, It is coming

But certainly not a passing bell not yet.

Ping just a reminder that the lifespan of a dog or a cat is very short and therefore you must prepare for its end. The more you love your pet, the more you must make ready, like taking out an insurance policy. Our beloved Maltese dog, Bonnie, would soon die. This is the law of the universe.

So I would make my husband consider where we might bury her when the time came, even though this was an act of cruelty to a man who cannot bear harsh realities. His face would shut down; if he were a child he would have stuck his fingers in his ears. But I was relentless:

A grave in the walled garden?

No, he said, it would become waterlogged in winter, with the river so near, and I wouldnt want her to be cold.

A grave by the wooden bench at the top of the garden, where we enjoy the last evening sunlight?

Maybe. Shed be with us while we have an evening drink.

A grave near our Buddhist statue of Kwan Yin, in her gazebo?

Possibly, because then (I thought) Bonnie would be looked after by the goddess of compassion.

These are not conversations anyone wishes to have, yet I told him stoutly that I had to get both of us ready, because we must all prepare for loss. All of us. You and me both. How confident I was (after many years of writing and broadcasting about bereavement and an advice column as well, not to mention six novels that all deal in different ways with loss) that I knew what I was doing. That I could analyse my own feelings in a mature way

Ah, how the mighty fall!

When the time came I felt weak, helpless, bewildered. Of course, my little dogs death, a couple of months before her fourteenth birthday, was not a shock. Of course I knew it had to be approaching because her heart had begun to murmur small protests at the length of days. The young vet nodded with grave sympathy when I said (using my wise, steady public voice), I do know that Im having to face up to the end of her life. Surely I must have been ready.

But no. I shuddered in disbelief, like a vehicle rammed sideways in an unexpected accident. A whiplash to the spirit. This one small death pushed me out of my safety net and on to a murky path I did not recognise. It took a month of grief before I began to realise that, yet again, my funny little animal companion was teaching me lessons far greater than the sum of her (very) small parts. Our journey together would continue, even though one of us would be invisible.

L et me step back, to when she was a baby and life was steady, or so I thought. Bonnie was abandoned in Bath in June 2002. She had been left tied to a tree in a park by persons unknown, picked up and taken to the RSPCA Cats and Dogs Home. Who would do that to an elegant little six-month-old Maltese pup? Fertile bitches are valuable, after all. I used to imagine her watching the cruel person walk away, trying to follow until she almost choked

No wonder she hated being left alone. I used to torture myself with what-ifs for example, she could have been used as a football by drunken young men high on drugs and savagery. Such things happen.

But from the moment I collected her on 20 June (which happened to be my mothers seventy-eighth birthday) we would never leave each other ever again, apart from holidays when she stayed with my family. Oh, she was lucky to have been tied to that tree and I was lucky to give her the best home a dog could have. She was only a silly little chalky squiggle on the blackboard of the world, but she wrote large lessons in love.

Id never been a dog lover. In 1994 it had taken me many months to decide to get my first husband a Labrador (Billie) for his fiftieth birthday and then a Border collie (Sam) one year later. You need to think carefully about giving a home to any animal; too many people are criminally irresponsible or just plain stupid as the rescue homes bear unfortunate witness. I took good care of Billie and Sam and liked them a lot, just as I was fond of our four cats, Django, Louis, Ella and Domino. It was my whim to call all the pets after musicians: respectively, Holiday, Cooke, Reinhardt, Armstrong, Fitzgerald, and Fats. Now the tiny white dog was named for one of my favourite singers, Bonnie Raitt although a red setter would have been a more fitting animal for that great country-rock star.

But taking good care of an animal is not the same as loving it. I had thought I loved Louis, a Burmilla, but realised (once Bonnie arrived) that while I admired his beauty and was fondest of him among the pack, that wasnt quite enough. All the pets delighted me, especially when the four cats and now three dogs followed me all the way through our small wood on a summer evening walk, as if I were the Pied Piper. But Bonnie made me realise I had never loved an animal before. This woman who had rarely adored a man at first sight, and who always liked to be in control of events, fell in accidental love with a small white dog. And that powerful emotion moved me on, like a ratchet, never to go back. Bonnie transformed me into a dog lover.

She came to live on a beautiful hilltop farm just outside Baths city boundary, with assorted horses, sheep and cows. All were rather fascinated by the petite pooch especially the sheep, since there was something of the lamb about her. My husband and adult children all liked her and life seemed perfect. But when, exactly a year later, my marriage began to unravel after thirty-five years, Bonnie became more than a pet; she was my chief comforter. The abandoned creature I had rescued now held out her paws and rescued me, the abandoned human. I had given her what they call a forever home but now all my own certainties of forever were collapsing like playing cards around my head. I cried into her fluffy coat, and alone at night reached out my hand and found, in the tiny bundle of warmth, solace out of all proportion to her size. She was always on the same spot in the bed and I whispered to her in the darkness on those long, hot, sleepless nights, knowing she was listening.