Penny allowed herself to be gathered up carefully as the vet gently inserted the catheter into her front leg. The decline had been slow but steady since Christmas and blood tests had revealed multiple organ failure and an immune system that had given up the ghost. ‘It’s better to do it a month early than a day late,’ a friend had said with a love borne only from the experience of having been there and done that. ‘It’s the greatest gift you can give them. A final thank you for all they have given you.’ I hung on to those words for dear life. It made the already sensible advice from the vet easier to take on, to lean into.
We had prepared the living room for the vet’s arrival. The stove was lit and cast a warm, comforting glow around the room where Penny spent most of her eleven years with us. I lit the candles on the mantle and turned on the corner lamps. It felt right that she was at home when the final moments came. A place where she felt safety, kindness and familiarity. Only weeks before, I rescued a hunted Woodcock from a ditch and carried it home only to have it die in my arms. So I felt like I could do it again. I could take Penny into my arms and hold her close against my heart so her last moments would be surrendered into something warm, someone who smelled like home, like a mother.
Three month-old Penny
I sat down on the floor leaning against the edge of the sofa and we all gathered around her. The children were all still in primary school when three month-old Penny bounced and tumbled in the door, tripping over her paws and ears. Their entire lifetime, from the mundane to the adventurous, was stitched into her world. She was there for every camping trip, holiday and Sunday walk. Hours were spent rolling around clean tents covered in seaweed or badger droppings, getting stuck in bog holes near Lough Bray, floundering in rivers, stealing socks from the laundry baskets and running with a euphoric uncontained joyfulness around the vast meadows at Tara. In our naivety we thought she would be with us forever. Why wouldn’t she be? Our love for her delivered a cognitive dissonance of sorts; yes everything has a time and a season. Just not Penny. She would always be there because the alternative was simply unimaginable.
The room grew quiet as the vet filled the syringe with a lethal dose of anaesthetic. A log collapsed inside the stove and a spray of sparks exploded behind the glass. Our desire for her to go gently into that good night had delivered us to this moment. I felt the warmth and softness of her in my arms and the palpable tiredness in her body from fighting for so long against some unseen enemy. Yet she was thrilled in that moment to be the centre of so much undivided attention. What a treat be loved and held and stroked and minded for hours on end. The vet worked quickly pushing the potent liquid into the tube in her leg. ‘It will be very fast’ she said gently.
Smiling throughout her life
The children told me afterwards that she smiled just before her head dropped and her body went soft and still in my arms. She smiled almost all the time throughout her life, in the way dogs smile to show that they are incredibly happy and content. That all is well in their world. The kind of smiling that bursts out of them when their people are close by and they know there is a walk, treat or rub on the horizon. Their mouths open, their tongues loll and their eyes sparkle. That is how she left us in her favourite room and then left this world. Smiling at us, at her life, in complete acceptance of the moment she had found herself in.
For days afterwards, I would think about her smiling and start to cry. I was unable to understand fully why it made me so upset. Was it her happy innocence in the face of what was about to unfold? Was it the tremendous and terrifying power that I held to stop proceedings at any time and give her just another few days of life in the hope she wouldn’t require emergency intervention? I recited my friend’s words over and over to help justify my thinking. My God, how grateful I should be that she gets to go out on a high, when most humans don’t get that chance.
I like to believe that we are all part of a great collective consciousness. That the first law of thermodynamics means after our physical bodies die, the electromagnetic energy from our neural activity, complex cellular functions and bio-physical functions, transition into something deeply consequential. Something that survives non-locally, that retains our hard won identity without the ugliness of ego, or even better a transcended conscious awareness that Love is why we are all here in the first place. That love is our home away from home.
Penny: Unconditional Love
Dogs teach us about love far better than most. They love their people unconditionally. They are incapable of hate and contempt. They don’t judge, they just offer confusion and anxiety when treated badly. They are the living embodiment of loyal companionship, endless forgiveness and sensitivity to our emotional states. They are eternally hopeful, like the child who seeks fun and play even in the most adverse circumstances. To love a dog and lose a dog is to be gifted access to parts of your soul that used to sit in the shadows and wait to be noticed, revealed and uncovered. They can teach us responsibility, empathy, compassion, care and shared vulnerability if we will only let them.
I felt her breath move in and out in the quiet reverence of the room and waited for the moment when I knew she was gone. She smiled into the space around her, dropped her head gently and her body went soft and slack. Then it happened. A movement across my heart that felt like the murmuration of a thousand starlings or a wave of ripples that carried their own pulse. I held my breath, confused at what I experienced, then whispered to everyone,’ ‘She’s gone.’ For a while afterwards I rationalised it as a surge of adrenaline or some kind of palpitation. If I am honest though, it felt as though in the exquisite precision of that moment, her soul shot through my heart on its way to the great unknown leaving a part of her in each ventricle. What an incredible gift from her to me.
Remember always how they loved you. Remember always, how they loved you.
(c) Oonagh Charleton
About Dancing in Small Boats by Oonagh Charleton:
There is more to survival than hiding from your greatest fear.
Sara and Marcus hide in forests and abandoned houses, fighting to survive extreme weather events and the violent gangs that hunt for people and resources. Both are parents but only Sara has hope that her children are still alive.
When she realises she needs Marcus’ help to find her family, their journey becomes fraught with complication. A brief encounter with a pregnant woman changes everything as she grapples with the complex nature of risk and the reliability of her own instincts.
As she moves through the shadows, Sara discovers that fear can deliver freedom, love transcends loss and to kill means to live another day.
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