I’ve now lost count of how many times I’ve been asked, in the months since my Jack Russell, Chota, died, if I’ll get another dog. And, I should add, it’s almost always a well-meaning query from loved ones, who know that Jason and I are dog people, that dog people find the canine habit hard to quit – and that getting another dog would, most likely, make us very happy.
The first time we were asked was on the day we lost her – about twenty seconds after we’d told an acquaintance that she’d died. And even then it wasn’t meant unkindly. It was just a polite query. A way of making conversation. It’s funny, though: we would never, in a million years, respond to the news that someone had lost their spouse by asking, conversationally, less than a minute later, “Soooo, do you think you’ll get married again?”
It’s not the same. I know it’s not the same, but my sixteen-year-old relationship with Chota lasted longer than many marriages – a huge swathe of my adult life that took me from my twenties to my forties. Her loss felt – and continues to feel – physical, like a chunk of me has been cut off or, to mix my metaphors, there is a Chota-shaped hole in my heart.
My grief for her is really not so different from my grief for much-loved people and, in some ways, it is worse, because I lived with her for almost two decades. She is everywhere in the house – every time I open the front door I can almost hear the skitter of her toenails on the floorboards, waiting to be let out; I take a bath and I think of how she’d trot in and put her head around the corner to check on me; every time I turn off the lights at night I remember all those evenings she used to curl up to sleep beside me.
When she died, Jason swept around the house, picking up baskets and biscuits and toys, hiding them from sight. And yet there are things he overlooked: a cluster of her toys piled on a box of books we covered with a blanket and dubbed Toy Tower; a lone basket hidden under the dresser; the smudge her nose left behind where she pressed it up against the car window.
And then there were the poo bags. For as long as I remember I’ve collected poo bags, shoved them into coat pockets and handbags and drawers, always on hand when I needed them. In the days after she died, Jase asked if he could throw them away, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I couldn’t tell him the reason why, but it came to me one night as I drifted off to sleep, remembering Joan Didion and her husband’s shoes: I was waiting for her to come back.
One of my favourite messages after we lost her was a voicenote from a friend who said simply: “She was irreplaceable.” That word stuck in my head. Some things just are, and perhaps that’s an unsettling thought. If our iPhone breaks, we might get another, the same with laptops, or any number of pieces of tech or household appliances. But there is no filling the space Chota has left. A new dog – lovely as it would be – wouldn’t be Chota. We wouldn’t share that unique bond, all those years of history.
A new dog wouldn’t have known me since my twenties or let me cry on it after break-ups or celebrated my first book launch or vetted my husband and followed us down the aisle or known my nieces and nephews as babies. A new dog wouldn’t be so inextricably associated with my recovery from what happened to me in Argentina. I can’t get those years or experiences back and I want to grieve her until such time as I feel ready to move on. I want to do it when it feels the right moment for us to welcome a new pet, so it’s not purely a rebound dog.
In the meantime, I don’t want to forget any of it – the sensation of stroking her small, knotty head, her delicate foxy face, her velvety snout, the soft patch of fur behind her ears, which I kissed for the last time before I got in the car to take her to the vet when she was dying. The way she’d roll her eyes at me when I did stuff like that, as if to say, “Oh, Mummy, you’re so soft”, but she’d let me do it anyway.
All of her: compact and sharp and uniquely herself. All of her funny, brilliant bold little ways – how she’d jump in the suitcase whenever I started packing to ensure she’d be coming too, her exuberant joy at the opening of presents, her enthusiasm for any passing toes in a sandaled foot.
Reading The Truth About Her by Jacqueline Maley I found in its epigraph a quote that immediately made me think of Chota, from Christina Rossetti’s “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary”.
At Easter we put a memorial plaque on a bench in the garden and planted forget-me-nots in a spot where she loved to dig. I know enough about grief to know these things are important: they are ways of honouring what you have lost, ways of respecting it and remembering. I suppose that’s why official mourning periods exist in many cultures, though, generally speaking, not for dogs.
I know, too, that some people might think it unseemly or embarrassing or self-indulgent to make such a fuss about losing a dog, but I really don’t care. We love what we love, and there is nothing to be done about it.
There are millions of abandoned pets in the world who need safe homes and I have every faith, in answer to that original question, that yes, one day, we will get another dog – I’m sure we will love it, and I’m sure it will be its own unique relationship. But, in the meantime, I want to come to terms with the fact that, while I might have another dog, I will never again have another Chota.
