It came, the grief, with the force of a snowplough in a blizzard on a Canadian highway. It sits on my chest like Wile E Coyote’s Acme anvil. Unexpected yet all-pervasive.

Oscar had lived to almost double his flatcoat life expectancy. Though he had always been pretty healthy, old age had rendered each successive little infection progressively more difficult for his body to fight. In the end a recurrence of pancreatitis was too much for a system that was fighting to clear fluid from his chest. Mercifully, it was relatively quick.

Trotting into the woods 100m in front of Raffles and me on Monday and sticking his substantial nose into my Zoom call that evening, he deteriorated at first to copious sickness on Tuesday morning. He walked into the vet’s wagging his tail in the afternoon, pleased to be there. By Wednesday morning he could no longer stand or move and had to be dragged to the car by his harness, his inert weight like sacks of heavy rubble to be taken to the tip. The pictures haunt me: his dear head resting on the shoes in the hall as I opened the front door; me shoving his 32kg weight with sheer force of will unceremoniously into the boot of our estate car, bought especially on our return from Hong Kong in the spring to accomodate him. I’m ashamed at the indignity of it for him. I suppose I thought I would make it up to him later on his return from the vet but I never did. I hope he forgave me.

As the vet nurses came out to the car to help me, Oscar raised his head slightly to look at me and gave a feeble wag of his tail and it was the most active he’d been that day. I can’t get this picture out of my head. His earnest, conker-brown eyes, trusting that I would make him feel better. Even at that point I thought that they would rehydrate him and he would bounce back to health. It had happened before so it was bound to happen now, surely?Ten minutes later I sat and listened to the vet explain so kindly, so gently that my precious Oscar’s body was too poorly to cope with any futher treatment. The kindest thing was to euthenise him. Having been told two years ago to enjoy Christmas with him after a diagnosis of a splenic tumour, I thought that I’d prepared myself for this moment. It would be the rational choice not to let him suffer, of course it would. But now the right choice felt  stark and callous. The tears sprang, and they still do.

As my angel lay on a towel on the floor, covered with a soft blanket, I stroked his beautiful face and his huge paws as they administered the massive dose of anasthetic that would send him gently to sleep. I told him how much we loved him and thanked him for the joy he had brought into our lives. We’d had fun, hadn’t we? I wished him safe travels. (To where?) And then the vet told me quietly that he had gone. One last nuzzle, my nose burrowing into his soft, warm fur, his paws already cold.

This flatcoat, this “cancer factory” did NOT die from cancer. I think it is important to register that now.

Then home to a bewildered-looking Raffles and Oscar’s favourite ball on his cosy bed and the paroxysms of sadness and desolation at the realisation of the emptiness where once there was My Boy. Where he should be, still. 

People have been so kind and effusive in their comforting wishes and each kindness prods my tender heart. Not one person who might think “It’s just a dog,‘ has said so and I’m grateful for that too. What I feel is real and raw and visceral. I keep having flashbacks of his huge nose demanding chips; of him dashing out to the back garden barking at the slightest intrusion; of how he used to lie in his buggy, watching the world go by as I pushed him home up the hill. His soft, Byronic ears. I loved him so much, my beautiful boy. `And now he’s gone.