He stole my tomatoes. He stole them green and straight off the vine, had a bit of a chew, and with no guile at all left the evidence strewn around the garden for me to find.
He came snuffling upstairs when he thought you'd slept in too long of a Saturday, but every day at half past two in the morning, he padded out to the kitchen to sit with me as I quietly made myself coffee before going in to work.
I don't think our dog Bunk every really understood why I was there with him in the middle of the night, only to then slip out the front door. It's hard to know. Bunk's default expression was bewilderment. His go-to attitude resignation. He was not a dog of deep inquiry.
I was told once by someone who works with guide dogs that they don't train chocolate Labradors because they aren't considered the sharpest pencil in the box. Our experience would back that — but I have a feeling they are the absolute sweetest.
Bunk never barked at anyone, ever. We used to joke that if we were robbed, he'd lick the thief to death. He never fetched — he just wanted to sniff. He regarded a voice command as purely advisory.
He came into our lives as a bouncy six-month-old and I brought my infant son home to his brief confusion and then swift adoption of a strange new playmate.
Addison watched TV from his dog bed and fed him every crust I tried to press upon him.
We loved this big brown dog deeply.
A Christmas surprise — of the worst kind
By now you may have guessed that this story does not have a happy ending. Do you remember me writing last year that my feelings about Christmas are conflicted and ambivalent? The most wonderful day of the year ain't always so, it seems to me.
Bunk had not been well. He had slowed down and was refusing to walk. He slept all day, waking only to press his nose into my leg, his unblinking eyes beseeching me to understand. "He's trying to tell us something", I said to my husband.
Just before Christmas we took him to hospital, and they discovered a large tumour in his jaw. At first glance it looked very bad. They wanted to keep him in for tests.
The call came through on Christmas morning as we were driving home from collecting armfuls of fresh bread for the family hordes that were later to descend.
The vet on the line spoke quietly. The tumour was well-advanced and had spread to Bunk's neck and chest. We could try chemo to slow it down, the vet gently suggested, but it wouldn't cure it. The other option to discuss, she said, was putting Bunk down now before he suffered any more.
My son leapt from his seat in the back of the car. "Don't you dare kill my dog!" he yelled and burst into tears.
By the time we got home, my son was quiet again and asked us to sit down. We need to talk about this, he said.
The film director Michael Apted died this summer, and his famous 7 Up documentary series came alive again in the minds of us who have seen this remarkable social experiment. It tested the Jesuit adage: "Give the child until he is seven and I will show you the man".
I don't know if the series bore out that adage or not. My eight-year-old still loves cuddles and pretend play and fluffy animal pictures, but that morning he proceeded to walk his parents through complexities and the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities of being the loving carer of another sentient being.
"I know that Bunk wants most of all to come home and be with me," he reasoned, "and I want him home too, but I also know that the best thing for him is not to be in pain. But I don't want to be the one who killed their dog — so I don't know what to do."
Yeah kid — you said it. You said all of it.
Whose comfort are we most taking care of?
The date was set for the next day, Boxing Day — which had been, up until this Christmas, my favourite day of the year.
There is no varnishing that experience. We call it "putting an animal down" but there is a much blunter word for what we decide to do in the name of humane animal treatment.
I don't know if I will ever be able to make my peace with it, but there it is, and there we were — in that room, with our dog lying on a colourful crocheted rug, an IV line into his arm, a needle of green liquid, and our hands all over him, all over him, his long flank stroked by my husband, his velvet ears warm under my palms. I closed his eyes.
I ran into a friend a day later who had heard the sad news, and he shared with me the story of the time his family made the same hard decision we did, only to be told by their vet that maybe their beloved family dog had a little longer in him. You don't need to do this yet, the vet said.
Relieved, they left her as planned with the sitter and went on holidays. The dog died a few days later — alone in the house, and possibly in an unknown amount of pain. My friend said he will always wish they made the harder decision earlier and were able to be with her at the end.
Whose comfort are we most taking care of when we make decisions like this? Our own? Our beloved pets? A bit of both, yes?
In the way of children, our boy went from storms of sobs to insistently asking when we were going to get another one. My husband says things just don't feel right without the pleading eyes of a lab at his side.
Bunk, it looks like you made too large a space in our lives for us to wait much longer for some other lovely creature to try to fill it.
Your longish weekend ahead
This weekend, we can fill all the spaces of what I hope will be a longer weekend than usual for you all. We have wonderful reads for you on lost cricket pitches and lost streets, but we've also discovered the good economic news in Australia's continued recovery: here's something you probably never thought you'd hear an economist say about 2021 — "we got this".
Have a safe and happy weekend — watch out for the heat in the south-east and watch out you don't fall into one of those entrenched potholes in the road of the national conversation about Australia Day. You'd think a day of national celebration that continues to divide a people who are at heart so willing to be truly reconciled with one another would be sorted at some stage, wouldn't you? Not this year — maybe next.
Maybe one-person Aussie band Tash Sultana can salve these still-raw historical wounds. Their new single just drips like nectar, gorgeous and rich, and will wrap itself around whatever this long-ish weekend holds for you. Wrap yourself around someone warm in return. Go well.
LoadingVirginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and the former co-host of ABC News Breakfast.
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2021-01-22 20:00:00Z
CBMiUGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAxLTIzL3ZpcmdpbmlhLXRyaW9saS1sb3NpbmctcGV0LWdyaWVmLzEzMDgwNDQ00gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEzMDgwNDQ0
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