This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
A last act of love
The arrival of spring has felt more than usually welcome, after a more than usually bleak winter. Last time I wrote this column, I mentioned that my dog — the fabulous Jessie — was displeased about our building work. Soon after, though, I realised that Jessie’s unhappiness was more than temporary.
Fourteen is a grand age for a labrador, and in the last couple of years Jessie’s arthritis had become more severe. It’s a pitfall of her breed, although rigorous enforcement by the sausage police (me) meant that she avoided the other classic labrador problem of obesity, which in turn reduced the strain on her joints. She still liked gentle walks and especially swimming.
When that changed, I knew the end was close. The day she stopped being able to walk, I knew it had come. I asked the builder to take the day off, and he kindly agreed, showing me the tattoo he’d had in memory of his own dog. The Ditums (me, my husband, our two grown-up children) spent a last day with the best dog in the world.
* * *
We gave her treats (mostly sausages). We hugged her a lot. We tried not to cry when she could see us, because we didn’t want her to worry about us and we took her for a walk in a favourite woodland — which, with four of us to help her get around, she was able to enjoy. Then we took her to the vet for the final time.
Jessie came to us when she was seven and was a part of our family through my children’s teenage years: even when everyone else in the house was an unbearable imposition on adolescent nerves, Jessie was there to give and receive affection. She kept us all sane (ish) through lockdown, and she gave me someone to talk to when I worked from home (probably no dog ever knew so much about the Gender Recognition Act).
No one becomes a pet owner in anticipation of this last trip, but every pet owner knows it has to come eventually.
And however much you know objectively that this is the right time to let your pet go, the brutal reality of choosing their death is unavoidably painful. But it is, importantly, a privilege to take this responsibility. It is a last act of love. As we stroked her goodbye, we knew we had been so lucky to have had her.
• • •
WhatsApp gap year
Not long after that sadness, a different kind of parting had to be done: my daughter, now 18, has gone backpacking in South America with two friends. I steeled myself for long periods of not knowing where she was or what she was doing and tried to purge from my brain all memories of watching the BBC series The Serpent, about a serial killer who preyed on backpackers in the 1970s.
I reckoned without Gen Z’s enthusiasm for keeping in touch. Today’s crop of young people have grown up in constant contact with their families: one of the first things my daughter and her friends did in the planning stage was to set up a group WhatsApp for the parents, and even before they got from the gate to the plane, it had started buzzing with updates.
Is it a shame that these girls won’t get the authentic experience of roughing it? For a few days, I worried that the ease of communication was going to bar them from true independence: one day my daughter sent me a very cross message because I’d failed to pick up the phone whilst I was out with friends, which felt like we’d role-reversed.
But even with a data connection, a continent is still a long way away, and the time difference counts. Right now, she’s in the Bolivian salt flats and has been out of reception for several days. Of course, I’m missing hearing from her whilst she has her adventures, and if I let myself, I could fill the silence with terrible imaginings; which is, of course, exactly how being a mother is supposed to be.
* * *
The magic of plaster
Meanwhile, the building work continues, and I dream of a day without dust. A nadir was reached when I caught the flu and staggered downstairs on a Saturday morning to find a carpenter who seemed equally surprised to see me. “You don’t sound very good,” he said, suspiciously. “I don’t fancy catching that.” Chastened, I booked into a hotel so I could spend the weekend shivering and hacking without interrupting the door-hanging schedule.
More hearteningly, we’re past the “tearing things down” stage and comfortably into “putting things up”. To a completely unhandy person like me, the transformation of my house might as well be witchcraft. Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and to me, the sufficiently advanced technology is plastering.
That sounds sarcastic, but there’s something genuinely revelatory about discovering that the bones of my Victorian terrace are amenable to all kinds of adaptation. A house is a living thing, and like any living thing, it can evolve. Still, it will be nice when this particular evolution is over and I can have a proper vacuum.
• • •
Grief is in season
The days before we put Jessie to sleep were a series of sad lasts. After that come the sad firsts: all the things that have to be done newly in the light of the loss. Walking near my house, I saw the spring bulbs had come out. It was on a patch of grass that Jessie regularly patrolled, and I was stricken with the thought that she’d never got to see them flower. Or, being a dog, never got to scent-mark them.
You know you’re grieving when the thought of a crocus going un-urinated on can make you cry. I miss Jessie every day — I still expect to hear her jump up to meet me whenever I walk into the living room — but there’s a reassurance in those new shoots and the proof that life goes on. I’m very ready for the season of rebirth.
