Stray Dog. Gareth O'Callaghan

on a real life of its own. It was as if it acquired a soul when it came into being. Our chestnut tree was no exception. He seemed to look beneath the surface of everything that breathed and drank to stay alive. And he always saw something much deeper, more beautiful and everlasting. And yet, after twenty years of living together, I had never been able to share his raw connection with life and nature. It was a part of him that I felt excluded me. What I didn’t realise until midday that day was that I had been excluding myself all along.

      Shortly after eleven, John complained of feeling sick. He told me the pain was so bad that he could not get comfortable on the chair any more. He had taken his painkillers at eight. He wasn’t due another dose of morphine until two. I wanted to give him an extra dose but he waved his hand and forced a smile.

      “Will I help you up to bed?”

      He shook his head and held his stomach.

      “Will I get the doctor?” I asked nervously.

      “No.”

      He was in agony. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes closed. His fists formed a knot around his tummy. I felt helpless, as if I was going to cry.

      The sound of a car screeching to a halt and a loud howl made me jump. We could hear the piercing yelp of an animal from the street outside. I ran to the front door.

      No sooner had I opened it than a white, shaggy dog ran in between my legs, past the staircase and into the sitting-room where John was lying.

      I closed the door quickly in case a second dog might follow. Perhaps there had been two of them fighting. I heard a car drive away at speed. I hurried into the sitting-room to find the shaggy dog crouched across John’s legs, whimpering and shaking.

      “Out!” I shouted.

      The frightened dog crouched even lower, shivering and yelping. Her left leg was bleeding. She licked the wound and stuck her head into the crook of John’s arm.

      “Leave her, Jo. She’ll be OK. Let her just catch her breath,” John said softly. He stroked the back of the dog’s head.

      I watched as John whispered to the dog. He smiled as the dog looked up at him.

      “Here, come and pat her,” he said to me.

      I shrugged my shoulders. “What if she bites?”

      John smiled. “Of course she won’t bite you. She has just been knocked down. She needs to be loved, not thrown out. Get me a bowl of water and a clean towel. We’ll tidy her up a bit.” He felt the dog’s leg gently. The animal whimpered and crouched again. “She can still move her leg. I don’t think she’s too badly hurt.”

      4

      Later that day I called the pound. I asked them if they were missing a white, shaggy dog. They said they were. She had escaped while being fed. They asked if we wanted them to come and collect her. John waved his arm from left to right. It was a very clear “no thanks, we’re keeping her.”

      And so, in the days and weeks leading up to my husband’s death, we adopted a stray dog and fell head over heels in love – not just with her, but also with each other.

      Within a week of taking in “the dog from Death Row”, as John had christened her, strange things began to happen in our lives and around the house. John needed less sleep. He was managing on lower doses of morphine, which he didn’t need so often.

      On the eighth day after the dog’s arrival, he asked me if I would like to walk in the park beside our house. Our doctor had warned me that John was not to walk outdoors because of the risk of catching a chest infection. This, I was told, could kill him. John insisted that, whether or not I chose to come with him, he was going.

      And so, holding hands, with the dog on a brand new lead, we walked in the afternoon spring sunshine in a quiet part of the park. We chatted about old times. We laughed and squeezed each other’s arms like young lovers. It was something we hadn’t made time for in a very long time.

      We spoke about the weekend we visited Paris to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. We talked about the weekend in Prague we had won in a pub raffle some years before and how we had promised each other we would go back some day. And we laughed.

      We laughed at how the dog chased a small hare but couldn’t catch it. I watched John throw a large stick and shout to her, “Fetch!” I couldn’t help wondering where he had got this new strength from in just a few days. I had expected that he might need my help getting from the bed to the couch in a matter of those same days. Something was happening – something I couldn’t understand.

      Another thing occurred within the same few days. Our “strange” neighbours, as John liked to call them, called to say hello. This might not seem unusual until you consider that they hadn’t spoken to us for almost three years! They blamed the sudden halt in our friendship on John’s habit of playing Chopin waltzes late into the night. Yet we never once complained about their son’s habit of testing his motorbike’s engine in their garden shed in the early hours of the morning. We’d built a wall between the two gardens. They felt that this was a personal slur against them.

      In recent days they had heard the dog barking and playing and two people laughing in the back garden. They heard the sound of Chopin filling our home for the first time in years. They admitted that days and nights of curiosity had got the better of them. They called to see if there was room in our lives again for two old friends. And there was.