Month's Mind

I took SuperModel to be vaccinated and microchipped.
I cannot describe just how hard it was to go back to the vet's surgery.
It is a month ago today that Top Dog died.
All I could picture, standing on one side of her operating table was my sweet hound, lying there unconscious. All I could think of was holding his face in my hands, of having to kiss him goodbye.

We have had many pets - dogs and cats - and therefore many deaths over the years.
Whenever possible, the vet has come to the house to put an animal to sleep gently in its own bed.
Very few have come to their end in that room they all hate so much.
There was something brutal about the table - pristinely clean of course, not even one white hair caught in the seam to say he had once been there - although God knows, both our vets loved him and tried to save him.

DodoWoman kindly invited me to drop in on my way home, so she could meet SuperModel.
It was a relief to do so, and break my train of thoughts, but back in the car I found some lines going through my head as  - undeterred - my mind replayed the sequence of that ghastly morning:

'...consider when I shall have lost you,

The moon's full hands, scattering waste,

The sea's hands, dark from the world's breast,

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed

In my hands, and my hands full of dust...

Lines from one of my favourite poems by Ted Hughes. It is called 'Song'.

I was lucky enough to meet Ted Hughes once, many years ago.
I told him how much I liked the poem, but he pulled a face. He had written it, he said, when he was very young. It was addressed to his muse, not - of course - a lost dog.
Perhaps he had outgrown it, as writers sometimes do.
I still love it.
And those lines summed up my feelings better than I can at the moment.

The Month's Mind, although a Catholic tradition now, is a custom that goes back to Norse times.
I understand why.
It marks the moment when you begin to realise, truly realise, that someone isn't coming back.


We went, the three of us, and put snowdrops on their graves in the quiet winter sunlight.
Model Dog sat, pressed tight against my leg, and stared at what I was doing. She knows.
SuperModel tried to run away. She doesn't want to know.
I wish I didn't have to know.