Night Night, Molly

And some mornings you wake up with your head smushed into a sour pillow and you know before you open gritty eyes that this might be a goodbye day and so it was, and so it is and saying night night to a dog is all the terrible and beautiful things there are in the most ordinary of Mondays.

There should be a grander day for it, really. Thunder in the distance. A sky full of signs. Clocks stopping. Instead, we ran out of milk, my phone bleeped with endless notifications, cars continued passing the window and the world failed to notice that one beloved creature was about to leave it.

Maybe you will remember how Ben brought Molly to me when she had just had a litter of six beautiful babies and for a while my whole world was swallowed up in the bliss of squirming tiny puppies, and then the mayhem of the first few months until one by one we found homes for them and sent them off with tiny collars in all the colours of the rainbow.

She arrived in my life already at the centre of something: a mummy, a working dog, Ben’s beloved girl. She came with a history written in fields and whistles and muddy paws, and then calmly allowed me into it.

And through it all she was the epitome of calm Mum. A highly trained, stunning gun dog who was both Ben’s pride and joy, and testament to his skill and who managed the delicious chaos that was the tumble of her own babies with such natural grace it put me to shame when I thought about who I was in the aftermath of the birth of my own little one…

She seemed to instinctively understand that motherhood was both devotion and the occasional need to lie down somewhere nobody could climb on your head. She fed them, watched them and endured them, then looked at us with the patient expression of a mummy who had already worked out that panic was pointless.

How proud we were of her. How lucky I felt to have experienced those few gorgeous months. It felt like a gift.

The Ben I got was a package deal: four working cocker spaniels, two beautiful girls and an orange cat, and while they are all a little bit of wonderful, I don’t think any of them would disagree when I say Molly was the best of them. Obedient to a fault, affectionate and more than that so gently caring in her own doggy way, that if we were walking on the beach and I fell behind, she would linger to check I was ok, instead of dashing into the sea to chase a ball with Raffy, and her two wildly fun little pups, Winnie and Willow.

That was Molly. She noticed. Amid all the barking, running and glorious doggy commotion, she kept a quiet account of where everybody was. She knew when one of us had fallen behind. She understood that a walk wasn’t complete unless all her people came home from it.

She was kind and gentle and an absolute rascal. Open the door and she would be gone, dashing off on adventures the other dogs wouldn’t have dreamed of going on, resulting in much drama as having made her crazy fast escapes, we would find ourselves searching high and low for her, until the kind people around us would report her found and Ben would run out to fetch her, only to find her a few houses down seemingly having the time of her life and charming the pants off those who clearly would have kept her in a heartbeat if he wasn’t so keen to have her back.

Apparently, even the most devoted dog requires a private life. Molly’s included sudden expeditions, new acquaintances and brief attempts to move in with strangers. She could be wonderfully obedient until she decided not to be, at which point she became a small brown streak with no forwarding address.

She was naughty, but heck we loved her so.

And perhaps that is why we loved her so. Goodness without mischief would have been far too saintly for Molly. Her kindness was real, but so was her appetite for an unscheduled adventure. She was gentle without being dull, loyal without surrendering her own mind… a girl after our own Brocante hearts.

But she was getting older. Slower. Her coat duller and her eyes a little droopy, not with sadness but with, I suppose, the kind of quiet exhaustion you only see in the eyes of old ladies sitting on buses. She had had enough I think?

There comes a point when loving an animal asks something unbearable of us. We have to look beyond our own frantic wish for one more day and listen to what their body has been trying to say. They can’t explain it. They simply become quieter inside the life they once charged through, until we understand.

So today we took her to the vets, where it was confirmed that it was time, and they took me to a little quiet room and I sat on the floor with our gorgeous girl on my knee and they gave me biscuits to feed her, and just a few moments later she was gone, and it was, as my dad told me it would be, both beautiful and something of a privilege to be there as she went.

It was a goodbye day, a night night sleep tight day, a doing right by her day, a thank-you for being so utterly perfect day.

There I was, sitting on the floor on an ordinary Monday, doing the last thing I could do for a dog who had spent her life quietly keeping track of all of us. She didn’t have to wonder if she was loved.

And afterwards I walked back to the car to Ben who has seen too much grief, but knows above all else that the life he gave Molly was all that it should have been and her sweet beautiful nature such lovely reflection of him and his family that he can always, always believe that we get the dogs we deserve. That dogs are the mirrors of our soul and that a dog who was never happier than when she was snuggled up as close to our faces as she could get, truly was a reflection of the goodness and silly joy of her owner.

We will find her everywhere, always. In the muddle of the other dogs piled up in a silly stack. In the pause before opening the back door. In the beach walks where somebody must remember to look back for the person who has fallen behind. In the strange new emptiness left by the kind of little dog who took up no more than her own small patch of floor, yet somehow occupied whole rooms in our lives.

Six squirming puppies. Rainbow collars. Escapes and adventures. Her long, astonishing ears. That wild little fringe. The warm weight of her pressing as close to our faces as she could possibly get.

We will miss her so very much. But it is true, saying night night to a dog truly is all the terrible and beautiful things there are in the most ordinary of Mondays.

Sleep tight Mol.x