Each time a family dog dies, I go over it all again and decide that the intense grief is far outweighed by the joy the animal brought to our lives.
And so it is yet again with Ronda – the raven-black, shiny, fine-boned labrador, soft-hearted and so very beautiful, euthanised after spending 12 of her 13 years with us.
Dog people know that all canines are different. Some dogs are funny and eccentric. There are extroverts and introverts. Pack leaders and followers. Some are angry. Some are mean. Some dogs are super-smart, others are bone lazy.
The best way to describe Ronda is that she was kind. She was kind to all other dogs. And she was kind to humans – not just to her own people but to all she encountered. Her love for her human and canine family was as unencumbered as it was uncomplicated.
In her later years especially, strangers could sense her kindness – could see it in her eyes and her flailing tail. They would stop (when she could still do her daily long walks; a tumour in her chest kept her largely housebound for her final year), remark on her beauty and ask to pat her. She would make way for other dogs. Sit patiently while the yappiest, most alpha mutts barked at her and tried to boss her. Toddlers could yank her ears, poke her eyes and pull her tail. She’d lick them in return.
Amid the rivers of tears, and the heartache at losing a being so central to our family, come the reminiscences of golden moments from the years we shared with her. I spend so much of my time with our dogs. They are with me when I work, when I walk, when I cook, when I go to the shops. They are part of life’s prosaic rhythms.
They are integral to our memories. Their lives, their births and their deaths are in so many ways deeply emotional markers of our own time on Earth. Twelve years feels like a significant chunk of my life. Our youngest daughter was eight when Ronda arrived. Like Nari, the lab we got when our youngest was three, Ronda was a failed trainee detection dog. Nari died when our daughter was 12 and Ronda became the surviving co-pilot, the consort, a comfort and a joy in her journey from childhood to adolescence and now to adulthood.
Ronda is there in so many of my seminal memories (not to mention hundreds of photographs) of all our kids and, now, our grandchildren.
Nari was decidedly, robustly alpha. The day Ronda arrived and tried to steal her bone, Nari bit her on the snout. She never did that again. Ronda was madly jealous, demanding our attention – until Nari put her back in her box with a nip here and a snap there. She was always the subservient one.
No surprise then that Ronda became lost, totally rudderless and afraid of the world when Nari died (I’d said when she went that she was my favourite dog ever but I’m no longer sure I have a best in show). After Nari’s death, I felt I needed to learn to love Ronda. But she made it easy for me after the arrival of a new interloper – the hyper-energetic Olive, a collie crossed with a blue cattle dog.
We quickly observed a beautiful temperamental change in Ronda when the feisty six-week-old Olive blasted into her orbit. Olive nipped at Ronda constantly, chewing at her ears and scratching her face. She stole her food, used her as a child might the play equipment in the park. The pup gnawed so incessantly at Ronda’s tail that its tip was calloused until the day she died.
But Ronda responded only with kindness, patiently playing with the pup, shielding her from bullies in the dog park and schooling her in her humans’ commands: stop, sit, outside, stay, go.
Olive watched her surrogate mum die on her bed in the lounge, with her humans all about and ABC Classic (she loved it) as her final soundtrack. She understands what happened. Today, she sniffs around the house – in the laundry and under my desk as I write this – in search of darling Ronda.
Olive is the smartest of dogs. Yet she can’t quite intellectualise it.
But neither can I. I felt relief when Ronda’s discomfort – her laboured breathing and nocturnal restlessness – ended so gently. And yet this morning I still somehow expected to see her at the bottom of the stairs, her tail thumping at the floorboards at the faintest hint of my footfall. More tears.
I thought about Ronda’s kindness and patience a lot when she was dying, about how her legacy had gradually become manifest in that yapping, nipping cross-breed pup Olive.
For I’ve seen it in recent times in her care around dog-crazy toddlers on the street and the grandkids. And so touchingly at the aged care home we visit regularly, where she sits at the feet of the elderly so they might stroke her and shut their eyes to summon the poignant memories of their own long-lost doggies.
I’ve long thought people (whatever our choice of pet) can learn so much from the animals in our lives. For me, it’s always – and always will be – dogs, such highly sentient, emotionally acute creatures.
Ronda was a beauty in every sense and the grief at her death, right now, is as painful and red-raw as any I’ve felt. I often wondered if she was investing in me more love, patience and kindness than I could ever reciprocate.
And now I see all of those characteristics in the dog she adopted and I’m certain of it.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
