We Stayed Together for the Dog
Neither of us could leave the one creature who loved us both.
Our couples therapist asked what was still holding the marriage together. We answered in unison, for the first time in four years...
"Biscuit."
Biscuit was not a metaphor. Biscuit was eleven kilos of beagle mix with the ears of a much larger dog and the moral authority of a small town judge. We adopted him in our second year of marriage, back when we still shared a blanket and finished each other's food, from a shelter where he had been returned twice for, and I quote the paperwork, "excessive devotion."
They were not wrong. Biscuit loved with his entire body. He greeted us at the door as if we had returned from war. He slept exactly halfway between our pillows, a furry demilitarized zone, long before we understood that a demilitarized zone was what we needed.
I cannot tell you the day the marriage ended, because it did not end on a day. It ended the way a houseplant dies when two people each assume the other one is watering it. Somewhere around year five, Raj moved into the spare room, officially because of his snoring, and we both agreed to believe that. We became flawless roommates. We had a chore chart. We had a shared calendar. We said "thank you" to each other constantly, with the terrible politeness of two people who have run out of anything else to say.
What we still had, at seven every morning and eight every night, was the walk rota.
Biscuit did not know the marriage was over.
Biscuit believed we were the two finest people ever assembled, and he needed us both present to believe it properly. If Raj took out a suitcase for a work trip, Biscuit sat inside it and trembled. The one weekend I went to my sister's alone, he refused food for two days and lay across my side of the bed like a widow in a film. The vet used the word "attachment" the way other people use the word "condition."
So we stayed. And I want to be honest about how absurd it got, because if I am not honest, this story is worthless. We spoke to each other through the dog. "Tell your father his dinner is in the microwave." "Ask your mother if she paid the electricity bill." Biscuit would look from one of us to the other, ears at half mast, doing his level best as a translator for a language he did not know was dead.
We spent four hundred euros on a therapist and used most of our sessions to discuss Biscuit's separation anxiety, until the week she put down her pen and said, very gently, "I would like us to consider whose separation anxiety we are actually treating."
We laughed at her. Together, actually... It was the most married we had felt in years.
During that time I was writing again, quietly, the way you take up smoking again. Careful little poems where nothing happened to anyone. I posted a few, and they earned exactly the polite nothing they deserved. Much later I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and my face went hot, because every poem I wrote in that house was wearing a seatbelt in a parked car. The one thing I could not write about was the specific loneliness of a house where nobody fights, nobody touches, and the only heartbeat that crosses the hallway at night has four legs.
Biscuit turned thirteen.
Then his kidneys turned on him.
The vet talked us through it in the tone they must practice in the mirror, and we nodded in the way people nod when they are not going to be able to remember any of this later. There were fluids, special food, a chart on the fridge next to the chore chart. Raj set alarms for the night doses and never once missed one. I would hear him at three in the morning, whispering to the dog in the kitchen. "Good boy. Nearly done. Don't tell your mother I gave you cheese."
On the last morning, the vet asked if one of us wanted to hold him, and we both stepped forward at the same time...
Neither of us stepped back.
So we sat on the floor of that little room together, knee to knee for the first time in years, and Biscuit lay across both our laps, which had always been his favourite arrangement, the one that pinned his two favourite people into the same square metre where he could supervise them. He looked at Raj, and then at me, and then he sighed the enormous sigh of a small dog who has finally, finally got everyone where they belong, and he went to sleep.
We cried in the car park like teenagers. Raj cried into my shoulder, and I cried into his horrible fleece jacket that I had hated for a decade, and it smelled of him and of dog, and I hated it and I loved it and I hated it.
And here is the turn I did not see coming: the grief did not release us... Not straight away.
The grief sat us down at our own kitchen table that night and made us talk. Real talk, the kind we had been outsourcing to a beagle for six years. We talked until two in the morning.
We said the unsaid things, all of them, and none of them were cruel, which was somehow the saddest part. There was no villain to divorce.
There were just two people who had loved each other once, carefully, and then carefully stopped, and one dog who had spent his whole life carrying the difference.
Biscuit was never keeping the marriage alive. He was the last honest creature in the house, and neither of us could bear to be the one who moved out and left honesty behind.
We sold the flat in spring. The chore chart went in the recycling. The custody question that had held us hostage for years resolved itself with a cardboard box of ashes that we split, seriously, fifty fifty, into two small tins, because even at the end we were fair to the point of comedy. The estate agent asked why we were smiling at the handover. Neither of us could have explained it.
That autumn I finally wrote about him. I sat down meaning to write about a dog and wrote about a marriage, which I understand now is how grief operates: it lets you in through the small door and then shows you the whole house. It was the first unsafe poem of my life. My hands were cold when I finished it, and I knew it was good the way you know milk has turned... Instantly, and with your whole face.
Raj and I meet once a year now, on the anniversary of the adoption, at the park where Biscuit conducted his daily inspection of every bin and every ankle. There is a bench there, third one along the chestnut path, that was his command post. Last October Raj brought his new partner's homemade biscuits and I brought a poem I did not read out loud, and we stood by the bench for twenty minutes, catching up like the old colleagues we essentially are.
Neither of us sat down on it. We never do.
The bench stays empty, the leaves pile up against its legs, and somewhere in the middle of it, exactly halfway between where the two of us stand, there is a space the size of a small, devoted dog.
We leave it there. It is his.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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