Upwards Facing Dog

Sally sits beside me in the car, completely silent, her head turned towards me, dark almond eyes searching mine, but calm. Somehow we already know this will be the last trip, and as I drive my eyes begin to blur through the wordless goodbyes, reliving our years together, our walks, pizzas, cuddles on the couch. It’s Easter Sunday. The waiting room is quiet. Someone will see you now, I’m told.

Next day they come to the house at my invitation. It’s time.

We’re in the kitchen. I’m hunkered down on the floor while one of them trills conversationally. I don’t look to see what she is doing - I’m holding Sally in my arms. The other is more sombre, respectful. She murmurs gently what’s now and next, but I drown her out, trying to slow the moments before there are no more moments left. We’re silently singing our memories. A patch is shaved, anaesthetic rubbed, a needle fixed onto a syringe.

Through the glass door, my daughter and Sally’s sit side by side, watching us, afraid.

The needle discharges its poison and she slips away in my arms. So quickly. One moment here, next moment gone. Our daughters run forward, mine wild-eyed. But her daughter, Dolly, is following some other canine sense we’ve lost or never had. Eyes and nose up she is watching a scene we cannot see. She follows a trail in the air, around the room and up towards the ceiling. In the corner opposite where I wait with her lifeless mother in my arms she stays, gazing up, at something unseen.

I turn to the vet – do you see that? Yes, she nods, I’ve seen it before. They know more about death than we do.

My daughter and I, still holding Sally’s lifeless body, try to encourage the other dog over to sniff at least, to say goodbye. But she has no interest. Her goodbyes are being said elsewhere. Upward facing dog, facing what?

When the vet told us that it was important that Sally’s pup was present at her death – it would stop her perpetually searching for her – I didn’t expect that she would witness a different death to the one we saw. I’m sure there will be some doubting Thomas who’ll say it was just a whiff of Bisto from next door. I’m not here to argue, just to say that it was one of the strangest, but most comforting things I have ever seen.

In the intervening years I declared that I would never again issue an instruction to terminate the life of another creature, like some trigger happy commandant. Or a South American traveller happy to drown her dog in the airport toilets rather than miss her flight. The debate about assisted dying last winter for me became a simple binary decision. No. But I had not reckoned on the agony of a life force that was stronger than the body built to carry it. Asking Dolly, now aged sixteen, to continue seemed self-indulgent when she’d lost her sight, hearing and finally sense of smell, with dementia, dizziness and double incontinence, just possessed of an indefatigable loyalty that seemed to be her motor. But someone had to pull the trigger.

In one of the most infuriating verses of the Old Testament, and there are so many to choose from, Genesis 1, 26-31, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Our dominion is not one of our strengths.

Some of you may be reading this and saying, you silly goose – human life is so much more valuable than that of animals. I will honk back, value is a relative concept. It's not that I think some animals, i.e. my pets, are more valuable than some humans, i.e. Donald Trump, it’s that I think that we are all here on this beautiful planet, by the grace of something that some people call God. Not the main character of that King James sweeping family narrative, but a force that gave us our lives and will give us our deaths. It’s far easier when death is given than when you need to order it, turn up for it, insert the pessary or the syringe, deus ex machina to die-for. Trump can only be tolerated in a world in which he can be viewed as just another bunch of atoms expanding from the singularity. God speed his return there too.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit yuj, meaning union – of breath and body. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs says: “The practice of Yoga is believed to have started with the very dawn of civilisation. The science of yoga has its origin thousands of years ago, long before the first religions or belief systems were born. In the yogic lore, Shiva is seen as the first yogi or Adiyogi, and the first Guru or Adi Guru.”

One day you may choose to adopt the downward and upward facing dog poses in Chaturanga, gliding from Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (up dog), arse in the air to Adho Mukha Svanasana (down dog). There you will ideally take five deep breaths, as one with the other sentient creatures on God’s green earth, all of them. Breath and body as one. Unlikely that you’ll see a spirit, but you never know.

I wonder, is it a coincidence that so many yoga poses are named after animals?

In the throes of grief, when your loyal dog fails to turn up and settle herself inconveniently on the yoga mat behind you, you will find yourself missing her, and her mother, and all the pets who’ve loved and who have loved us back. They too are atoms returning to the breath of the universe. Maybe we have more to learn from them than we thought.

The Covenant
by Brenda Hillman

Having stopped using dolphins to locate explosives in the Cold War
they had 30 leftover dolphins.

An officer noted that to move them to open waters would endanger them.

One dolphin taking part in all this smiles like a Boy Scout counting knives—

(how do they smell explosives under the sea)

(who had once taken souls to the beyond)

Before the second marriage i greeted middle age;
should i wear reading glasses at the wedding?

(& : how to keep up w/ the spirit world— whose figures
     seemed distant, cool—)

These bodies we’ll know only a few more decades
 have become a series of yeses;     yes to capillaries & leg veins’ h’s,
    to x’s on hands bathed in aloe & sweet peppermint,

yes to face lines so western—

When the officer shows concern by squinting,
one especially tame dolphin puts its nose—what looks like a child’s knee—
    into the officer’s hand.

We have so much to learn. From the ancients, from the animals.

Do you agree?