Ode to Zola

For the love of Dog

Our family dog, Zola, died ten days ago. Writing is my way of processing my emotions and giving them some sort of narrative shape, creating a story out of something painful or enormous that is made easier to tell and to remember. So, it’s natural that I should write about Zola, but I also want to honour her because she was the very best dog to us.

This love that we felt for our dog is, I know, a commonly recognised thing. The many, many messages we received from friends and strangers showed me how resonant this extraordinary relationship is between human and dog. It felt to me that people only just stopped short of sending us flowers. How is it that two such utterly different species, with no common language, can understand each other so well?

We’ve talked a lot about this at home for the last few months as we watched her ebb away. Zola was just shy of her twelfth birthday, a healthy, strong dog until her muscles and vitality were stripped by cancer. We took the decision not to put her through treatment but only palliative care, keeping her with us to the end. Though she became slower and more lethargic over the weeks, she never appeared to be in pain or confusion. Not long after her final morning walk, she refused to eat any food and barely drank water. We think she waited for us to come down the stairs in the morning after her last night and died at home, gently, her beloved master holding her paws.

Lying in bed that night, sobbing, my husband and I talked about her. ‘She was just such a wonderful person,’ he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. We always had the greatest of respect for her caninity – she was a skilled hunter, with a nose that could sniff out a mole buried deep beneath the earth or a pheasant that had wandered through a woodland an hour before – but she had an emotional intelligence that awed us. Each of us in the family felt we had our own special connection to her, believed that she understood us in a way that no one else did. If you were feeling low or in pain, Zola would come and sit beside you, quietly, just letting you know she knew.

And if that’s anthropomorphism? I don’t care. Sometimes I think that if you think it, it is true. We’re always wondering what dogs really think, and for most of them, most of the time, it isn’t anything more than a desire for their needs to be met. They know to give you whatever they recognise makes you fulfil those needs. Zola was certainly capable of lying on her back to expose her tummy, inviting a rub, making sure you still loved her, would still feed and walk her.

But Zola never did something she didn’t want to do just because there was a bit of a bacon-flavoured treat at the end of it. Quite often, she would lull you into believing that you were in control, running back to you on the whistle, sometimes even in view of admiring strangers (‘what a well-trained dog,’ we smugly imagined them saying), only to then ignore you on the next whistle, as she ran across three fields to the place where she knew the pheasants could be flushed out. Screaming her name, fury on her return, rewarding her return, ignoring her, going quiet so she would wonder where we were… none of it made a blind bit of difference until she decided she would come back. And yet, there were those times when she sat beside you, and asked for nothing in return. What is that, if not an understanding of her owners?

She was an important dog to us because she sat so firmly in the centre of the family. We got her six months after we had left London and moved to the countryside. It was the first time we were able to give my two older stepchildren – then 14 and 21 – proper rooms to stay with us, and my stepson, in his own wisdom, saw that a dog would help us turn the house into a home. She arrived when our son was just three years old, and we spent the summer mostly in our new garden, fawning over our adorable black puppy with enormous paws. She was something we could all love together easily, outside other more complex family dynamics, and blended us into something else – the Zola family. Her enthusiastic welcome whenever any one of us came through the door, whether after ten minutes or ten days, meant each one of us felt at home immediately. Whether toddler, stepchild or stepmother newly wrenched out of London, we knew where we were when Zola was there.

Both my husband and I work from home, and we loved to have Zola lying on the office floor, fast asleep, gently snoring. We’d look up from composing a reply to a tricky email, or wondering how to meet a hard deadline, and see her there, a perfect example of another way to exist on this earth.

The simplicity of the relationship – if you love a dog, they’ll love you back – made her an easy repository of all our emotions. I can understand why men particularly doted on their dogs – socially, loving another person could be fraught with difficulty, but there was no shame in loving your four-legged friend. One man told my husband that he sobbed more when his dog died than he did for his parents.

In every relationship you have, there’s a part of you that is brought out by the peculiarities of that connection. When that relationship is over, that part of you is over, too. It’s a truism that a little part of you dies with it. We are each of us grieving the part of us that loved Zola, and her absence has shifted the family dynamic in some subtle way. It’s not necessarily for the worse, but it is different.

Of course, as with so many families, she arrived when our children were young and her death came as they are either grown or on their way to being adults. Her life defined a very particular era in our family. My stepdaughter is living and working in London, my stepson married and moved to America a year ago, our youngest son is halfway through his teen years, shedding his own childlike features, growing into the shape of the man he soon will be. My tears are shed for Zola and for the recognition that those years have come to an end. And there’s a strange, thin flutter of liberation that a death brings, too: something new will come, not to replace, but in its stead.

We wrapped our Zola in a soft blue blanket and buried her in the garden in a spot that we pass every day, and the image of her so beautifully enclosed, her body curled up as if only asleep, has been very comforting. A weeping cherry tree will be planted there, blossoming every year at the anniversary of her death and on her birthday.