His bed still sits in his corner of the livingroom. His toys are still strewn across the floor. Every so often, one of us will step on one and it will emit a squeak that reminds us of what it was like when he filled this place with his presence and how horribly quiet it is without him. We can’t bring ourselves to get rid of any of his things, even though it’s been six weeks now. I don’t know how long you’re allowed to grieve for a dog because I never loved an animal like I loved Humphrey.
The smallest, most mundane things are still liable to bring forth the tears. Basset hounds are shedders and there was always so much of his hair to clean up. But every time I hoover now, the barrel is emptier than the time before, so it feels like every last trace of him disappearing from the world. I still find his hairs on my clothes. I’ll be sitting in a meeting and I’ll spot one on the sleeve of my sweater or the leg of my trousers and I’m sad again.
There’s a passage in Me Cheeta, James Lever’s hilarious and heartbreaking “autobiography” of Tarzan’s chimpanzee, where he talks about the severing of the bond between cross-species friends. He thinks about his former costar and best pal, Johnny Weissmuller, and he wonders whether he feels that there’s a foolish animal missing from his side, one that mocked him constantly “but only out of love”.
That was how it was with Humphrey and me. It’s like he was my wisecracking sidekick and I was his straight man. He ate a man’s sandwich in Stephen’s Green once. The man took his eye off it for a second and Humphrey had it out of his hand without even breaking stride, leaving me to apologise for him. Another time, I tethered him to a bench outside the post office in Avoca and he decided to take off, dragging the bench behind him like a sled dog, until it was smashed into a dozen pieces.
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He was wilful and disobedient in all the ways that anyone who has ever known a basset will understand. I can put my hand on my heart and say that, in all the years we shared together, he never, not even once, did anything I told him to do, unless it happened to be something he was about to do anyway.
One day, which was typical, I was trying to persuade him to get into the car after a walk on Dún Laoghaire pier, but Humphrey had decided that he’d prefer to stay out if it was all the same to me. I resorted to pleading with him the way I always pleaded with him: “Humphrey, please get into the car. I’m begging you. Please, Humphrey, don’t do this to me. I don’t need this today.” And then I noticed, standing a few feet away, a couple with a golden Labrador, staring at me like they believed me to be quite mad.
I think Humphrey was of the opinion, generally, that I took life too seriously and I could do with lightening up. There were times when he drove me to despair, but the love he gave back to us was always more than ample compensation. If you left him alone for five minutes, he greeted your return like you’d been away for a month. Incredibly intuitive, he sensed if you were sad and would lie across your feet, or your lap, just to let you know that he was there – he had this.
We developed a routine that suited us both, synching our inner clocks. We got up at five o’clock every morning. If it was one minute past five, the low whining would start and was enough to roust me from the bed. We spent a few minutes saying good morning to each other and he listened out for one of the dozen-or-so human words that he recognised – but mostly it was “chicken”.
I fixed our breakfasts, then I let him out to go to the toilet, before we settled down for the morning, me to work, Humphrey to enjoy his first nap of the day. He usually slept on the saddle of the doorway, or with his head pressed up against the leg of my desk chair, because his biggest fear in life was that I might go to the fridge to get something to eat and he would sleep through the entire thing. Whenever he awoke and smelled food on my breath, he would shoot me a look so full of betrayal that I’d have to turn my head away.
He got up around 11 in the morning to await the arrival of the postman. He sat at one end of the hallway, staring at the letterbox like a polar bear at a foxhole. When it opened, he charged towards it, barking madly, then the postman said hello to him through the front door and he settled down again.
Then he spent two hours repeatedly assuring me, through huffs, whines and groans, that it was lunchtime, even though he knew well that it wasn’t. Lunchtime was one o’clock. He scoffed his quickly, then watched me eat mine, staring at me unblinkingly in the hope of getting a bread crust from my plate. Even when the last piece of food was in my mouth, he still considered it “in play” until the very moment it was swallowed.
Then we went for one of our walks, which were never about exercise. Basset hounds are slaves to their noses, so walking one tends to be a stop-start affair, which can be incredibly frustrating until – as in all other matters – they teach you patience.
In the afternoon, I returned to work, while Humphrey went back to sleep, although he often woke to bring toys to my desk to try to entice me to play with him. More often than not, he was successful – he was very, very persistent – but sometimes, if I had a deadline to meet, I had no choice but to ignore him. On those occasions, when I finished work, I looked down to find a pile of his toys on the floor next to the desk. It always broke my heart that they were never his favourites but the ones he thought that I had a bias towards.
The evenings were Humphrey’s time. He ate his dinner and then wondered what we were having. If it was chicken, he could sit for two hours and watch the bird cook through the little window in the oven door. When the Christmas turkey was in the oven, he was like me binge-watching The Sopranos for the first time.
Then we settled down for the night. Humphrey was adamant that we should, at the very least, share the sofa with him. The word “no” to a basset hound means “not now – but try again in, say, 30 seconds”. Sometimes, he decided that he preferred the sofa to himself. Many times, my wife arrived home from work to find him stretched out on the thing, snoring, with his ear in his mouth, while I sat glumly on the hard floor.
I miss our routine. I miss all these little tentpoles in our day. Our lives have become less complicated in a terrible way. We can go out now and stay out for hours without the inconvenience of having to rush home to a dog. But we know that when we do arrive home, there’ll be no Humphrey – his entire, ridiculously long body wagging with excitement – to greet us.
It feels way too soon to even think about getting another dog. We both have this fear that another dog wouldn’t measure up to Humphrey and that we wouldn’t love him in the same way. We may feel differently in time but not while we’re still feeling his absence, not while I’m still looking down every 15 minutes, expecting to see him at my heels.
Or maybe Humphrey will be the first and last dog that ever shares my life. And maybe I’ll never get over the feeling that there’s a foolish animal missing from my side, mocking me but only out of love.
For 13½ years, he was my constant companion. We were seldom out of each other’s sight. It was Humphrey who taught me that perhaps the best day’s work we ever did on this planet was to domesticate the dog, but also the great sadness, which every dog lover knows, that our lives are so very long, and theirs are so very short by comparison. And it’s always too soon to say goodbye.
