I want to write about Samson, my dog, who is dead, his body anyway, who died almost a year ago, who I miss, we all do, who is still so alive in my head. He died last October after a failure of his kidneys brought on by something he ate many months before which brought him low at the time but I ignored it, as is my get-on-with-it survival want that I seem to apply to everyone, including myself, in my care. My dependents have to be pretty bad to warrant a trip to the hospital, or even over the counter medicine. Mostly I figure it out myself, my children patched up with sweating it out or magic gel or hot broth and sleep. It’s mostly worked apart from the week-long episode of poorly dog six months before he died when I was certain he’d eaten a rotten rat and just had to pull himself together. I didn’t know such a thing could get into his kidneys, the pulling together cause an irreparable strain that would emerge later as vomiting, a terrible foul breath that was, the vet told me, the toxins that he could no longer process. We’d taken him to have his teeth cleaned. They did a blood test. The news came in a phone call while I was busy doing something else. He was born in my hands, pushed out of his whippet mother as she circled by the Aga, I broke the seal on his sac. He was supposed to go to my friend and his identical brother to stay with me, but they determined the switch, the whippet twins, and he stayed instead. He put up with my tough love, he forgave and loved relentlessly, when we would go away for long summers here, leaving him at home with a friend come to stay, we would sing the going away song, No Samson, no cry and we would cry a little and our hearts would lurch a lot. He was our boy. His last days were a trip to Scotland, ten hours in a car, stinking and forgiven for it though I didn’t yet know he was ill. And when the phone call came from the vet and I stopped what I was doing, she said, it’s better sooner than later and so I called my children home. He died in our arms, those eyes that knew, he knew it was time to go. We buried him in open air in the arms of the great Juniper tree high up in the woods where only we would know. My son returned to the place three months later to find his body picked clean, a perfect skeleton of Samson, the tilt of his whippet head. He has taken his skull. And people come to the farm and say they thought they saw a whippet running in the fields, chasing deer, and we sing the song of him and cry.
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Now look what you've done. You've gone and made me cry again. Darling Uncle Sams. Bless him forever.
The Spirits of Sport and Samson flowing over those hills and fields.......two very much loved friends xxxx