Suey
This piece, written to process the grief I felt when I lost my dog, was originally written in March 2018.
When I knew this would happen someday soon, I wanted to mark it by writing something short and touching, with a well chosen photo accompanying it.
When the time to say goodbye finally came and went, I was left with a thousand thoughts and pictures, none of which seemed enough to sum up the life of a dog that I had spent nearly half of my life with.
Suey was a small and sometimes difficult dog, always instigating scraps with the others, and always forgetting that she was the one that would usually come off worse for wear. The very definition of the word ‘dogged’, she woke everyone up in the morning at 7am with her incessant yowls each day, and would announce every mealtime to my husband by whining and jigging in front of him before he would even think to look at the clock. She would complain outside my bathroom door when she could smell me using both toothpaste and deodorant because she knew that meant I was heading out somewhere — that I was leaving her behind. When we got back, she would cry and scold us, whilst simultaneously admonishing the other dogs for jostling against her, eventually demanding some kind of compensation for being so cruelly abandoned. Her nails, no matter how often we had them trimmed, would clatter across the floor, announcing her entrance into each room. She would tap on the door to be let in, and punch it with growing aggression if we didn’t respond fast enough. Her literal song and dance each time she would get corned beef for lunch must have sounded like Guantanamo Bay to our neighbours, when really it was just Suey’s total lack of patience making itself known from the moment the tin was cracked open until her bowl of food was set down in front of her. She would even sit in the kitchen whenever my mother would come over to cook, bossing her to get back to it when she took breaks because my mum’s beef curry was her absolute favourite.
The beef curry, as it turns out, was the last meal she made herself eat, purely because she loved the taste of it so much. After that, she was done, and we knew it was time to let go.
You are never fully prepared for how quiet your home becomes when a dog is gone, and Suey was an absolute cacophony. Even her farts were audible.
I have sifted through every single photo I took of her; her adorable puppy pictures, her stone-faced killer phase (before the grey fur set in and softened up her sharp, jet black visage), her glamorous chapter where I took photos of her with a borrowed DSLR camera, her journey through middle age, old age and finally into her twilight years when she was forced to share a house with my new husband whom she hated at first, but then grew to love because I put him in charge of the food.
In the end, I had a look at my ‘On This Day’ page on Facebook and realised that there was an album that I had shared exactly 10 years ago today of both Suey and her sister Rosie arsing around in the garden. So here is my photo and my not-so-short stream of thought on the matter.
She was a good dog, and on my last night with her I made sure to tell her that repeatedly. The next day, the same tuk driver who had brought her and Rosie to our home when they were puppies 13 years ago was the one who took her on her final journey on this earth.
Now she is gone, and our hearts are all broken.
