The brothers did everything together. And over the past week they died together. Bundy and Buster, bullmastiff bon vivants extraordinaire, had cancer. They were only six years old!
Bundy had an aggressive cancer of the spleen. He had a huge tumour there. His kidneys were stuffed with so many tumours there was hardly any kidney to be seen. He had more in the space near his heart, and in his lungs, which was why he had been coughing the past one and a half weeks. One day he was bounding around on springs, all four long legs in the air (he was a rangy, excitable bullmastiff). In the past three weeks he grew quieter and then very quiet. We thought he had tick bite and would get over it. Or had eaten something foul like a dead bird and was trying to digest it. The vet gave him an ultrasound last Sunday and booked him in for a CAT scan on Tuesday. We put him out of his misery straight away.
We wondered how Buster would cope. An invisible string connected the brothers. One would rush outside to investigate a noise and would always check to see if the other was following, always. They would stay in line of sight of each other. They would jointly ignore aeroplanes, bees and birds for hours and then simultaneously decide that one of those was a sinister threat, bolting out into the garden, then wasting precious seconds tangling in a snarling, gargling fight for the right to be the first to bark while the bird, bee or aeroplane drifted out of sight. A million memories …
Buster had an eye problem which was not getting better – also in the past three weeks. The vet thought it was an infection – perhaps a grass seed had got inside. I felt guilty that in spraying them with fly spray I might have got some in his eye. Antibiotic ointments didn’t work. Like Bundy he began vomiting after meals last Friday, and coughing. Then he stopped eating. That day his eye bulged out – not an infection but a tumour was pushing everything out. He couldn’t even drink water without throwing up. We took the old boy in Monday this week and he was glad to go. When pets know they are dying they withdraw from you, and we could see that in the last 36 hours.
Oh, the house is silent. Their bowls are still there, and the collars and leads. There’ll be fur in corners of the room and in the tracks of the sliding doors for months. There’ll be dog-hairs on our black tee-shirts for ages.
The silence in the mornings, and when we come home after work! No tail thumps, no panting, no muffled bumps as they manoeuvre around the half-door, each shouldering the other aside to be first to say hello, no crazy grins splitting their huge faces when we open the door, no Bundy taking my entire forearm in his warm mouth and delicately holding it, his eyes loving me, no Buster persistently pawing us to share a petting interlude, no Bundy rushing over to lick us whenever we finished a phone call, as if we’d come back from a long journey, no Buster yodelling along with us, no dogs drinking noisily from water-bowls in celebration of our returning home from the shops or work or any time away from them. Patrick took their many dog mattresses out of the family room, and now the hard-floored room echoes with our voices. I have the radio on to fill the space.
Bundy was the intelligent one who could see problems and work out quick ways around them, making life easier at fraughtly competitive moments like mealtimes. Buster was all big-boy male, heart on his sleeve, uncomplicated and virile. They taught us to live in the moment and love them and learn that there is no better time to love anybody than right now, at any present moment. Wherever we sat they would lie facing us, their eyes drinking us in, wagging their tails when their names were mentioned or even when we talked about them in code – they knew. We loved them, we loved them so.
Goodbye, my beauties. See you later.
dinookelleghan 