Book description
Lucy died at 9. 25 a. m. on Tuesday, 8 December 2009. My wife and I
had known this would happen, in the sense we had known it would happen
sometime, for she was old and had become very deaf. What nothing had
prepared us for, what nothing could have prepared us for, was the
effect it would have on us as we found ourselves locked into the full
Victorian choreography of grief. In our time death has been taken out
of direct personal experience; it occurs off-stage, among strangers, a
staff nurse intoning on the phone, Â I think you'd better come, but
there's no need to hurry', that coded instruction we all get in time,
so confusing when we first hear it, so bleak after. But with Lucy
there were no hospital visits, no hanging onto the clipped asides of
doctors, and there was not even the shuffling factory line of
cremation; this was the old emotional round, familiar only from novels
now, of bedside vigil, of being there at the actual moment of death,
then of burial, followed Â- dear God, it embarrasses me to find myself
writing this Â- of talking to the grave under the ash tree. Lucy was
my dog.
