Dad grew up in the 1930s and ’40s in a tiny terrace in the grimy backstreets of a West Yorkshire mill town. It was a world of outside toilets and tin baths in front of the fire. The idea of keeping a dog, or any pet beyond a few pigeons, for pleasure and companionship would have been an unimaginable indulgence. Why take in another mouth to feed when the housekeeping was already stretched to breaking?
Neither did the boxer thing come from Mum, who grew up on a farm in North Yorkshire where a dog was a working animal that slept in the barn. There was little room for sentiment in the hard-scrabble world of small mixed arable farming between the wars.
Dogs and their owners … I’m happy to be compared with beautful Rosie.
Yet Dad, and then Mum, fell in love with the breed long before I was born, and dogs – boxer dogs – were a constant in my growing up.
Boxer No.3 – Joe – in particular was an adored repository of much of my teenage angst. When the world didn’t understand me, he was an always willing and unfailingly discreet ear, asking, in return, only for the occasional belly rub and a treat or two sneaked from the dining table.
Later, sweet Maggie was a constant comfort to my parents in their declining years. Mum, always a country girl at heart, walked her so often, Dad swore he sometimes found Maggie hiding her lead just to get a break.
So, years later and half a world away, when the conversation turned to getting a dog to complete our family of four, there was no question – in my mind.
For a while, Meg argued for a cocker spaniel, but as soon as she and our girls laid eyes on that litter of eight-week-old boxers, they were lost.
And so Rosie came to live with us, and our daughters, just like I did, grew up with a constant goofy, smooshy-faced, slobbery-chopped companion and poured their own secrets in her ear, treating her as a four-legged sibling.
It seems only yesterday that tiny puppy Rosie was unable to tackle the timber steps to our front deck on her little legs. And then, more than a decade later, once again we had to carry her up and down as some insidious malignancy robbed her of balance and co-ordination.
We made that hardest decision and ended up in the room at the vet.
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Of course, I miss the walks on the beach with Rosie, the wrestles over sticks (she never got the whole retrieving thing) and even the eye-watering farts, but it’s the physical absence around the house that is so pronounced.
At 35 kilograms, there was a lot of her. There was a lot of her on the lounge between us when we watched TV and there was a lot of her when she would silently appear under my feet in the kitchen as soon as I started prepping chicken or mince.
Some people will obviously think “she was only a dog”, as if mourning is at best an indulgence or at worst diminishes all the human loss and pain that surrounds us.
However, our family has become all too familiar with human bereavement in recent times. We know loss. Of course, I know this is on a different scale. But there is still space to mourn the absence of such a dear and loyal companion. A slobbery boxer dog-sized space.
Sleep well, sweet Rosie.
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