We lost our dog, Sally, today. Sally arrived in Cork in 2011, when I was 15 years old and studying for my Junior cert exams. I came home from supervised study one Saturday morning to find a little blue roan cocker spaniel puppy scuttling across our tiled kitchen floor, looking unsure of her legs. I had no idea we were getting a dog, and even if my parents had told me beforehand I’m not sure it would’ve registered. I had oodles of that strange disconnectedness that separates teenage boys from reality. Nevertheless, it registered bigly when I got home that day and saw our new little family member. My dad had brought her over on a ferry from the UK, buckling under the psychological pressure that had been applied by my little sister for the year or two beforehand.
It’s difficult to overstate the role Sally played in our family, not least as the harbinger of a second puppy, Rosie, who would find herself scuttling across those same tiles about a year later. From the moment my goldfish, Elmer Fuddstone, breathed his last water in 2001ish, we had been a no-pet family. Now, all of a go tobann, there were two little dogs making us all happy. They were both so unique and good-natured (if you weren’t another dog) and they brought so much happiness into our home. They even loved me throughout my late teens and early twenties, when I was particularly cantankerous. My parents loved them both more than everyone, and very quickly the needs of their actual human children slipped down the pecking order to be replaced by those of Sally and Rosie. They walked them every day, worried about them incessantly, and talked of little else.
It’s hard to think that they have both now gone, Rosie in early 2025, and Sally in 2026. The sadness of losing a pet has been described beautifully by others, and I particularly loved Paul Howard’s tribute to their basset hound, Humphrey. As trite as it may sound though, others can’t capture the rhythm or ritual of the time you spent with your own pet, nor can they explain just how those two dogs become the emotional centre of gravity of your own home. They can’t describe the nights that you spent with them sat happily on the couch after a night out drinking (me, not the dogs), sharing a bag of microwaveable popcorn, and they can’t do justice to the comical sounds of them eating it.
I’m sad that we’ve lost our two little friends. We were lucky to have them, and the happiness they gave us for 15 years. It’s faintly absurd that you can just hand over a sum of money to somebody and receive a dog like Sally or Rosie, but you can. Whenever it is that I get my own dog, and hopefully I’ll be surprising my own family with one, I will think of the sound of Sally’s little paws scratching on the tiles, and my parents and brother and sister, and where I grew up.