Bigger Than Her Body

Nibbles lies on a fluffy bed near the back door.

Her breathing is rapid and shallow, her creamy brown pelt drenched with sweat. She whimpers occasionally, but the sound is barely audible. More a sigh than a whimper, really.

My little dog is dying, and I am having great difficulty letting her go.

We have the usual attachment between dog and owner. But this tiny yappy dog (a Pomeranian-Fox Terrier cross) has also been with me for nearly 18 years.

Years of massive change for us, periods of adjustment, resetting, even second and third chances.

I wipe my eyes, curse my sentimentality.

When did I become so bloody human?

I pick up my phone.

It is time.

First encounter

My first encounter with Nibbles took place in a rural house.

I see myself sitting on a couch in a stranger’s living room. My first wife sits opposite me, perhaps a portent of things to come. Our four children sit cross legged on the floor and six chubby newborn puppies waddle in all directions around the room.

Our first dog was killed by a car a few months before. My wife and I don’t always agree, but we both believe that children should have pets. A friend of a friend says that she has heard there are some cute well-bred pups for sale.

Phone calls are made and here we are.

We plan to select not one, but two, pups this time. Both of us work and it feels wrong for a dog to be by itself for vast amounts of time while we work, and the children are at school. These six pups are siblings but if we take two, they will at least have each other.

Ultimately the choice is easy.

One pup stands out, a fluffy caramel one which has thrown to his Pomeranian genes. He is a beautiful placid creature, physically the most pleasing to the eye.

But another stands out because of her huge personality. She is the one that comes forward to each of us, nibbling our outstretched fingers and feet, making the children laugh spontaneously. She is also a caramel color but with shorter hair. Perhaps her Fox Terrier genes over-ride the Pomeranian ones. There is a sharp intelligence about her, a wisdom which, strangely, reminds me of my own mother.

We are all in agreement, both on the matter of which two puppies to select and their (ridiculous) names.

Caramel and Nibbles.

The next few years

Happy memories dominate the next few years, as both pups grow into young dogs. There is mutual joy as they quickly become part of our lives and we play with them.

Caramel is the larger of the two, but Nibbles dominates, even to the extent of stealthily eating most of her brother’s food. Her porky appearance alerts us that something is wrong at mealtimes. We take steps so that her brother Caramel gets a fairer share of the food.

He seems happy to let her continue to steal his food, however. He has the perfect compliant disposition to complement her bossiness. His long hair disguises how bony he becomes at times. She continues to always be a little above her recommended weight.

Change on the horizon

I become increasingly keen for new challenges. So eventually we travel to China to teach English for 6 months while taking special leave from our jobs here. Our children are part of this adventure too, but the dogs stay behind in the care of a dog-loving young woman who lives in our house during our absence.

She falls completely in love with them.

Nibbles becomes even fatter in her care.

It is hard to settle back into my teaching job after the adrenaline rush of China so after another year of teaching at my old workplace, I apply for one year off to explore what else life has to offer. I’m immediately offered a job managing a market business and throw myself into that.

One year soon turns to six. It is so different from teaching and the money is surprisingly good. My children are rapidly becoming young adults. Two have already left home for university. I have more time to be with my family also.

Evidently that is not enough to stop the winds of change.

My wife tells me one afternoon that, not only is our marriage over, but she already has a house to live in and is leaving immediately with our two younger children. I’m completely blindsided by the situation.

So begins a period of pain and shock.

In a fog I vaguely register that she has not mentioned the two dogs. I assume that I am now the sole caregiver of Caramel and Nibbles.

I’m not finely tuned to the needs of the two dogs in the months that follow. I make sure, though, that they are fed and cared for. I am also surprised that I’m intensely grateful that they at least are still with me, rocks in a sea of change, unconditionally loving and faithful.

Then Caramel disappears.

I find him ten days later under a shrub not far from the house, a pile of beautiful caramel fluff. I have no idea why he died. Was he clipped by a car before running back towards the house to die, perhaps? Or did a snake bite him?

I bury him in a flower garden at the sunny end of the house and plant an abundance of multi-colored nasturtiums on top of him.

I focus my attention on Nibbles, my slightly bewildered little dog. I resolve to be a better dog owner than previously. She starts to spend more time inside the house than she was previously allowed to. This is particularly the case when my two youngest children are with me for part of the week.

The old rules have changed, after all.

The nasturtiums explode out of the ground, huge plants, beautiful flowers of all colors.

The sun shines again.

I soon notice not just flowers, but sunlight. Birds.

Eventually a beautiful woman.

I begin a relationship with my current partner, a relationship which is now more than ten years old.

Where is Nibbles throughout this period of job change, children leaving, a marriage breakup, and a new relationship?

It’s a fair question.

My current partner is a cat person. She is deeply devoted to her own special furry friend, and I put my concerns about cat allergies to one side. But she quickly develops a special attachment to my little dog. She is more thoughtful than I have ever been when it comes to looking out for Nibbles and her needs. As a country dog Nibbles has rarely been on a leash, running free across paddocks. But my partner soon has her out for walks, training her to be one of those dogs who walks, usually obediently on the other end of a restraint.

Nibbles loves it. And wants to sniff everything!

Yet another adventure

We eventually move to the city, partly because my partner wants a change of job and environment, and partly because change is good for me even when I don’t necessarily want it.

Nibbles has no say in the move, but we want her on this adventure. Life is offering us all three of us a chance for renewal.

Every walk is now an adventure, where she constantly stops, sniffs, and computes new odors. We speculate that a thought bubble hovers above her head. Figures and equations are being rapidly calculated and adjusted before she is finally satisfied and moves on.

She maps her neighborhood by scents.

She is becoming elderly, but is also a child seeing new things for the first time. She realizes that there are apparently other dogs in the world apart from her and her brother Caramel. And there are more people in the world to meet than the nine or ten she has known in her life to this point!

She is 14 by her move to the city, but still looks like a pup, much to the excitement of many people we meet on our walks.

'Puppy!' young children squeal excitedly, reaching their hands out to her. She thrives on their attention and affection. She seems born to receive their love and there is now something regal in her bearing.

‘Pat me, humans’, I imagine her thinking as walkers, old and young, stop, coo and lavish attention on her.

Not all passers-by are impressed.

‘That’s not a dog. That’s a water rat’, I overhear a grumpy looking old male say to his partner.

I’ve seen water rats. He is not entirely wrong, but he is overlooking her magnetic pull on people.

Her twilight years

I see now in my mind’s eye a montage of images involving Nibbles as she discovers another incarnation as a city dog:

• Random attacks: when living on the land, she’d previously attacked a kangaroo as tall as a basketballer; in the city she occasionally, for fun, attacks my partner’s cat, after lulling the poor creature into a false sense of complacency.

• Spinnies: lying on her back on a smooth timber floor, holding eye contact with me, while I gently spin her whole body in neat quick circles with my right foot. She doesn’t tell me, but I can tell that she loves it from her blissful open-mouthed smile (but maybe she just sees how much I enjoy it and is too polite to disappoint?)

• Shuttle runs: Nibbles dashing back and forth into the house when we wake each morning, dashes of pure joy simply because we have risen from bed. She screeches to a halt like a cartoon dog before pivoting and repeating the process.

• Toad water: Nibbles sometimes drinks water from her bowl that cane toads had been sitting in overnight. We stop this as soon as we realized but in the meantime are stunned and mesmerized by the renewed vigor which she puts into her dashes. After discovering a huge cane toad rehydrating by sitting in her water, we do some research. The simple explanation is that our tiny dog is tripping.

• Daily walks: her recognizing the subtle signals that a walk might be on offer. As soon as my partner puts on her joggers, Nibbles does a few perfunctory runs before going outside and standing next to the passenger door of the car. She looks up at the door, back to us (beatific expression), back at the door and so on. Sometimes, of course, she misreads the signals – she isn’t about to walk with us. But mostly we open the passenger door and this ageing dog with absurdly short legs would leap neatly onto the front floor of the car (until she was too old and too overweight to make the successful leap, hitting the side and falling back before trying again, repeatedly falling back down before we rescued her …).

Once she entirely escapes our property and is redelivered back to us, grinning like a loon. Air-conditioning kisses her face in the ride home in someone else's car, accompanied by more cuddles from strangers who recognize our now famous little dog from our regular walks.

We introduce measures so that she does not do any more unauthorized wandering.

The final months

But time waits for no-one, not even a reinvigorated, slightly drugged, bossy little dog.

We notice some greyness on her nose.

We notice repeated failures to leap into the car so we lift her in.

We notice that she drinks huge quantities of water and urinates on our timber floor. We pretend this is normal.

The walks become shorter. Increasingly we carry her.

We know something is definitely not right when she shows little interest in food.

A visit to the local Vet confirms that that Nibbles is close to the end.

It comes down to a judgement call by me, apparently. Is her quality of life below an acceptable level? She can't tell me.

Having her ‘alive’ is now only for my selfish needs. I probably – well, definitely – let her go on for a few weeks past when it would be decent to put her to sleep.

But how do you let go of a loyal pet, a constant in an otherwise changing world? A completely faithful creature who has always wanted to make me happy even when it is not her job to do so?

But she and Caramel could be together again, as dubious as the concept of dog heaven is to me. I imagine them as young dogs again, excited to see each other, bouncing joyfully across the lawn to meet incoming vehicles.

Her eating his food yet again, as he stands by, apparently unfazed …

I make the phone call.

She goes to sleep in my arms a few weeks short of what would have been her 18th birthday.

I still see Nibbles sometimes in my mind’s eye before I remember that she is gone. Sniffing stuff – anything, really. Randomly chasing an animal or bird which just happened to be passing through and looking absurdly proud of herself. Doing spinnies. Shuttle runs. The quirky little tilt of her head when she thinks that I’ve done something particularly stupid.

She is gone, but she lives on in my head.

She always was bigger than her body.