Stray Dog. Gareth O'Callaghan

      1

      I loved him more than life itself. I often heard people say that about someone they had lost. But I never understood how anyone could love another person so much. Now I can. It’s been three months since I lost John. And, yes, I know now that he was everything to me. With each day that passes, I realise that more and more.

      We sat close together and held hands the afternoon the doctor gave us the awful news. John’s cancer had gone too far for us to have any hope. He had less than a month to live, if he was lucky.

      He lived for six months, which meant we were both lucky. It also marked the start of an amazing journey, which I now know has given me the strength and understanding I need to carry on. It is a journey that has given me more hope than I could ever have imagined.

      We sat in heavy traffic that evening on the way home from the hospital. We took turns to hide our tears. I tried to hide my shock and disbelief. John reached across and squeezed my hand. He said, “It’ll be OK.”

      I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What the hell do you mean ‘it will be OK’?” I felt sick. My heart pounded. I wanted to scream at him for the lack of respect he had just shown me with his silly, simple, careless words. I turned the key, pulled it out and threw it at him. I flung open the door and jumped out into the heavy traffic. I cried and banged the roof of the car.

      John was standing behind me before I realised he had got out of the car. He put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me tightly. “We need to keep our heads. We need to be united on this, Jo. Please get back in the car. Let’s go home.”

      His words made no sense. How could they? I had four weeks left with the man I had spent almost half of my life with. He was going to die, and he was telling me we needed to be united?

      But then, that was my John – the man I had come to know. He was always the calm, reflective one in our relationship. He thought things out. I just lost the head. He always looked at choices. I never thought I had a choice in most things I did. What really scared me now was the prospect of life without him.

      John had always believed he would go somewhere better after his life here. I had believed for most of my adult life that there was nothing beyond what I had been given. At that moment, I wanted to believe so badly that there was something beyond the word “goodbye”, something that might give me a lasting connection to the man who had been my cornerstone for over twenty years.

      2

      We sat together on the double armchair that night. It was something we hadn’t done for years. The fire crackled with damp wood and coals. The soft lamp in the corner gave off just enough light for both of us to look at photos. I was glad we had taken the shots on the few holidays we had gone on together over the years. I wished at that moment we had gone on more, that we had travelled the world together.

      Instead we had become like most middle-aged couples. We assumed things, took each other for granted and lost sight of what it meant to be best friends. We felt uneasy sitting so close together. Even though I knew our time together was limited to weeks now, the touch of his body so near to me made me uneasy. I longed for closeness to this man, but we had become settled, on our own in our own little worlds. I wanted to be in his arms and to feel loved. I knew he loved me. And I hoped he knew how much I loved him. But it had become easier just to assume he knew.

      “Let’s go somewhere,” I said nervously. It meant nothing to me. It felt like an unexpected cough that had interrupted a cosy silence.

      “Like … where?” John sighed. “When?”

      He was telling me there wasn’t enough time.

      “Remember how you always wanted to visit the Great Barrier Reef? And Times Square? We could go to New York for a long weekend.”

      What a stupid line of talk, I remember thinking. But it was better than the silence and the old photos, token gestures of holidays we had gone on because we had become bored with each other at home. None of that mattered any more.

      “I’d love a dog,” he said softly. Then he smiled.

      His words caught me completely off-side. I remembered him telling me that his dog had been killed when he was fourteen. He said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It took him years to get over it.

      I hated pets. I had a phobia about cats and another about horses. My first thought was what would I do with the dog when John was gone. “Where will we get a dog?” I asked.

      “The local pound, I suppose. You can give it back later … if you don’t like it.”

      I wasn’t even listening to what he was saying. I was nodding and nodding again harder. “Yes, yes, of course,” I insisted lovingly. “First thing in the morning, we’ll go. And you can pick …” I started to cry. It felt like I was talking to a child. I was trying to cheer him up in the light of something neither of us could explain properly or handle as well as we might have thought we could.

      3

      John spent most of the following day lying on the couch. He stayed in his pyjamas, under the duvet. He looked very tired. His eyes moved between the television and the French doors that opened out onto a small veranda.

      It was the start of spring. Small birds sometimes pecked on the kitchen window. They picked at the nuts that he had left out carefully in the homemade wooden bird-house.

      “The