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Speaker 1: This podcast is for general information only and should not be taken as psychological advice. Listeners should consult with their healthcare professionals for specific medical advice.
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Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Amanda Keller.
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Speaker 1: And I'm Anita McGregor.
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Speaker 2: Oh, I'm going to cry. Welcome to Double A Chattery.
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Speaker 3: Look, today was the day I wasn't going to cry.
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Speaker 1: And look how we've started. It's just, yeah. Oh, Amanda.
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Speaker 3: I haven't seen you since Minnie passed away. And I'm sorry if you've heard all this on the radio show. I spoke about it there. But I haven't spoken with you, Anita, in depth about how this last week has been.
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Speaker 1: This has just been amazingly, like I feel as though Minnie was my dog too.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: She came with us on our walks. She was just this constant, constant, constant presence for us. And I just.
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Speaker 2: Boo. Boo. Boo.
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Speaker 3: Well, anyway, if it's all right with everyone, I don't want to be overindulgent, but when you talk about this stuff, as I've discovered, other people... feel free to talk about their own grief and I think it helps us all. So let's hold hands and let's discuss what's happened. Let's. So I feel like I've cried every day for about the last month because a month ago, Minnie was diagnosed with lymphoma. She was 14. So she was an elderly dog.
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Speaker 2: So I often wondered how would the end be?
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Speaker 3: And when she was diagnosed with lymphoma, we were told maybe four weeks to eight weeks.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: I remember being in the vet clinic because it was the day after the Logies and I was having coffee with my son, Liam, and I felt these lumps under her neck. I said, I wonder what that is. I don't know why I think, oh, God, that was the last moment of life being easy.
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Speaker 2: The before. The before.
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Speaker 1: The before.
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Speaker 3: And I was in the vet clinic and they said, look, it could just be an infection, but chances are, a dog of this age, this isn't uncommon if it's lymphoma. And the tears just came out. Is that vertical or is that horizontal? That's horizontal.
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Speaker 2: They came out horizontally out of my eyes. And I thought, oh, no, no, no.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Because as you know, Anita, she's the glue. Yep.
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Speaker 1: She really has been.
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Speaker 3: And.
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Speaker 2: So anyway, fast forward. She seemed to be okay. And then she wasn't.
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Speaker 3: And we changed some medication and then she was. And then last weekend, she really wasn't. And you saw her on the Saturday.
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Speaker 2: We went for a walk. She was not too bad, was she?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, we went for a walk. She was attentive. She was just absolutely present to us. She had a little bit of banana bread at the little coffee shop. She was just Her. She was just absolutely her little furball of a self.
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Speaker 2: She was.
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Speaker 3: And I had to lift her in and out of the car and up and down the stairs and all of that, as my physio will attest. But that was the elderly part of the dog as opposed to the ill part of the dog. Yeah. And then she had some diarrhea. I took her up to the vet. We were given some stuff to put down her throat. And at that point, she was having some tablets that dissolved on her throat. some other stuff that was shot down her throat as a liquid. She was on tablets and this other paste I was trying to prise down her throat.
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Speaker 1: And I do remember you telling me that she had– pocketed some of the pills and had gone to the, like, and was just spitting them out at some point, you know.
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Speaker 3: Well, she's normally pretty good, but it was actually half a Panadol morning and night, and she just hated the taste of it. And so it would be in the mixture of the food. She'd eat everything else, and then that little bit would come out. So I'd put it back in, and towards the end, she was just going to the garden, giving me a bit of side eye, and I'd just see her nudging something into the garden with her nose.
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Speaker 2: I thought, yep, that's it.
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Speaker 3: And on the last day, she just looked at me and I said, are you trying to tell me that today's the day?
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: And our vet was just brilliant, can I say. Give them a shout out. North Randwick vet. So wonderful. So they came to the house. Both boys were there. Harley was there. Funny enough, that's where we live. But the boys don't live at home anymore. But they were there.
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Speaker 2: And I gave them the option. And I'm glad that they said yes.
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Speaker 3: And... We spent a couple of hours with her before the vet arrived. And she was just asleep, really. She was just asleep. But at one stage, she stood up and she came over to where Harley was in the wheelchair. And she put her head next to his hand so he could touch the top of her head.
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Speaker 1: It's like she's... She knew.
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Speaker 2: She knew. She understood the assignment of what her goodbye would be.
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Speaker 3: Yep.
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Speaker 2: And we all patted her and we all did all the things.
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Speaker 3: And the vet was just brilliant. It was Claire and her other side of Rowan. And so I held Minnie's little face in my hands and she sort of said, I'm going to make a little mark in her arm here and then I'll put the port in and we'll leave the room for a while and you tell us when you're ready.
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Speaker 1: Oh, you're never ready.
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Speaker 2: Never ready. Never. Anyway.
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Speaker 1: I held her little face.
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Speaker 3: We all told her we loved her. And what was great too was that As a family of four, it was just such a terrible but sort of very important bonding situation. And Harley was mentally present with these neurological situations. Sometimes he can be there half through the chat and then be diverted by something in his head. He was completely present. We were all weeping for Minnie. And then that was it.
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Speaker 2: And then also.
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Speaker 3: When Minnie had gone and they'd taken Minnie, And I'm going to get her back some of her remains. I've asked for two little stones, one to have at home or one in our place in the south coast, little memorial stones with her remains. But limbs are on the floor where they shaved her arm. It was almost in a heart shape with some of her fur. And I've put it in this locket. Remember we've done an episode on jewellery. And I've spoken about this locket that I was given when I was about 14 by my grandparents. And in it, over the years, there's been a boy's name, there's been a phone number. There have been photos of my babies. There's been a photo of my previous dog.
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Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. And now it's Minnie's turn. Her fur is in here.
00:06:51
Speaker 1: Oh, Amanda.
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Speaker 3: Oh, so it's been an extraordinarily stingy, painful week because it's such an uncomplicated grief.
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Speaker 2: Because there's no guilt.
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Speaker 3: There's no I should have, would have, could have, which I think when humans pass, there's a lot of that.
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Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. And she lived such a lovely life.
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Speaker 2: Oh, she did.
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Speaker 1: She really did.
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Speaker 3: And I felt bad that the last day I was prising her mouth open and putting, you know, pretty much spraying cement down it. But apart from that, she's had a lovely life.
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Speaker 1: You know, I was looking at the montage of pictures of Minnie and I had completely forgotten that. when she was that little ball of fur, when she was just a puppy.
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Speaker 2: You babysat her the first night.
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Speaker 1: Janet and I did. And it was just, and she was just such an amazing little ball of fur that was just completely unhinged. You know, she was just, she was a whirlwind.
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Speaker 3: God, for the first year we thought, what the hell?
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Speaker 2: What the hell?
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Speaker 1: She was just hilarious.
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Speaker 3: Yes.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely. And then she just, all of a sudden, she kind of turned a corner and she became this absolute, like she herded us. She made sure that we were where we needed to be. You know, when we were walking, she would make sure that we were on the path. Like she was so sweet.
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Speaker 3: She constantly did the census is what Harley would say. She'd come in and look where everyone was.
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Speaker 2: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Everyone present and accounted for.
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Speaker 3: Yep. In all the midst of all the emotion of the last week, my brother, who also loved Minnie very much, reminded me of a story of a man I'd met in the park a few years ago.
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Speaker 2: And he'd wanted to.
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Speaker 3: Tell me he lived near us and he had been going through a really bad time to the point where he was thinking, do I want to be here? And one day he was walking back through the park thinking the darkest of thoughts.
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Speaker 2: Oh, dear.
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Speaker 3: And he encountered little Minnie. who went up to him and he said there was just something about the openness of the way she looked at him, the acceptance and the kindness and the optimism he saw in a little puppy face.
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Speaker 1: That unconditional love.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. He sort of said she'd saved him.
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Speaker 3: So he went home and didn't do something terrible and then built to rebuild his strength and his life after that. And he'd always thought if he saw me, he wanted to tell me the role my dog had played.
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Speaker 1: Isn't that?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, what a lovely story.
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Speaker 3: When I spoke about this on the radio, and maybe this will resonate with anyone who's listening to this too, it gives people permission to grieve pets because we know they're not humans.
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Speaker 2: We know that.
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Speaker 3: But acknowledging the grief of losing someone who's been by your side for.
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Speaker 2: 14 years is worth talking about.
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Speaker 1: Well, you know, I think about it that as an adult I've had Two dogs and both in Canada. And when they passed, it wouldn't have occurred to me. to tell somebody at work to.
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Speaker 1: I mean, my friends knew, but probably nobody else. It really wouldn't have been something that I.
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Speaker 1: Was kind of, I don't even know, is acceptable.
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Speaker 2: The word?
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Speaker 3: Yes, I don't think it has been until recent years. I don't think it was acceptable.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: And I think about, I think about the grief because you're right. You know, our dogs were with us every day. They were, you know, you'd always be looking to say, you know, where is Kali? Where's Crunch? Where are these dogs? And they'd always be, you know, at your feet usually.
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Speaker 3: Right.
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Speaker 1: But somewhere, you know, they were always around. They were always, you know, part of our, all the activities that we did as a family. So it seems now I look back at, and I think what a travesty that I felt as though I couldn't grieve it more publicly.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Isn't that interesting?
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Speaker 3: Whereas now I think, you know, they understand at your place of work that you can perpet grieving or your friends get it. You know, we've had so many lovely emails and people reaching out and, flowers, all kinds of things. Someone sent me this beautiful picture that they'd done of Minnie because I think it touches everyone. And I thought this was interesting because I'd said that, you know, I held her face as she died. I knew she'd died. And yet the next day the shock of the permanence of it was just horrendous. I looked at where I expected to see her lying. I looked at where the water bowls should be. The shock of it that, oh, my God, this is every day. And this man sent me this fantastic email. His name's Alan. And he said he'd recently lost his dog Zoe after 17 years. Oh. And so he said, I get that the moments where you think you're okay, then you see the spot that they always lay in and you sob again. He said it's very familiar. And he'd heard someone talking about this, a neuroscientist who'd written a book called The Grieving Brain. And he said, what stayed with me was the idea that although we consciously know they are physically gone.
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Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
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Speaker 3: Our brain has spent years learning their physical presence as part of our world. It predicts them being in their usual spot, hearing their sounds and seeing them when we come home. So when that spot is suddenly empty, it's almost a collision between what we know and what our brain still expects. Grieving is partly the brain slowly having to relearn that physical reality and rewire the map.
00:12:29
Speaker 1: Oh, you know, I think about when we were, you know, we'd be down at your place down south and I would know that it was about 4 o'clock when Minnie would kind of look at you and go, dinner. She was the clock. She was the clock. And so that whole sense of her knowing and her rhythm and knowing that. And I was actually, you just said that you'd taken her food and water bowl away.
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Speaker 2: Almost straight away. And I wondered why. Actually, Liam did.
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Speaker 3: Liam washed up the bowl and the water bowl and he put them under the stairs. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: For Harry Potter to use.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. But I was going to ask that. I know when my pets passed that that was probably the one thing that was just the hardest was to go and put those away because they were that constant presence.
00:13:29
Speaker 3: Also, I feel really it's a weird thing to feel guilty about But we had a carpet cleaner come in yesterday because upstairs where I sleep, Minnie used to sleep on the floor. And the last few weeks, because of the tablets she was on, during the night she'd wet herself. And then towards the end, I called it her date stamp. Wherever she sat down, there's a bit of poo. And so I felt disloyal that it's only been a few days and yet we had the carpets cleaned.
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Speaker 2: And I thought, is that disrespectful? And I've just felt.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: I thought I was humiliating her somehow by having people come in to remove her stains.
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Speaker 2: It's stupid, isn't it?
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Speaker 1: Because you're never going to be able to erase her presence from your home, ever.
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Speaker 2: Starting with the stains. Starting with the.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: Stains, yeah. I mean, she had a wee the first time she came to our place.
00:14:22
Speaker 2: I know, you moved it. That was hilarious. You'd moved it to your new place. I think you'd had the carpets professionally cleaned.
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Speaker 3: Yes.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: And then Minnie, who never wees inside.
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Speaker 1: No.
00:14:32
Speaker 2: Came up and did a wee on your floor.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely. It was a christening of sorts.
00:14:39
Speaker 3: Well, part of the gift of doing different hours this year for the radio show is that every morning it was my non-negotiable. So I'd take Minnie down and we'd have a little bit of a stroll and we'd stop at that little kiosk down at the beach. They'd give her some banana bread. I'd get a hot chocolate. And there were some other people down there, some other people I'd met who I'd seen throughout the years with their dogs, Arthur and Matt in particular. And Matt at the end was carrying his dog down.
00:15:03
Speaker 2: And Arthur had Belle and then Belle passed away two.
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Speaker 3: Weeks ago, a 14-year-old dog who I've seen at the park for 14 years. And this morning I saw them again and they knew that Minnie had passed and the three of us sat there on the bench because Arthur had said, it's tempting not to come back down here. But he said, I'm going to. I'm going to force myself to walk down where I've walked for 14 years with my dog and sit down there and honour her.
00:15:32
Speaker 1: So you guys are a little club now.
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Speaker 2: We're a little club.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: Are you guys going to start solving mysteries now?
00:15:42
Speaker 2: A dead dog club. A dead dog club. Maybe we should.
00:15:52
Speaker 1: First mystery, why are they still stained?
00:15:58
Speaker 2: Oh, well, thank you for making me laugh. And I must say, it's riding this weird grief train.
00:16:04
Speaker 3: As I said, I think when humans pass, there's much more complication to this grief. With a dog, it's the stingy, sharp, missing band. It's a Band-Aid and it stings like hell. And the minute it happened, my youngest son, Jack, said, well, this is effed. And he said, excuse my French. And I said, Jack, if ever that language is appropriate, today's the day.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:16:27
Speaker 3: Yes, it is.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: It's completely effed. Yeah. But you don't know when the wave will hit you. One minute you're fine.
00:16:35
Speaker 3: And then I said to Harley last night, well, it was this time last week and I felt quite all right.
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Speaker 2: And then suddenly, bang, I started sobbing.
00:16:43
Speaker 3: It's just, it's like, you know, there's a lot to cry about and a lot to love about. But, God, it's all on the surface all the time. I feel like I'm a teenager. Everything is on the surface at the same time.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: It's exhausting. When I think about the early stages of grief where it's just there, it feels like, you know, when I first went down, moved to Australia and went down to Coogee and I stood in the waves and I had no idea about the idea of shore dump. And I was doing this moment where I was just turning round and round and I was going like, I shouldn't see my feet from this angle. And I had sand in places I shouldn't have had, all of that.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: The gusset of sand.
00:17:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, the gusset of sand. And I just remember thinking like that feeling that that's actually what grief feels like, where you're just getting hit by this wave and you're just absolutely topsy-turvy. You just don't know what's happening. It just And you don't know when that wave is going to let you up and have a breath again. But I think that's the thing about grief too, is that eventually it's kind of like the waves come less and less.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean you don't get a bad set every once in a while, but yeah.
00:18:06
Speaker 3: It's a gusset of sand. That's the first novel. It's the first title in our crime-fighting.
00:18:13
Speaker 1: Oh, I like that. I was just going to name my band that.
00:18:17
Speaker 2: Oh, nice, nice.
00:18:18
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:18:18
Speaker 2: Gusset of sand. No, you're right.
00:18:21
Speaker 3: And the first few days you think, it's like when your heart is first broken, you think I'll never be happy ever again.
00:18:26
Speaker 2: I will never, ever be happy again.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: I will never find love again. Oh, yep. And then you do. And then you do. But I think right now this is just about taking care of your tender heart. I mean, it's just ….
00:18:42
Speaker 2: Well, you know, and it's exhausting, isn't it? Grief is exhausting.
00:18:47
Speaker 1: It really is. It really is.
00:18:49
Speaker 3: And thank you to everyone for reaching out and for people telling me the stories of how they've coped, how they feel. Some people say they're still crying. It happened years ago. You know, this is big stuff and we are allowed to acknowledge it.
00:19:02
Speaker 2: We really are.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, my friend.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:19:07
Speaker 1: How are you feeling?
00:19:07
Speaker 3: A bit better, thank you. And you've given me some impetus to write a crime novel.
00:19:13
Speaker 1: I'm glad.
00:19:15
Speaker 2: No one would suspect us.
00:19:17
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so.
00:19:20
Speaker 3: All right.
00:19:21
Speaker 2: Well, let's get to some glimmers.
00:19:22
Speaker 1: Let's.
00:19:28
Speaker 3: My glimmer, and I've already touched on this, was how people have responded to my grief and sharing their own. And it's just been absolutely beautiful. There's a couple I'd like to mention. There's a woman called Marianne Oliver who painted a picture of Minnie And underneath she wrote, Minnie, the sunshine and the glue. Oh.
00:19:46
Speaker 1: And it looked so much like Minnie.
00:19:48
Speaker 2: Oh, it looked so much like Minnie.
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Oh. And our digital producer, Jenna, reached out to a pet shrine ceremony that they have online. It's a Japanese Buddhist tradition and it's called the shrine. And Jenna gave details of Minnie and Minnie was included in this ceremony. for animals that have passed. And just the ritual of these things has made me feel so wonderful. So thank you to everybody. Because I think sometimes, as you said, Anita, we don't give these things the ritual. And even in that brochure where I picked the little stone where Minnie's remains would go, they had little, and I know you're not a fan of this animal, but they had little urns for rats.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Oh, dear.
00:20:36
Speaker 1: Oh, dear.
00:20:36
Speaker 2: It's not your thing.
00:20:37
Speaker 1: Not my thing.
00:20:38
Speaker 3: But that thing's for mice and rats and where smaller remains could go. Because, you know, who are we to say that's not a proper grief for someone?
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Absolutely. What we consider a pout is what's in our hearts, you know, that we can create relationships with all kinds of creatures, great and small.
00:20:58
Speaker 3: And of this generation, hopefully, where this stuff can be acknowledged. Even by you, who's not a fan of the rats.
00:21:05
Speaker 1: Oh, that's right.
00:21:07
Speaker 2: I know that's your hoodoo.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: I was going to say that. I'm never going to get there with rats.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: No, okay. I'll let you off the hook for that one.
00:21:13
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:21:14
Speaker 2: All right, what's your glimmer?
00:21:15
Speaker 1: So, you know, thinking about grieving and thinking about the things that I do to comfort myself is that I was, on the weekend, Taya, my daughter-in-law, my gorgeous daughter-in-law and I, we made a big double batch of pereshka.
00:21:34
Speaker 2: Oh, yum.
00:21:35
Speaker 1: Which are these Ukrainian, they're hard bunned and they're filled with like farm cottage cheese and potatoes.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: It's like you at the gym, hard bunned.
00:21:43
Speaker 1: Oh, hard bunned, absolutely. And you serve them with sour cream. They are not a low-cal option here. But I remember making this dish with my With my mom, my sister, my grandma, you know, my auntie. It was an all-day affair. It was just women in the kitchen. And, you know, we were all bitching and gossiping and moaning about this, that, and the other thing. And we'd make all these and freeze them for future meals, right? They are delicious. They are very delicious. And what I was thinking about, we were actually, Ty and I were having this conversation because she's Egyptian. And her comfort foods would be very different than the comfort food that I grew up with. But we were talking about how some of the dishes that she makes for us, for our family now, that they have become my comfort foods. And that, you know, I love that some of the food that we have brought into– And Tataya's family have become comfort food as well, that I know that there'll be a dozen or so of these little hard-bun things going over to my daughter-in-law's brother and family and that kind of thing. So I love that that's a shared thing. I think that that's glorious. And I took a picture of my granddaughter. who's 10 months old and, you know, just making an absolute mess of herself eating one. And I just thought this is her Ukrainian heritage coming out. I loved it.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: You and I have spoken about this before, about, you know, the nature of love being a doing word, but the nature of food and our mother's cookbooks, our mother's cookbooks, our grandmother's cookbooks with their handwriting, all handwritten. The memory of that, the emotional memory of that, not just of the food, but of the story, of where you had it. And often the recipe will be Auntie Marguerite's cheese puffs, Mrs.
00:23:48
Speaker 2: Smith's whatever. That's the legacy too.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: I really love that it's often add a pinch of or add until it mixes well. And I'm going, I don't know what that means, but, you know, we'll find our way.
00:24:01
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Anita, thank you for holding my hand through yet another of life's things. And thank you to all of our teacups for riding the waves with us too and for being here.
00:24:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that we can be there for each other through the ups and the downs.
00:24:23
Speaker 2: Always with a cup of tea. Speaking of which, shall we?
00:24:25
Speaker 3: Let's.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: Love you.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: Love you.
00:24:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This podcast is for general information only and should not be taken as psychological advice. Listeners should consult with their healthcare professionals for specific medical advice.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Amanda Keller.
00:00:25
Speaker 1: And I'm Anita McGregor.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm going to cry. Welcome to Double A Chattery.
00:00:28
Speaker 3: Look, today was the day I wasn't going to cry.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: And look how we've started. It's just, yeah. Oh, Amanda.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: I haven't seen you since Minnie passed away. And I'm sorry if you've heard all this on the radio show. I spoke about it there. But I haven't spoken with you, Anita, in depth about how this last week has been.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: This has just been amazingly, like I feel as though Minnie was my dog too.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:01:02
Speaker 1: She came with us on our walks. She was just this constant, constant, constant presence for us. And I just.
00:01:10
Speaker 2: Boo. Boo. Boo.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: Well, anyway, if it's all right with everyone, I don't want to be overindulgent, but when you talk about this stuff, as I've discovered, other people... feel free to talk about their own grief and I think it helps us all. So let's hold hands and let's discuss what's happened. Let's. So I feel like I've cried every day for about the last month because a month ago, Minnie was diagnosed with lymphoma. She was 14. So she was an elderly dog.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: So I often wondered how would the end be?
00:01:51
Speaker 3: And when she was diagnosed with lymphoma, we were told maybe four weeks to eight weeks.
00:01:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:01:59
Speaker 3: I remember being in the vet clinic because it was the day after the Logies and I was having coffee with my son, Liam, and I felt these lumps under her neck. I said, I wonder what that is. I don't know why I think, oh, God, that was the last moment of life being easy.
00:02:12
Speaker 2: The before. The before.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: The before.
00:02:14
Speaker 3: And I was in the vet clinic and they said, look, it could just be an infection, but chances are, a dog of this age, this isn't uncommon if it's lymphoma. And the tears just came out. Is that vertical or is that horizontal? That's horizontal.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: They came out horizontally out of my eyes. And I thought, oh, no, no, no.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Because as you know, Anita, she's the glue. Yep.
00:02:40
Speaker 1: She really has been.
00:02:42
Speaker 3: And.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: So anyway, fast forward. She seemed to be okay. And then she wasn't.
00:02:48
Speaker 3: And we changed some medication and then she was. And then last weekend, she really wasn't. And you saw her on the Saturday.
00:02:54
Speaker 2: We went for a walk. She was not too bad, was she?
00:02:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, we went for a walk. She was attentive. She was just absolutely present to us. She had a little bit of banana bread at the little coffee shop. She was just Her. She was just absolutely her little furball of a self.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: She was.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: And I had to lift her in and out of the car and up and down the stairs and all of that, as my physio will attest. But that was the elderly part of the dog as opposed to the ill part of the dog. Yeah. And then she had some diarrhea. I took her up to the vet. We were given some stuff to put down her throat. And at that point, she was having some tablets that dissolved on her throat. some other stuff that was shot down her throat as a liquid. She was on tablets and this other paste I was trying to prise down her throat.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: And I do remember you telling me that she had– pocketed some of the pills and had gone to the, like, and was just spitting them out at some point, you know.
00:03:53
Speaker 3: Well, she's normally pretty good, but it was actually half a Panadol morning and night, and she just hated the taste of it. And so it would be in the mixture of the food. She'd eat everything else, and then that little bit would come out. So I'd put it back in, and towards the end, she was just going to the garden, giving me a bit of side eye, and I'd just see her nudging something into the garden with her nose.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: I thought, yep, that's it.
00:04:15
Speaker 3: And on the last day, she just looked at me and I said, are you trying to tell me that today's the day?
00:04:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: And our vet was just brilliant, can I say. Give them a shout out. North Randwick vet. So wonderful. So they came to the house. Both boys were there. Harley was there. Funny enough, that's where we live. But the boys don't live at home anymore. But they were there.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: And I gave them the option. And I'm glad that they said yes.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: And... We spent a couple of hours with her before the vet arrived. And she was just asleep, really. She was just asleep. But at one stage, she stood up and she came over to where Harley was in the wheelchair. And she put her head next to his hand so he could touch the top of her head.
00:05:02
Speaker 1: It's like she's... She knew.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: She knew. She understood the assignment of what her goodbye would be.
00:05:08
Speaker 3: Yep.
00:05:10
Speaker 2: And we all patted her and we all did all the things.
00:05:13
Speaker 3: And the vet was just brilliant. It was Claire and her other side of Rowan. And so I held Minnie's little face in my hands and she sort of said, I'm going to make a little mark in her arm here and then I'll put the port in and we'll leave the room for a while and you tell us when you're ready.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: Oh, you're never ready.
00:05:34
Speaker 2: Never ready. Never. Anyway.
00:05:37
Speaker 1: I held her little face.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: We all told her we loved her. And what was great too was that As a family of four, it was just such a terrible but sort of very important bonding situation. And Harley was mentally present with these neurological situations. Sometimes he can be there half through the chat and then be diverted by something in his head. He was completely present. We were all weeping for Minnie. And then that was it.
00:06:07
Speaker 2: And then also.
00:06:10
Speaker 3: When Minnie had gone and they'd taken Minnie, And I'm going to get her back some of her remains. I've asked for two little stones, one to have at home or one in our place in the south coast, little memorial stones with her remains. But limbs are on the floor where they shaved her arm. It was almost in a heart shape with some of her fur. And I've put it in this locket. Remember we've done an episode on jewellery. And I've spoken about this locket that I was given when I was about 14 by my grandparents. And in it, over the years, there's been a boy's name, there's been a phone number. There have been photos of my babies. There's been a photo of my previous dog.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. And now it's Minnie's turn. Her fur is in here.
00:06:51
Speaker 1: Oh, Amanda.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: Oh, so it's been an extraordinarily stingy, painful week because it's such an uncomplicated grief.
00:07:03
Speaker 2: Because there's no guilt.
00:07:06
Speaker 3: There's no I should have, would have, could have, which I think when humans pass, there's a lot of that.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. And she lived such a lovely life.
00:07:13
Speaker 2: Oh, she did.
00:07:14
Speaker 1: She really did.
00:07:15
Speaker 3: And I felt bad that the last day I was prising her mouth open and putting, you know, pretty much spraying cement down it. But apart from that, she's had a lovely life.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: You know, I was looking at the montage of pictures of Minnie and I had completely forgotten that. when she was that little ball of fur, when she was just a puppy.
00:07:40
Speaker 2: You babysat her the first night.
00:07:42
Speaker 1: Janet and I did. And it was just, and she was just such an amazing little ball of fur that was just completely unhinged. You know, she was just, she was a whirlwind.
00:07:55
Speaker 3: God, for the first year we thought, what the hell?
00:07:58
Speaker 2: What the hell?
00:07:59
Speaker 1: She was just hilarious.
00:08:01
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:08:02
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And then she just, all of a sudden, she kind of turned a corner and she became this absolute, like she herded us. She made sure that we were where we needed to be. You know, when we were walking, she would make sure that we were on the path. Like she was so sweet.
00:08:18
Speaker 3: She constantly did the census is what Harley would say. She'd come in and look where everyone was.
00:08:22
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Everyone present and accounted for.
00:08:25
Speaker 3: Yep. In all the midst of all the emotion of the last week, my brother, who also loved Minnie very much, reminded me of a story of a man I'd met in the park a few years ago.
00:08:36
Speaker 2: And he'd wanted to.
00:08:36
Speaker 3: Tell me he lived near us and he had been going through a really bad time to the point where he was thinking, do I want to be here? And one day he was walking back through the park thinking the darkest of thoughts.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: Oh, dear.
00:08:52
Speaker 3: And he encountered little Minnie. who went up to him and he said there was just something about the openness of the way she looked at him, the acceptance and the kindness and the optimism he saw in a little puppy face.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: That unconditional love.
00:09:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. He sort of said she'd saved him.
00:09:11
Speaker 3: So he went home and didn't do something terrible and then built to rebuild his strength and his life after that. And he'd always thought if he saw me, he wanted to tell me the role my dog had played.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: Isn't that?
00:09:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a lovely story.
00:09:27
Speaker 3: When I spoke about this on the radio, and maybe this will resonate with anyone who's listening to this too, it gives people permission to grieve pets because we know they're not humans.
00:09:36
Speaker 2: We know that.
00:09:37
Speaker 3: But acknowledging the grief of losing someone who's been by your side for.
00:09:41
Speaker 2: 14 years is worth talking about.
00:09:46
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I think about it that as an adult I've had Two dogs and both in Canada. And when they passed, it wouldn't have occurred to me. to tell somebody at work to.
00:10:05
Speaker 1: I mean, my friends knew, but probably nobody else. It really wouldn't have been something that I.
00:10:14
Speaker 1: Was kind of, I don't even know, is acceptable.
00:10:18
Speaker 2: The word?
00:10:18
Speaker 3: Yes, I don't think it has been until recent years. I don't think it was acceptable.
00:10:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:10:24
Speaker 1: And I think about, I think about the grief because you're right. You know, our dogs were with us every day. They were, you know, you'd always be looking to say, you know, where is Kali? Where's Crunch? Where are these dogs? And they'd always be, you know, at your feet usually.
00:10:41
Speaker 3: Right.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: But somewhere, you know, they were always around. They were always, you know, part of our, all the activities that we did as a family. So it seems now I look back at, and I think what a travesty that I felt as though I couldn't grieve it more publicly.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:10:57
Speaker 2: Isn't that interesting?
00:10:57
Speaker 3: Whereas now I think, you know, they understand at your place of work that you can perpet grieving or your friends get it. You know, we've had so many lovely emails and people reaching out and, flowers, all kinds of things. Someone sent me this beautiful picture that they'd done of Minnie because I think it touches everyone. And I thought this was interesting because I'd said that, you know, I held her face as she died. I knew she'd died. And yet the next day the shock of the permanence of it was just horrendous. I looked at where I expected to see her lying. I looked at where the water bowls should be. The shock of it that, oh, my God, this is every day. And this man sent me this fantastic email. His name's Alan. And he said he'd recently lost his dog Zoe after 17 years. Oh. And so he said, I get that the moments where you think you're okay, then you see the spot that they always lay in and you sob again. He said it's very familiar. And he'd heard someone talking about this, a neuroscientist who'd written a book called The Grieving Brain. And he said, what stayed with me was the idea that although we consciously know they are physically gone.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
00:12:05
Speaker 3: Our brain has spent years learning their physical presence as part of our world. It predicts them being in their usual spot, hearing their sounds and seeing them when we come home. So when that spot is suddenly empty, it's almost a collision between what we know and what our brain still expects. Grieving is partly the brain slowly having to relearn that physical reality and rewire the map.
00:12:29
Speaker 1: Oh, you know, I think about when we were, you know, we'd be down at your place down south and I would know that it was about 4 o'clock when Minnie would kind of look at you and go, dinner. She was the clock. She was the clock. And so that whole sense of her knowing and her rhythm and knowing that. And I was actually, you just said that you'd taken her food and water bowl away.
00:13:01
Speaker 2: Almost straight away. And I wondered why. Actually, Liam did.
00:13:05
Speaker 3: Liam washed up the bowl and the water bowl and he put them under the stairs. Yeah.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: For Harry Potter to use.
00:13:13
Speaker 1: Yeah. But I was going to ask that. I know when my pets passed that that was probably the one thing that was just the hardest was to go and put those away because they were that constant presence.
00:13:29
Speaker 3: Also, I feel really it's a weird thing to feel guilty about But we had a carpet cleaner come in yesterday because upstairs where I sleep, Minnie used to sleep on the floor. And the last few weeks, because of the tablets she was on, during the night she'd wet herself. And then towards the end, I called it her date stamp. Wherever she sat down, there's a bit of poo. And so I felt disloyal that it's only been a few days and yet we had the carpets cleaned.
00:13:57
Speaker 2: And I thought, is that disrespectful? And I've just felt.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: I thought I was humiliating her somehow by having people come in to remove her stains.
00:14:07
Speaker 2: It's stupid, isn't it?
00:14:10
Speaker 1: Because you're never going to be able to erase her presence from your home, ever.
00:14:14
Speaker 2: Starting with the stains. Starting with the.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: Stains, yeah. I mean, she had a wee the first time she came to our place.
00:14:22
Speaker 2: I know, you moved it. That was hilarious. You'd moved it to your new place. I think you'd had the carpets professionally cleaned.
00:14:28
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: And then Minnie, who never wees inside.
00:14:31
Speaker 1: No.
00:14:32
Speaker 2: Came up and did a wee on your floor.
00:14:33
Speaker 1: Absolutely. It was a christening of sorts.
00:14:39
Speaker 3: Well, part of the gift of doing different hours this year for the radio show is that every morning it was my non-negotiable. So I'd take Minnie down and we'd have a little bit of a stroll and we'd stop at that little kiosk down at the beach. They'd give her some banana bread. I'd get a hot chocolate. And there were some other people down there, some other people I'd met who I'd seen throughout the years with their dogs, Arthur and Matt in particular. And Matt at the end was carrying his dog down.
00:15:03
Speaker 2: And Arthur had Belle and then Belle passed away two.
00:15:06
Speaker 3: Weeks ago, a 14-year-old dog who I've seen at the park for 14 years. And this morning I saw them again and they knew that Minnie had passed and the three of us sat there on the bench because Arthur had said, it's tempting not to come back down here. But he said, I'm going to. I'm going to force myself to walk down where I've walked for 14 years with my dog and sit down there and honour her.
00:15:32
Speaker 1: So you guys are a little club now.
00:15:33
Speaker 2: We're a little club.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: Are you guys going to start solving mysteries now?
00:15:42
Speaker 2: A dead dog club. A dead dog club. Maybe we should.
00:15:52
Speaker 1: First mystery, why are they still stained?
00:15:58
Speaker 2: Oh, well, thank you for making me laugh. And I must say, it's riding this weird grief train.
00:16:04
Speaker 3: As I said, I think when humans pass, there's much more complication to this grief. With a dog, it's the stingy, sharp, missing band. It's a Band-Aid and it stings like hell. And the minute it happened, my youngest son, Jack, said, well, this is effed. And he said, excuse my French. And I said, Jack, if ever that language is appropriate, today's the day.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:16:27
Speaker 3: Yes, it is.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: It's completely effed. Yeah. But you don't know when the wave will hit you. One minute you're fine.
00:16:35
Speaker 3: And then I said to Harley last night, well, it was this time last week and I felt quite all right.
00:16:40
Speaker 2: And then suddenly, bang, I started sobbing.
00:16:43
Speaker 3: It's just, it's like, you know, there's a lot to cry about and a lot to love about. But, God, it's all on the surface all the time. I feel like I'm a teenager. Everything is on the surface at the same time.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: It's exhausting. When I think about the early stages of grief where it's just there, it feels like, you know, when I first went down, moved to Australia and went down to Coogee and I stood in the waves and I had no idea about the idea of shore dump. And I was doing this moment where I was just turning round and round and I was going like, I shouldn't see my feet from this angle. And I had sand in places I shouldn't have had, all of that.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: The gusset of sand.
00:17:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, the gusset of sand. And I just remember thinking like that feeling that that's actually what grief feels like, where you're just getting hit by this wave and you're just absolutely topsy-turvy. You just don't know what's happening. It just And you don't know when that wave is going to let you up and have a breath again. But I think that's the thing about grief too, is that eventually it's kind of like the waves come less and less.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean you don't get a bad set every once in a while, but yeah.
00:18:06
Speaker 3: It's a gusset of sand. That's the first novel. It's the first title in our crime-fighting.
00:18:13
Speaker 1: Oh, I like that. I was just going to name my band that.
00:18:17
Speaker 2: Oh, nice, nice.
00:18:18
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:18:18
Speaker 2: Gusset of sand. No, you're right.
00:18:21
Speaker 3: And the first few days you think, it's like when your heart is first broken, you think I'll never be happy ever again.
00:18:26
Speaker 2: I will never, ever be happy again.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: I will never find love again. Oh, yep. And then you do. And then you do. But I think right now this is just about taking care of your tender heart. I mean, it's just ….
00:18:42
Speaker 2: Well, you know, and it's exhausting, isn't it? Grief is exhausting.
00:18:47
Speaker 1: It really is. It really is.
00:18:49
Speaker 3: And thank you to everyone for reaching out and for people telling me the stories of how they've coped, how they feel. Some people say they're still crying. It happened years ago. You know, this is big stuff and we are allowed to acknowledge it.
00:19:02
Speaker 2: We really are.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, my friend.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:19:07
Speaker 1: How are you feeling?
00:19:07
Speaker 3: A bit better, thank you. And you've given me some impetus to write a crime novel.
00:19:13
Speaker 1: I'm glad.
00:19:15
Speaker 2: No one would suspect us.
00:19:17
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so.
00:19:20
Speaker 3: All right.
00:19:21
Speaker 2: Well, let's get to some glimmers.
00:19:22
Speaker 1: Let's.
00:19:28
Speaker 3: My glimmer, and I've already touched on this, was how people have responded to my grief and sharing their own. And it's just been absolutely beautiful. There's a couple I'd like to mention. There's a woman called Marianne Oliver who painted a picture of Minnie And underneath she wrote, Minnie, the sunshine and the glue. Oh.
00:19:46
Speaker 1: And it looked so much like Minnie.
00:19:48
Speaker 2: Oh, it looked so much like Minnie.
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Oh. And our digital producer, Jenna, reached out to a pet shrine ceremony that they have online. It's a Japanese Buddhist tradition and it's called the shrine. And Jenna gave details of Minnie and Minnie was included in this ceremony. for animals that have passed. And just the ritual of these things has made me feel so wonderful. So thank you to everybody. Because I think sometimes, as you said, Anita, we don't give these things the ritual. And even in that brochure where I picked the little stone where Minnie's remains would go, they had little, and I know you're not a fan of this animal, but they had little urns for rats.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Oh, dear.
00:20:36
Speaker 1: Oh, dear.
00:20:36
Speaker 2: It's not your thing.
00:20:37
Speaker 1: Not my thing.
00:20:38
Speaker 3: But that thing's for mice and rats and where smaller remains could go. Because, you know, who are we to say that's not a proper grief for someone?
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Absolutely. What we consider a pout is what's in our hearts, you know, that we can create relationships with all kinds of creatures, great and small.
00:20:58
Speaker 3: And of this generation, hopefully, where this stuff can be acknowledged. Even by you, who's not a fan of the rats.
00:21:05
Speaker 1: Oh, that's right.
00:21:07
Speaker 2: I know that's your hoodoo.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: I was going to say that. I'm never going to get there with rats.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: No, okay. I'll let you off the hook for that one.
00:21:13
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:21:14
Speaker 2: All right, what's your glimmer?
00:21:15
Speaker 1: So, you know, thinking about grieving and thinking about the things that I do to comfort myself is that I was, on the weekend, Taya, my daughter-in-law, my gorgeous daughter-in-law and I, we made a big double batch of pereshka.
00:21:34
Speaker 2: Oh, yum.
00:21:35
Speaker 1: Which are these Ukrainian, they're hard bunned and they're filled with like farm cottage cheese and potatoes.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: It's like you at the gym, hard bunned.
00:21:43
Speaker 1: Oh, hard bunned, absolutely. And you serve them with sour cream. They are not a low-cal option here. But I remember making this dish with my With my mom, my sister, my grandma, you know, my auntie. It was an all-day affair. It was just women in the kitchen. And, you know, we were all bitching and gossiping and moaning about this, that, and the other thing. And we'd make all these and freeze them for future meals, right? They are delicious. They are very delicious. And what I was thinking about, we were actually, Ty and I were having this conversation because she's Egyptian. And her comfort foods would be very different than the comfort food that I grew up with. But we were talking about how some of the dishes that she makes for us, for our family now, that they have become my comfort foods. And that, you know, I love that some of the food that we have brought into– And Tataya's family have become comfort food as well, that I know that there'll be a dozen or so of these little hard-bun things going over to my daughter-in-law's brother and family and that kind of thing. So I love that that's a shared thing. I think that that's glorious. And I took a picture of my granddaughter. who's 10 months old and, you know, just making an absolute mess of herself eating one. And I just thought this is her Ukrainian heritage coming out. I loved it.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: You and I have spoken about this before, about, you know, the nature of love being a doing word, but the nature of food and our mother's cookbooks, our mother's cookbooks, our grandmother's cookbooks with their handwriting, all handwritten. The memory of that, the emotional memory of that, not just of the food, but of the story, of where you had it. And often the recipe will be Auntie Marguerite's cheese puffs, Mrs.
00:23:48
Speaker 2: Smith's whatever. That's the legacy too.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: I really love that it's often add a pinch of or add until it mixes well. And I'm going, I don't know what that means, but, you know, we'll find our way.
00:24:01
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Anita, thank you for holding my hand through yet another of life's things. And thank you to all of our teacups for riding the waves with us too and for being here.
00:24:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that we can be there for each other through the ups and the downs.
00:24:23
Speaker 2: Always with a cup of tea. Speaking of which, shall we?
00:24:25
Speaker 3: Let's.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: Love you.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: Love you.
00:24:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
