A Carer’s Diary – Episode 3

We lived successfully enough, for a number of years, without this ever becoming a real issue. I knew how she felt about a dog. She knew my feelings, and quietly accepted them.
Instead, we compromised about pets. She had first, a gerbil. Then a rat. Then a rabbit. Then a horse. I got to thinking: what’s next? What’s bigger than a horse? For every pet she successively acquired turned out to be larger than the one before. 

But then her mental health took a dive, and for a while, she couldn’t even think about what might replace Kafka, her chestnut mare. Finally, though very sick, she concluded she did need another pet, but one she could be very tactile with. One that needed her, and would play with her – perhaps even offer some sort of everyday affection. Accepting that a dog remained out of the question, she reached back down the scale and chose a canary. She loved him, but he couldn’t ever really be handled in the style she had hoped. And then he died. So: we replaced him with another canary, a lovely, spunky chap with a badly-damaged foot. Perhaps he would need Harriet and allow her to handle him. But no. Although chatty and amusing to watch, he has always, frustratingly, remained too nervy to be handled or played with.

Her mental health has continued to deteriorate – or at least, to not ever improve – and the deep-seated need she carries for an animal she can really, physically bond with, has never gone away. And then, thoroughly unhelpfully, the local paper carried an article the other week about a young local girl whose mental health had been revitalised by her relationship with a new pet dog. I’d seen the paper first and really should have hidden it, or burnt it, but Harriet eventually got her hands on it, and brought the article jarringly to my attention.
  “You see! You see!” she said, triumphantly.

Several further weeks of very serious illness (and despond) followed. Now and again, when she was lucid, Harriet would try and talk to me about getting a dog, about what it might take to change my mind. And I was considerably affected by all the rancour, all the possibilities. I had worries, fears even, about what the introduction of a dog might do to the dynamic of our household. For I was bound to try and avoid, try and stay out of its way as much as I could; and this necessarily would mean less time spent with Harriet.
  “But I won’t need you around me all the time if I have a dog,” she argued. And I could see that.
  “How about the walks though?” I reasoned. “For much of your life, you’re simply not well enough to leave the house.”
She said a dog would change all that.
  “Look at what it did to that girl …” 
She suggested also that the need to walk the dog two or three times a day would compel her to leave the house. Would give her a reason to physically and mentally ‘get better’.

I love Harriet, I love her very much, and all this persuasion – all her continued appalling health – finally caused me to agree to a trial. We would have her parents’ dog in the New Year, while they spend seven weeks in New Zealand.
She was delighted. Simply overjoyed. But none of this endured. Her parents already had a dog-sitter lined up for the trip, and were not interested in cancelling her and changing their arrangements. We were back a step, and Harriet was even more shattered than she had previously been, when there’d seemingly been no chance of her ever having access to a dog.

What could I do? I’d agreed to the seven week trial, and now it had evaporated in an instant. I took a deep breath, and told her I would agree to her having her own dog. She had persuaded me she could look after it, and that if it would bring her even half as much pleasure as she imagined it would, then how could I, as a loving husband and carer, stand by and refuse it?

Naturally, she was thrilled all over again. After years of marriage, so many long years of horrible mental illness, she was to have a dog around the house with us. Her joy – and her love for me – had never known such heights. Off she went to the PC, to begin researching the breed most suited to our home, most suited to the type of life she would be able to provide for it: playful, not too much care needed, quiet, not requiring an enormous amount of exercise …
Then later the same evening, she came over to me in the kitchen.
  “I have something I’ve got to say …”
I waited, uncertainly. With Harriet, such an opening could be the preface to anything.
  “I’m not getting a dog …” she said. “I’ve thought about it, and it is just so wonderful that you’ve agreed to it, just for me. But I can’t put you through it.”

I protested. I’d resolved myself to it, we could work round the two of us living amicably under the same roof.
  “I know, I know,” she continued. “But I simply don’t want to do it to you. I don’t really need a dog. And it means so much that you were willing to do it for me. I’ve been having a look online, and I’m going to get a parrot instead.”