I have been thinking about Bobby.
Not a dog I know personally, as he has been gone for over 150 years. Greyfriars Bobby is a dog whose name I carry in my heart, as I suspect all dogs do. He was a small terrier who lived in Edinburgh in the 19th century. When his owner, John Gray, died and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Bobby did what any of us would do, if we could. He stayed. For fourteen years, he kept vigil at that grave. He was still there when he died himself, in 1872, aged sixteen.
The Scots thought so much of this that they gave him a statue. His headstone reads: Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.
I think about that phrase often, particularly lately.
The humans at Pesel & Carr have lost people they loved. Some of these losses are recent. Some are older wounds, the kind that don’t announce themselves loudly but simply become part of the shape of you, a space where someone used to be. I notice it in the quiet moments. I am, after all, very observant. It is one of the advantages of having excellent hearing and no meetings to attend.
Grief is not something dogs do differently from humans, really. Humans and pets carry the ones we love in some internal place that doesn’t have a name but that everyone who has loved someone lost recognises immediately.
Bobby didn’t guard that grave because he was told to. He did it because he didn’t know what else to do with all that love.
I understand this.
The best any of us can do is remember. Keep the people we’ve lost present: in the stories we tell, the habits they gave us, the way they changed how we move through the world. Memory is not the consolation prize for loss. It is, I would argue, the whole point of having loved someone in the first place.
Hold them close. Tell their stories. Let Bobby’s loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.
Woof, with love — Louis
