The Day We Lost Our Dog

I have a cat. Its name is Mimi. She is small and white. I love her because she sleeps on my bed.

When I was a child, my grandmother had a small grey cat called Misha. She was very quiet and she liked to sit on the kitchen window. She used to wait for my grandmother to come home from the market. She slept on a cushion next to the heater. Misha died about ten years ago. I still think about her sometimes when I see a cat in a window.

Last summer, I left the flat I had lived in for six years. It was small and not very nice, but it was where I had lived in my twenties. The new flat is bigger and brighter and in every way better. I should have been happy.

What surprised me was how much I missed the old one. For weeks, when I came home from work, my body wanted to walk to the old street. I missed the noisy neighbours I had often complained about. I missed the bad shower and the small kitchen.

I think now that I was not really missing the flat. I was missing a version of myself that lived there — the person I was at twenty-four. That person is gone now, even though I am still here. Sometimes a small move is the end of a quiet stretch of life, and you only notice when it is over.

I left my first proper job two years ago. It was a job I had been ready to leave for at least a year — the work had become repetitive, the pay was no longer reasonable, and I had been complaining about it to anyone who would listen. When I finally handed in my notice, my friends sent celebration messages. I expected to feel free.

What I actually felt, for about three months, was something close to grief. I missed my old colleagues, even the ones who had irritated me. I missed knowing where everything was. I missed being good at something. I felt slightly stupid about it — I had been the one who left, after all, and the new job was, by every measurable standard, an improvement.

It took me a long time to understand that I was not really mourning the job. I was mourning a five-year stretch of my life that had ended. I had been junior in that office; I had grown up in it; the version of me that worked there was someone I would not be again. Other people's celebration was not wrong, exactly — but it was responding to a different question from the one I was sitting with. I think small endings, even chosen ones, often deserve more time than we give them.

My grandmother lived alone for the last twelve years of her life, in a small flat above a baker's, and during those years I visited her, with whatever frequency I could manage, on Sunday afternoons. The visits were not, by any standard I would now describe as exciting, particularly varied. We drank tea, mostly. We talked, when we talked at all, about not very much: the price of fish, the weather, a person we had both known some decades earlier who was now either ill or dead. There were, on the whole, no revelations.

I tell people, sometimes, that I learned a great deal from my grandmother, because I think this is what one is supposed to say about an old woman one loved. The truth is that I did not learn very much from her in the way I have learned things from books or teachers. What I learned was something more peculiar, and it took me longer to recognise: I learned that another person can be quietly satisfied, in your presence, without requiring you to be interesting. My grandmother, on Sunday afternoons, was not waiting for me to perform. She did not expect insight. She did not, I came eventually to suspect, even particularly want conversation. What she wanted was that I should be in the room.

I have not, in the rest of my life, often experienced this. The world I inhabit is largely structured around the assumption that one is, at any given moment, either being judged on something or producing something. The rooms one is in are mostly rooms in which something is being asked of one. It is, on the whole, a tiring kind of life, and I had not, before I had spent some years sitting with my grandmother, fully understood that there was an alternative.

She died about three years ago. I think about her often. I do not think about her wisdom, of which she had less than people now claim about elderly women. I think about the texture of those Sunday afternoons — the slow tea, the long silences, the absolute permission to be quietly present without justifying the presence.

I have begun to think, in the years since, that the highest compliment a person can pay to another may be simply to be at ease in their company. I do not know how to teach this skill, and I am, on present evidence, not yet very good at it myself. But I can recognise when it is happening, which is a small piece of progress for which I am, in a quiet way, grateful to her.

There was, until last spring, a particular bench in a particular park that I had been sitting on, with what I now recognise to have been quite remarkable consistency, for the better part of fifteen years. It was an old wooden bench, of no architectural distinction whatsoever, situated under a plane tree on a slight rise overlooking a duck pond, with a brass plate on the back commemorating someone called Eleanor Baxter, of whom I knew, and now know, nothing whatever except that she had died in 1994 and was, presumably, fond of the same view I have been fond of since I moved to the neighbourhood in my mid-twenties.

The bench was removed, without ceremony, sometime in March. There is, I am told, going to be a new one. There is also going to be, I gather from a council notice, a redesigned section of path, which will be, in the language council notices specialise in, more accessible and more sustainable. None of this, I should make clear, strikes me as a bad development. I am in favour of accessible paths. I have nothing against new benches. I am not, on any reasonable accounting, the victim of an injustice. I am simply, in the unphotogenic way these things tend to happen, going to have to find somewhere else to sit.

It is the kind of loss it is, I am aware, slightly absurd to write about. A bench is not a creature; Eleanor Baxter is not a person I knew; the park itself is going to remain a park. The thing I have lost is, in any quantifiable sense, very small. I have, however, sat on that bench through three jobs, two relationships, the death of a grandparent, the writing of a great many emails I am not proud of, and several quiet decisions I now regard as among the more important ones I have made. The bench did not contribute to any of this in any active way. It was, throughout, simply there — a stable surface in a part of the city I had come to think of as mine, on which I was, for fifteen years, more or less permitted to think.

I find, looking at this, that I do not quite know what to do with the loss. Bench grief is not a category recognised, as far as I am aware, by any tradition. There are no ceremonies. There is, I am almost certain, no relevant literature. The available registers for talking about it are limited, and most of them are slightly comic: I would like to say, for instance, that I am bereaved, and the word is so plainly disproportionate that the joke does most of the work for me. I have, accordingly, been doing the only thing the situation seems to permit, which is walking past where the bench used to be, looking at where the bench used to be, and walking on.

What I am noticing, doing this, is that the loss is having a quality I would associate with much larger ones. The route is not what it was. The afternoon I once had — the one structured around sitting for a while in a particular place — is not, as it turns out, transferable to a new bench. The familiar surface of that fifteen-year practice, into which I had embedded, mostly without noticing, a great many of my small private decisions, has been removed; and the absence is, I now find, harder to ignore than the presence ever was.

I do not want to claim more than this. The bench is gone; I will, in time, sit somewhere else; the loss is genuinely small, on any reasonable scale of losses. But I have come to think that one of the quieter features of adult life is the discovery that the things you had been doing without thinking about them turn out, often, to have been doing something for you, and that you only recognise the something when whatever was doing it stops. Bench, dog, daily walk, small ritual: these things accumulate, silently, into the structure on which one's life is, in some surprisingly load-bearing way, being held up. When they go, the structure does not collapse. It is, however, slightly less held up. And one tends to discover this, in my experience, in roughly the order of finding oneself, on a Tuesday afternoon, with nowhere particular to sit.