Someone said, "Bowie isn't eating his breakfast," at the table on a Tuesday in early May, and somebody else said, "What? Whose did he eat?" before the sentence landed properly and someone said, "Oh no." That was the whole warning we got.
Five days later we were all down at Oriental Bay, Max tearing around causing minor havoc in the middle distance while Bowie worked the wet sand at the careful pace of a very old gentleman who still insisted on attending every occasion. Fifteen years old. He'd been part of this family longer than any of the kids had. You slow down around a dog like that without deciding to.
Two days after that, on the twelfth, he died. That day's record shows a coaching call in the morning and then me at home with the kids in the evening, Lou wanting the whole of me, Fox and Dot drifting past in their teenage orbit. Whatever happened underneath that, I don't have much of it written down.
What I do have is the following Saturday: Fox's football game in the morning, cold and ordinary, and then six hours blocked out on the calendar for one line, collect Bowie's ashes. Nobody puts six hours against an errand like that by accident. Somebody, probably me, already knew we wouldn't want to be rushed doing it.
The rest of the month kept going the way months do. Dad came up for tea one afternoon in his downstairs room, the one that might one day be an Airbnb or might just stay his, and the conversation turned to his heart, diet, blood sugar, the usual, and by the time he'd gone back down it had settled to its usual size. A meeting with 47 people on the invite tried to put a number on what curiosity is worth. Jas took me to an art show one afternoon and for a few hours I stopped being a founder and was just a husband in a room full of paintings with his wife. The whole family gathered to watch Juliet one evening, Max curled up near the couch the way dogs curl when they've decided the situation isn't theirs to manage, and I noticed, not for the first time, that he was doing it alone now.
By the last weekend of the month I'd stopped leaving much of a trace at all, two whole days where the record shows nothing. That used to feel like wasted time. This month it felt about right.
The couch still has the dent in the left cushion where Bowie used to arrive and settle, the particular shape of twelve kilos going down all at once. Nobody's sat there properly since. Max tries sometimes. It's not the same shape.
