We never meant to become known as the couple with the old dogs. At the start, it was only meant to be one quiet foster, something gentle after the house had gone too silent. My husband, Niall, had retired from Dublin Bus, and I had closed my little alteration shop near Phibsborough. Our children were reared and gone, ringing from London and Cork when they could. The kitchen clock sounded louder than it used to. Even the kettle seemed to boil for nobody.
Then one wet Tuesday, we went out to the DSPCA in Rathfarnham and asked for a dog who wouldn’t need much. The woman behind the desk looked at us for a long moment and said, “Would you consider an older one?” That was how we met Seamus, a grey-faced terrier with cloudy eyes, a bad heart, and the confidence of a retired bank manager. He came home wrapped in a donated blanket, sat in the middle of our sitting room in Stoneybatter, and sighed as if he had finally found the place he had been expecting all along.
Seamus was with us for eight months. He couldn’t go far, so our walks were slow little loops towards Phoenix Park, with more sniffing than stepping. People would pass us, glance at his stiff legs, and say, “Ah, poor fella.” But Seamus was not poor in spirit. He barked at cyclists, stole toast from plates, and once tried to square up to a horse twice the size of our front door. When he died, Niall sat on the kitchen tiles beside him and cried into the same blanket he had arrived in.
I said, “We can’t do that again.” Niall nodded. Three weeks later, we were driving back from Rathfarnham with an elderly spaniel called Maura who had ears like wet velvet and breath that could strip paint. That was the beginning of it.
Over the years, there was Paddy with the missing tail, Bríd who slept standing up when she first arrived because she didn’t trust beds, and little Nell, a Jack Russell who hated everyone except the postman. We did not keep them long, and that was the point. People would say, “How do you bear it, taking them in just to lose them?” I never had a clever answer. The truth was, we bore it badly. Every time. But there was something worse to us than grief, and that was the thought of a frightened old dog spending its last winter on concrete, wondering what it had done wrong.
The one that changed us most was Barney. He arrived during a cold snap in January, a lurcher cross with a white muzzle and hips like coat hangers. He had been found wandering near the quays, confused and half-starved. For the first two days, he stood in the hallway and stared at the front door. He would not eat unless Niall sat on the floor beside the bowl. At night, I could hear him pacing, his nails clicking across the boards like little questions.
On the fourth evening, we took him for a short walk down towards Smithfield. The air had that sharp Dublin bite, and the windows of the pubs were glowing gold. Barney was wearing a red knitted jumper a neighbour had made, though he looked ashamed of it. Just outside a shop, he stopped dead. His whole body began to tremble. Across the road, a man was shouting into his phone, nothing to do with us, but Barney folded himself down to the pavement as if the sound had struck him.
I knelt beside him, not caring who was looking. Niall stood between Barney and the road, blocking the wind with his old body. “You’re alright, pal,” he kept saying. “Nobody’s asking
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