Olive, With Love

12 months on from saying goodbye, 12 things I have learned

It has been a year since we said goodbye to Olive, my beautiful 10-year-old miniature schnauzer, who died of too big a heart (literally) on 2 February 2024 when my daughter was three months old. The past 12 months have been a wild old ride; living with the joy of a longed-for baby alongside the grief of losing your best friend is an unsettling place to find yourself, and there were many nights when I sat feeding the baby, kissing her warm fuzzy head, my heart swollen with love, tears streaming down my face onto her increasingly damp warm fuzzy head that there wasn’t a second warm, much fuzzier head sleeping in the little bed by my feet.

In your first year as a mother you learn a vast amount about yourself, about babies, about love, about WIPING UP THE ENDLESS, ENDLESS MESS, and about the outrageous lie we are told about it being possible to ‘have it all’ (lols), but during mine I also learned about grief and loss and death, and more than I already did about the pure and unadulterated brilliance of dogs.

Here are 12 of the things I learned, one for each month without my magic little friend:

1. If ‘will I love my baby as much as I love my dog’ is something you googled while you were pregnant, panic not: you will, I promise. It sounds unlikely, I know. I felt the same! Surely nobody could be as flawless, as adorable, as silly or as funny as Olive, or have a nose that I would want to boop even half as much as I wanted to boop that wet little snout, but it’s true when they say that the heart expands, yada yada yada, and makes room for new flawless, adorable, silly, funny creatures within it. In the same breath, all those tedious, narrow-minded dullards who say terribly dreary things like ‘you haven’t known true love until you have a child’ are, frankly, narcissists. I loved Olive as much as I love my baby. In a different way, obviously, and with an understanding that she would one day die and I would have to accept it and move on, but still outlandishly and exhaustively. If you have a dog, you know true love. If you have a cat, you know true love. Heck, if you have a houseplant to whom you are particularly devoted, you know true love.

2. Before Olive, I loved all dogs equally and obsessively. I used to do what my friend Rachel called ‘stealth dogging’: surreptitiously perving on other peoples’ dogs on trains and buses, in parks and on beaches, occasionally taking photos. Then I brought Olive home and suddenly found most other dogs a bit annoying, because I had the best dog of all the dogs and none of the other dogs ever quite compared. Now that Olive is gone I have returned to loving them all, because I now understand that every single one of them is the absolute best one to the person who gets to call them theirs. Though I still perv on miniature schnauzers most of all.

3. Dog beds make excellent holding pens for non-rolling infants while you’re on the loo or in the bath or brushing your teeth, hold one back when you’re putting all her things into the attic.

   

   

   

4. For one solid month after Olive died, whenever the baby was asleep, and particularly during the middle of the night, I sat in the rocking chair in her bedroom trawling my iPhone for photos and videos of Olive, collecting them into an album called My Olive and weeping hysterically while listening to Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight. I now know that I would make an exceptional Spanish widow and because of this my boyfriend is actually quite excited about the send-off I’m going give him one day.

5. I see Olive in my baby daughter constantly, in her goofy confidence, in her desperation to chase all the cats, in the way she demolishes sourdough, in how fantastic she looks in a knitted jumper. It is genuinely shocking to me that they are not blood relatives, though when very tired I have obviously googled whether that truly isn’t possible.

6. If you have a dog as perfect as Olive was, I’m afraid to tell you that you will never be able to get a dog of that breed - presumably your favourite breed - ever, ever, ever again. We had the best miniature schnauzer there was! We literally completed miniature schnauzer! Another one would never compare! What would be the point? And yet….

   

   

   

7. Dog poo bags are the best nappy bags, much more so than those horrendous, rose-scented, 1 denier ones made for actual nappies. You will be glad your automated Amazon subscription for 240 of the fuckers arrived the week after your dog died, even though it turned you into an actual puddle at the time.

8. Babies and dogs have fundamentally different needs, so it feels unlikely that we will get another dog until our daughter is 4 or 5. But being a dogless household when you have lived with one for over a decade is eerie. ‘Here comes the hot-stepper,’ my boyfriend Mike used to say every time Olive’s clippy little feet skipped across the wooden floors. When you really miss the hot-stepper tell yourself, as my friend Louise does, that they have just gone out with the dog walker and will be back in an hour. In the beginning, this really is the only way to cope.

9. ‘I saw Olive today’ becomes a frequently uttered phrase in our house. On the stairs when we come through the front door, where she greeted us every single day, waving one little paw. Under the baby’s cot, where she slept every single night after we brought her home from the hospital. Sniffing about the garden, burying bones and popping through the cat flap covered in mud. Curled up like a croissant on the sofa. You even begin to see phantom puddles on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, though now they tend to make you smile.

   

   

   

10. When your baby learns to say dog - or, in our case, ‘wuh wuh!’ - and shouts it while pointing at a photograph of your departed friend for the first time, your heart will explode into one thousand actual pieces.

11. Scattering some of Olive’s ashes in her favourite place (the Victoria Park Boating Lake) on her anniversary, after keeping her in my bedside drawer for a whole year, did feel like letting her run free. I’m going to sprinkle some more over the edge of the Walpole Tidal Pool wall, which she loved to run around while we swam, giving us little kisses whenever we reached her. I’m going to turn another batch into a ring so I can keep her with me always, and I must keep a spare spoonful for when the baby inevitably hides the first ring, nobody can find it, and I need to make another. 'Olive the horcrux,’ Mike said. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’

12. When I consider having another baby - if that is something we are, by some miracle, lucky enough to do - my main consideration among all the myriad and enormous and existential things to consider is whether or not, if we have another girl, we would be able to call her Olive. Would it be weird, or unfair on our daughter whose middle name is Olive, because what if she wants to take on that name one day, and if so will I suddenly have two daughters named Olive, and would that actually be such a bad thing after all, since that name brings me so much joy that I really do want to be able to say it again, every single day, many thousands of times a day, as I did for ten and a half magical years. Olive, Olive, Olive. Olive.