Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we're joined by Gail Anthea Brown, a writer from Caithness in the Northern Highlands of Scotland. Gail's work, rich in folklore and personal storytelling, is deeply inspired by her experiences, including the journey with her dog, Brodie. A beloved member of her family, Brodie brought joy, loyalty and inspiration into Gail's life, shaping her writing and infusing her stories with warmth and authenticity.
Brodie's passing has left a profound absence, yet his memory continues to resonate in Gail's work.
With a background in psychology, mental health and creative wellbeing, Gail brings a unique perspective on the connection between loss, creativity and companionship.
This is part one of a two part series with Gail where she shares how Brodie's life and legacy have shaped her work and how the bond they shared speaks to the profound role our dogs play in our lives.
My name is John Littlefair and welcome to this very special episode of Never Just A Dog.
Gail, it's so lovely for you to join me all the way from Scotland. How's life for you at the moment?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: I'm fine, thanks, John. A little bit tired today. We had a very stormy night here last night. We had Storm Ashley, this one was called. So it was very windy outside last night. It was kind of keeping us awake a little bit. Thankfully it's calmed down today or you might have been hearing the wind noise in the background. But yeah, I'm doing fine otherwise. Coming to a week off work. So back to work tomorrow, back to sort of normality, normal routine and everything. So.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: So when you're not writing, what does your work entail?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: So I obviously am doing my writing, but like most writers, I kind of do other things as well. And I also work as a lecturer in further education, so I do that too part time.
So the nice thing about working in further education is, you know, term time working. So I get most of the holidays, which kind of ties in with my kids being on holiday at the moment as well. So that's nice. Just don't always get holiday weather, that's all.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: And you're in Caithness, so tell me about Caithness.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Yes, so I live in Caithness, as you say, which is up in the very far north of Scotland. So we're the most northerly county on the Scottish mainland, so a lovely place to live. When people think about the Highlands of Scotland, they probably imagine sort of lochs and mountains and so on, and a lot of the Highlands are like that. Caithness is a bit different. Once you get up as far north as us, it Starts to get very, very flat. So we've got a very wide open kind of landscape, very close to the sea, you can see all the way to the horizon. So that's the kind of landscape I'm used to, the landscape I grew up in. So, yeah, it's a lovely place to live. The flip side of the very far north of Scotland is obviously the weather. And I'm sure that will be a theme as I go through the different things we're talking about today.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: I do want to talk about your riding, Gail, probably slightly later, but most importantly, tell me about your dog, Brodie. I'm fascinated to hear how he came into your life.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: So Brodie came into our lives in the summer of 202012 as a very lively, very naughty, eight week old Hungarian Vizsla puppy. And give you the sort of background to where we were as a family at that point. Before Brodie joined us, it was just my husband, my two sons and I, and our sons were very young at that point. They were three and five.
So our eldest son was just about to be starting school and our youngest son was just about to be starting nursery, which is a kind of preschool in Scotland.
So both kids were going to be out of the house a little bit more. So things were changing very much for me with motherhood.
And I think that would be a theme that would continue, you know, during Brodie's life, following that motherhood journey and how it was changing.
But up until this point, I had been at home most of the time since the kids were born. I had actually given up a career in training and development not long after our second son was born. And right up until the kids were at sort of secondary school, I wouldn't work outside the home. You know, I was obviously working at home and I was writing and doing other things. But I would be at home, you know, for almost basically all of Brodie's life.
So when he joined us at this point, I think with the kids, you know, moving on to a little stage, another little stage in their lives, there was a kind of maternal void opening up for me. And we had decided, I think, that the way to complete that would be a puppy. And on paper, we did everything right in terms of thinking about getting a dog. And I'm going to stress on paper, we did the research, we looked at different breeders, we found a lovely breeder for Brodie. Once we had settled on the Hungarian Vizsla breed, we visited other dogs. You know, once we knew Brody was coming to live with us, we were getting the house already getting prepared and everything and my husband and I had both grown up with dogs in the family, so I think we felt we were reasonably experienced. I'm not going to say that we thought this was going to be a breeze, but I think we thought it would be okay.
In reality, Brodie exploded into our lives, upended everything, know, not just the plant pots, our whole sort of home and family.
He was very boisterous. He was a very normal, you know, eight week old Hungarian Vizsla puppy. He was very boisterous, very bitey. He loved to puppy bite in the early days. There was no badness in that. That was just the way he was exploring the world. But he did sometimes make small people cry and he would chase the kids around the garden and things. Our visions of having the Andrix puppy, you know, had turned into baby shark.
It was just a pretty intense time. I remember at that point, for the first few months of his life, one of Brodie's favorite hobbies was pulling socks off children's feet. He would, you know, anytime there was a child in the house and their socked feet, he would go up, pull the socks off, run away with them. This was a brilliant game for Brodie and he loved it. Whenever he had a hobby or whatever he was doing, he was quite relentless with it, you know. So this went on for months.
He would run off, you couldn't catch him, he wouldn't give the socks back and so on.
And I remember other moments in that period being pretty intense with regards to the kids because although they had started school and nursery, they ended up not being out the house as much as we thought they were going to be. Because what happens when kids start school and nursery is they get lots of bugs. So they were at home a lot being sick, basically.
And I vividly remember, you know, one night my husband was working away, the kids had picked up some sort of sick bug. They were sort of projectile vomiting. Brody was peeing on the kitchen floor. I just remember it being a very, very intense period in our lives.
But all that being said, Brodie was our third child. You know, it was challenging, it was intense, but we wouldn't have had that situation any other way. And as soon as Brody joined our family, that's what he was. He was like our third baby. He was a brother to our two sons and we just adored him.
And he would just become a completely integral, central part of our family.
So obviously he got a little older. He reached about 1. And I think at that point we noticed him settling down quite a lot in the home. He would sleep more during the day and between walks and so on. But what tends to happen then is you get a little lull of a couple of months, and then adolescence hits.
So that was another challenging and intense period with Brodie. Again, different things. I remember from that time, you know, taking Brodie out for walks, you know, arriving at the beach. The beach was lovely and quiet, nobody around, letting Brodie have some freedom off his lead to run around.
And within seconds, you know, Brody would spot somebody with a dog, you know, about a mile away, and he would just go. He would just be gone.
And naturally, you know, that didn't always go down well, understandably. And I sometimes got into some embarrassing situations with other dog owners. And I live in quite a small community, so bearing in mind I would be seeing the same people all the time, you know, and it was like, oh, not you again. You know, Brodie was an extrovert. You know, he loved meeting people. He loved meeting other dogs. I was more of an introvert, the kind of person who doesn't like to inconvenience others, get in anyone's way, be a bother. So sometimes this was quite a stressful sort of situation for me, this dynamic. So what ended up happening was that I think to probably make my life easier, and in a way, it ended up being easier for both of us because Brodie ended up with a lot more sort of freedoms. We started retreating more to kind of solitary walks, glaces. We weren't meeting many people or other dogs or whatever. And because of where we live, it's quite possible still to do that if, you know, the area, you know, to go to places that are very quiet, very sort of solitary. So Brodie and I kind of ended up in a world of our own making almost. And we would spend these long hours, you know, on beaches and moors and fields, you know, walking together.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: And did Brodie help you in your creative journey as a writer?
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Brodie would actually become a very large part of my creative process, although he wouldn't have maybe known that. But there was a couple of reasons for that. And one is when you go out with a dog, they pay attention to everything. They notice everything. They take everything. And they're not distracted with this world in the way that we are, especially nowadays with technology and so on. So Brodie really encouraged me to notice things, to pay attention to things, to slow down a little bit. And for a writer, those are really quite important, I would call them skills, you know, to have.
So in that sense, he was really helping me with my writing and my creativity and so on. And I was starting to see my Home in different ways because we would go out and we would be seeing birds and we would be seeing rainbows, and occasionally we would see the northern lights. You know, I remember one time walking along the beach with Brody, a pod of dolphins out in the bay. You know, we saw all these things together and this was part of our life together. The other thing that would happen is when we went out on walks, I would sometimes be kind of plotting the next chapter or the next part of my story. So in those different ways, Brody was really involved in my writing, even though he didn't necessarily always appear on the page.
So our lives kind of carried on like that, like this. Sorry. Brody and I spending lots and lots of time together probably leaned on each other quite heavily. I remember there was a period of about a year where I wasn't very well. You know, Brody, like all dogs, whether owners who go through any kind of difficult time, he was always there for me. You know, he was my constant, my steady at that time. And later, you know, as we went into lockdowns and that Covid area, you know, Brody was there for us as a whole family.
And, you know, all through his life, we never really enjoyed being away without him or anything like that. We would tend to holiday in Scotland or close to home or places that we could take him that were dog friendly, dog friendly cafes and that kind of thing. So in every sense, Brodie was just central to our family life, you know, and a huge part of my life, a huge part of my identity, you know, and we just couldn't imagine not having him in our family.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: And your sons were close to Brody?
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, very much so. I mean, they saw Brody as a brother. You know, they were very kind to Brodie in return. He was very good with them. Once he got over the puppy biting stage, you know, he was absolutely brilliant with the. With the kids, you know, he adored them. And the thing about Brodie was that for all this extroversion and you know, the things I've mentioned about him during his adolescence and so on the flip side of Brodie was that at home he was almost like an angel. You know, he was. He. He loved cuddles, he loved snuggling, he loved blankets, he loved affection, you know, and he would all throughout his life. And as a family, we really appreciated that because we're very close, very close knit family. And Brody just in that sense, just fitted in so. Because that was the way he wanted to be too. You know, he wanted this constant closeness and contact and that was something that we always appreciated about him. And also that he extended that to others, anyone who came to our home, anyone we loved and cared about. Brody also loved and cared about them. And he had this way of making people feel really beloved. You know, he would be incredibly affectionate to visitors and so on. So, yeah, in every way he was just, you know, felt like the perfect fit for our family and our home.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Brodie gets quite ill suddenly, doesn't he?
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Yes, everything seemed to happen very suddenly with Brodie.
So going back to 2023, at the start of 2023, as far as we were concerned, Brodie was still very healthy, very active, very youthful. And in fact, at that point, Brodie was often mistaken for a much younger dog. You know, he would often be mistaken for a dog of two or three. He had a very youthful look about him all his life and he didn't go particularly grey, like maybe quite a lot of Vizslas do. So Brodie was coming up to his 11th birthday. Brodie's birthday was on 21 June, so right in the middle of the year. Which meant that Brodie's half a birthday, as we called it, always fell on Christmas Eve. So we always used to kind of mark and celebrate his half a birthday and I'll maybe. But yeah, to all intents and purposes, as far as we saw it, Brodie was doing well at the start of 2023. And in our imaginations, Brodie was likely to be with us for some time to come. We imagined at least a couple of years.
That would never have been enough. No time would ever be enough, you know, and it always seems very distant when you're thinking about it. But some of Brodie's relatives had been quite long lived and he was looking well, so we had every reason to believe he would probably be with us for a bit longer.
In hindsight now I can see some signs that Brodie possibly wasn't doing as well as we thought he was. Brodie had at one point developed a little cough which we took him to the vet about. But to be honest, nothing really came of that. It kind of resolved itself and I think it was kind of put down to just one of these things.
He had a couple of periods in the early part of last year where he went off his food for a couple of days. Again, we didn't think too much about that because there could have been any number of reasons for it. And Brodie tended always to just kind of come back to normal. Brodie was an intact male, so there was always a chance a female in season was around or weasels are quite sensitive, you know, to changes and the fact that he always just kind of bounced back. We kind of put these feelings, any worries about these kind of things to one side. I do remember as well, in the early part of last year, Rosie was getting a bit slower to get up in the morning, sometimes appeared to want to stay lying down. And when he did get up, he was occasionally not quite limping, but kind of hopping on one foot. But then maybe the next day he'd be hopping on the other foot and then it would stop. So again, I kind of put this down to fuzzy feet. We called it. You know, my son used to call it fuzzy feet when your feet went to sleep after you've been lying down for a long time. I do think dogs are very good at hiding, you know, perhaps, you know, any kind of pain or whatever. And we certainly weren't getting the impression that Brody was unwell or in any kind of pain or anything like that. So it wasn't until this September that we actually noticed a deterioration in Brodie's health. And at the start of September 2023, Brodie and I had had a lovely weekend alone together. My husband and our two sons had gone away with a family member on a kind of boys weekend. And I'd been left alone with Brody. And we'd been swimming, we'd been walking, we'd been watching movies on the couch. Brodie was in bed with me at night. It was just so precious. And I'm so glad now that we had that time alone together, because it would only be about a week after that that Brodie would start to show signs of being unwell. So we were about mid September now. Brodie stopped being interested in food again. But this time he was actually losing weight.
And we noticed that he was starting to look quite thin. He'd been on a raw food diet all through his life, and he'd always seemed really quite happy on that. But now we were trying just to give him different things to see if he would, you know, get his appetite back. We were giving him canned food or kibble or just whatever, whatever he would take bits of chicken or whatever he would take to try and get him eating again. And he would sort of perk up and then he would stop eating again. He wouldn't be interested in the food. And this happened over a very short period of time. It was just. So we took Brody to the vet because another thing that had started to happen is that his toilet was basically turning to liquid. You know, he was. There was obviously something going on. We took him to the vet, and at that point, things were still looking pretty Positive, pretty hopeful.
We weren't really allowing ourselves to think about anything serious going on.
And the vet, I think, was exploring the possibility then that Brodie maybe had some kind of infection.
So he was given some blood tests, and they actually came back not really showing anything, to be honest. So I think Brodie was put on some medication to try and maybe clear if there was some sort of infection or something. And I think we had some stuff we were sprinkling on his food to try and encourage him to eat. But we were kind of hopeful this was something that could be fixed. You know, whatever it was, we would just go back to our normal lives with Brody. But unfortunately, after a slight, you know, uptick, he just went back down again. You know, he stopped eating. All of the toilet problems were the same.
And the main thing that was concerning us now was that he was getting very, very thin, to the point that we were putting his little coat on all the time because we didn't want him to be cold. And also just because he looked thin, you know, he didn't. He looked frail. So we took him to the vet for what would be the kind of final visit this time. We spoke to another vet, and all of the vets were lovely. They were all so kind at this. But this vet said that, you know, looking at the kind of trajectory, looking at Brody's sort of situation, his age, he was considered a senior dog now. And all the experience that the vet had, she thought we immediately needed to get him in for a scan. And she also told us at that point that she thought we should prepare ourselves. You know, those were the words.
I think you should prepare yourself that this isn't going to be the news that you might be hoping for.
So you can imagine, John, at that moment, you know, that was when the bottom starts to fall out of your heart a little bit. You know, it was the first time, I think, we had allowed ourself to consider that this might be something really serious.
And this sort of atmosphere in the room then was very charged and very emotional.
We didn't want to leave Brodie anywhere, but we had to leave him for a little while to have this scan, and that was really difficult.
So we went home. And we don't live too far away. We went home and we were waiting for the call from the vet, and actually, we weren't waiting very long at all. We were barely home for a few minutes when the call came in. And I just remember, you know, I think the words were, I'm so sorry. It's bad news. And that was when, you know, I just dissolved.
So I was at the other end of the line, and the vet was explaining that Brody had a tumor, a large tumor, that it was so far along that there was nothing that could be done, and that we were talking about a matter of days, you know.
So in my mind, you know, you're having to recalibrate all of these imaginings you had about your dog being with you for probably years to come, and suddenly you're talking about you've got days. You know, it's very difficult to process that. So there was disbelief, there was denial, you know, there was tears, you know, on the other end of the phone.
Basically, what we did then when I came off the phone is we wanted to get down to the vets and get Brody home as soon as possible.
So that's what we did. We went to the vets, and we picked him up. And I've mentioned, I think we live in quite a small community. So obviously there were people I knew in there or recognized, and it was very difficult. I was very emotional. People were very kind.
But Brody came out in his little green coat and his little tail wagging, and he was so happy to see us. As far as Brody was concerned, nothing had changed, you know, but as far as we were concerned, our whole lives had shifted on their axis. Our whole family had shifted at that point.
So we got Brodie home and settled. And then it was a case of thinking about, so, what are we going to do? What's the. What's the plan going to be? And what we decided and what we discussed with our kids then when they came home from school was that we were going to let Brodie be the guide, that we were going to take it day by day and let him tell us when the time was right. Because at this point, obviously, Brodie was very poorly. But at this point, he was still apparently very content in the home. He had still been quite enjoying his walks. He was still mobile around the house. He was still happy to see us, to see other people and so on. He was still as affectionate as ever.
So, yeah, we decided we would let Brodie guide us through these next days, whatever. You know, it actually ended up being two weeks. That's what we ended up having with Brodie.
But we decided we would take him on all his favorite walks, revolve everything around him. And, you know, to an extent, Brodie had been very much at the center of our family. But when you have young children growing up, you know, dogs do have to kind of fit in with family life bit. But at this point, it was a case of Brody's always been here for us. Now it's our time to be here for Brodie, you know, and everyone was on board with that. That was what we all wanted. So everything revolved around Pim. And, you know, we didn't even leave the room leaving Brody alone. He always had somebody with him who's going to be with Brody now, you know, so that's exactly what we did. We.
We took him on all his favorite walks. We ended up actually spending a lot of time in the forest because it was a very stormy period those last couple of weeks before Brodie died. And it's funny because right now it's very stormy as well. So it's almost like a mirror of that time. You know, we're almost a year on.
So we went to the forest for shelter. There's not a lot of forests in Caithness, but we went to one, and that would become a kind of poignant place for me always, I think, from then on. And we also saw all the people that Brodie had loved most. You know, our friends and family who'd been most involved in his life. You know, they came to visit, spent time with him, and those meetings were lovely, but they were also difficult because we knew they were goodbyes and that these people wouldn't probably see Brodie again.
There was a few kind of turning point moments that happened in that last couple of weeks.
And I mentioned at the start, you know, that a lot of my sort of journey with Brody would also follow my journey of motherhood and the changes in motherhood and so on, and the changes in me. And I remember us being at the forest one day, all of us as a family of five. And it was so lovely to do that because our boys were getting a bit older. And naturally, in the sort of months and couple of years previous, they hadn't always wanted to come out on walks, you know, every day or whatever. But now everything, you know, we were always together, you know, the family unit.
So we were walking in the forest and the boys were running, giving each other piggybacks, and Brody was kind of watching them. And for me, there was just something about that moment that sort of crystallized everything that we had and everything that we were about to lose, you know, because this was our family. And it just felt like that was never going to be like that again.
There were other moments like that throughout the course of the next couple of weeks.
I had actually had quite a difficult few months leading up to Brodie's death, personally, because various reasons, but one of them was I had been working for a mental health charity and that had been the first sort of job that had taken me kind of out of the home since the kids had been young. This was, you know, they were obviously at secondary school now, but that job had come to an end a few months prior due to lack of funding. So I'd been out of work, actually for six months looking for a new job. And there's obviously some sort of stresses and concerns that go along with that. There was a few other sort of stresses and anxieties happening in my life around that time too. And I think, you know, losing our dogs never happens in isolation. There's always other things going on in your life. So there was actually just round about the time that we heard the news about Brodie. I had actually just secured a new job and this is a job I do now, part time, working in further education.
So it was actually a really difficult time to be starting a new job. You know, as the weeks went on, it would actually be quite helpful because it would be a focus, you know, down the line when Brodie wasn't there. But at that moment, it was really quite difficult timing. I was very fortunate. My employers were very understanding and kind. And those first couple of weeks, which would be the last couple of weeks we had Brodie, I didn't actually have to go to work very often.
I was only away for a few hours at a time. And that would be another of these turning point moments, because I remember being at work, my husband being at home with Brody. He was working from home and I was in the staff canteen.
I was looking at my phone, checking, as I had been doing, you know, checking messages. How's everything at home? How's Brody? And my husband had sent me this photo, a beautiful photo of Brody in black and white. And he was sitting up on the headland near where we lived, near the lighthouse, a place we'd been so often.
And he was sitting just kind of looking out over the landscape.
In this picture, his head is actually turned, looking at the camera. And I remember just thinking, my goodness, my boy, he's suddenly got old and frail. You know, that's how he looked in the photo. I could see it in his eyes. I could see it in his face with that distance of a few hours away from him. And it is amazing how your dog can suddenly, overnight almost go from being this young, healthy, sort of really active dog to suddenly a sort of frail senior. It's like their lives are so compressed compared to ours.
At the same time, I adore that picture. Of Brody. It's probably my favorite picture of him, and I have it sitting on my desk. It's in our bedroom. There was another couple of these little moments that happened before he died. And one of them was, yeah, I think just maybe about a week before he died, we were on a family walk, and Brodie stopped, and he seemed to be looking at something.
And I looked out over the bay, and there was this huge rainbow, this huge rainbow. And he seemed to be looking at it. And the rainbows would actually become something for me. They would become a sort of symbol because they kind of carry on all through the rest of this story. And also, I think at that point, it felt like Brodie slowed down after he looked at that rainbow. Now, whether I imposed a meaning on that moment that wasn't there or whether it really happened, I don't know. But for me, that was when there was a shift. Brodie became slower on walks and so on. And he seemed quite happy to be on his lead in and so on, not kind of exploring as much. He wanted to be connected, I think a lot of the time connected to us close, that feeling of safety. A couple of days after that, we had my birthday, which actually ended up being three days before Brodie died. And for me, that was really special, having that last birthday with him. And I think perhaps I had wanted Brodie to hang on, and maybe he had wanted to hang on for that day. And we spent the day. Tiny little walk, but we spent the day mostly huddled under blankets and watching movies and cuddling and so on.
And I'm so glad I had that birthday. It was the best birthday, you know, I could have had. It was all I really wanted at that point.
My husband and I had decamped through to the kitchen that I'm in now just to sleep with Brody on a sofa bed, because, you know, he obviously, the toilet. He needed to get out to the toilet at night. We needed to make that easy and comfortable.
The day after my birthday, my friend came to visit. And Brodie, who had always been so excited to see this particular friend all over her, almost wouldn't leave her alone sort of thing. He didn't get up. He didn't get up to greet her. And I remember just feeling like that was another of these moments, you know, these little moments where the dial shifts, and we'd taken him out for a walk after that very, very short walk, and a huge rainbow above our house, you know, as we. As we turn to come home, and these rainbows would just keep coming.
So that kind of takes us up to the last weekend, I think I knew that day on the Friday that we were basically at the end. I think my husband maybe needed just a couple more days to get to that point. But we took Brody that weekend just couple of very short walks to the forest. And we were taking him to the forest to see if he would actually have a drink a lot of the time, because he got to the point where he. He wouldn't drink tap water in his bowl anymore. He would drink from plant pots and things in the garden, and he would drink from little burns at the forest. Burn is like a stream in Scotland.
But the very last day, we took him to the forest.
You know, it was beautiful, the light in the trees and. But he didn't want to be there. You know, we got there and we could see it in his face. We could see it in his eyes. He was telling us, you know, it was time. He was doing this for us now.
So I think there was a very brief conversation between my husband and I. You know, it's time to make the call. And we drove home pretty much silent. We were just locked in our own thoughts at that point.
The anticipatory grief, I think, in these situations is just huge and almost unbearable. You know, to be honest, I think I'd been going around the world with my heart in my mouth, you know, for about two weeks.
And it was just a horrible, horrible feeling.
So we got home, we got Brody settled, we spoke to our boys, and they agreed about everything.
Brodie was just lying on the sofa bed, as he'd been doing for the couple of weeks, very content, very peaceful. I still believe Brody wasn't in any pain or any discomfort. He was still enjoying being stroked.
Just the usual loving boy that we'd had for all these years.
So my husband made the call, and that was another moment that sort of spoke to me in the sense of saying, this is the moment. Because the vet who was on call this night, it was a Sunday, we were going to be getting the vet to our home, which had always been the intention, actually, to get the vet to come to our home. But the vet who was on call was a vet called Tom. And Tom is just the loveliest man, the loveliest vet, kind, caring, everything you could hope for. And I'd always in my head thought that when the time came, Tom would be the vet I would want for Brodie. And when he happened to be the vet on call that night, it just told me that we were at the right time.
So we had a couple of hours then with Brodie, I think that had been our choice. At the same time, it was very difficult because it was very, very intense. You know, we knew where we were going. We knew the moment that was coming. And it was a very intense couple of hours.
But it was spent, you know, hugging Brodie, cuddling him, all of us saying all the things we wanted to say to him, the things we'd been saying for the last couple of weeks, but this was just cementing it all in those last, you know, couple of hours.
The vet arrived.
After that, everything really happened quite quickly.
Tom and my husband had spent quite a long time talking on the phone, so we already knew what was going to happen. So when he arrived at the house, it was all quite quick, very peaceful, very dignified. We were all sitting around Brody. Boys, you know, had decided to be there. That was their choice. We were all sitting with him, holding him, telling him how much he was loved.
And I know that the last thing Brody heard was me telling him I loved him, because I was saying over and over again, we love you, Brody. We love you. There was a slight flicker across his eyes after the injection, and then he was gone. It was just very, very peaceful and very, very quick.
You know, obviously the emotions start to flow. We had tried to contain ourselves as much as possible in that last little while so that we didn't transfer anything to Brodie, any fear or any anxiety or anything like that. But, yeah, we were obviously very upset, particularly my boys and my husband. At that point, I think I was still keeping myself quite contained while the vet was in the house. And I remember we were going back and forth to the car because Brody was going to be transported to the vet surgery. We'd arranged for him to have a cremation, and that would happen from the. They would take him from the vet surgery. So Tom, the vet, was coming in and out to the house, collecting some of his things.
And I actually remember just about saying, don't leave the door open. Don't leave the front door open because Brodie might get out. You know, it was just on the tip of my tongue. So I knew what had happened and I didn't know what had happened. You know, you're in that very strange, liminal space where everything seems bizarre and unworldly. And I remember standing out on the drive as Tom drove away with Brody in the footwell of the passenger side.
And I stood there for a long time, longer than, you know, longer than the car took, to drive out of the estate up the road. I was. I was kind of following that journey, you know, standing there and everything just seemed so surreal, Just so surreal.
And then it was a case of coming back into the house, and everything has changed. You know, your whole home has changed. Your whole family has changed just in an instant.
Dogs have such a presence in our homes. You know, they add so much warmth, so much comfort, and all of a sudden, it just felt like there were empty spaces everywhere that Brodie had left behind. A house full of empty spaces.
[00:37:15] Speaker A: Did it feel like the house stopped breathing?
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah, very much so. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. It was just a complete shift, you know, in the essence of our home.
So we obviously spent some time then collectively grieving. You know, there were tears. Of course there were. We looked at photos. We did laugh a little bit that night, looking at some photos. But I remember, you know, messaging people, contacting people to let them know that Brodie had gone. People who had been keeping in touch with us over the past few days. And I think that was just a way of pacing myself with the grief. You know, I think grief can be so overwhelming initially that, you know, we use these things to spread it out, to pace it, because otherwise it would just sort of drown you, you know, that avalanche of it initially.
It wasn't really until that night, you know, when everyone had kind of. We'd gone to bed and we were in our own heads now. That's when I think I really sort of fell to pieces. I was having a lot of difficulty sleeping. I remember waking up in the night, and the only thing I can, you know, describe it as is panic. You know, I was panicking. It was a case of, he's never coming back, he's never coming back, he's never coming back. I was rushing around the house trying to find things that smelled of Brodie. So I was picking up blankets and coats and things.
I remember going to bed that night, you know, curled up with these. I think it was one of his little coats.
At 2 or 3 in the morning, I was scrolling through social media looking for things about dog loss. You know, other people had. Had anyone ever felt like this, you know, just seeking some sort of connections. And as I say, in the days and weeks that would come, that's when I would discover things like your podcast and all the other resources out there that were so helpful around that time, so comforting.
But, yeah, that first night was so, so hard. And obviously from there, after that first night, you're then going on to what's beyond, you know, the next stage, the next day, the next week.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us on this first part of our conversation with Gail Anthea Brown today, we heard about the incredible bond she shared with her dog, Brodie, a true member of her family who brought so much warmth, joy and inspiration into her life.
But as we know, these deep connections make saying goodbye all the harder.
In our next episode, Gail will take us further into her journey, sharing what it's been like to navigate the grief and loss since Brodie's passing. She'll explore how his memory continues to shape her path, her writing, and her own healing process. It's a conversation about love, resilience, and the way we carry our beloved companions with us even when they're no longer physically by our side.
My name is John Littlefair, and thank you for listening to this very special episode of Never Just a Dog.
