τέλος

Merry hell indeed! Friday morning dawned pink and beautiful but he was too weak to stand yet again. We tried, we coaxed but it just wasn't working for him. We phoned the locum vet to let her know we were on our way and would be with her in a little over thirty minutes. We parked in the olive grove behind the surgery and walked him about for a bit, letting him collect his messages, as you would. And he could walk, and he was a bit interested, but he did look up with slightly glazed eyes, and I don't wish to anthropomorphise, but if you could read his expression you would probably have read that to mean “really, I've had enough, can I go now?”

Spousie carried him into the surgery, the locum vet was almost as tearful as we were, and she has known him only a few weeks. He was put on the scales and it was as awful as I expected; he'd lost a critical amount of weight.
Dimitris, the local resident vet, who has been managing Homer's chronic ear infections for about 30 months now, but who is also a brand-new daddy and shouldn't be disturbed, joined us for this saddest of sad moments. He agreed, as we all did, that this was a difficult and painful decision to make but was really and truly the kindest thing to do for Homer. The tip of his tail wagged slowly until it absolutely couldn't do that any more. And then we brought him back home.

We first met Homer on a Friday lunchtime in Skopelos Town and we finally said farewell to him on a Friday lunchtime in Skopelos Town exactly 576 weeks later.
The original photo here was taken on 16th October 2007 by my best friend Liz, who was visiting us ten years ago but who now lives on the farthest corner of the planet. Thank you SO much Liz for this beautiful portrait.

Nobody is running down the hill barking at crows with his tail spinning like a propeller any more. Mo is still waiting for you to come home big boy, so sad :-(

So much palaver
under the Sun
and into the hole he goes!