Gussie

This is the last photo I shall take of our beautiful Gussie. He died today. He was in a lot of pain and discomfort this morning, and while C was teaching her Qigong lesson, he was lying on the floor looking at me with his soulful eyes. I took this photo a little later, we tried to make him comfortable and keep him warm. But it was obvious we had to act quickly. The vet and the veterinary nurse came immediately when we called. His passing was so peaceful, and he looked as if he was sleeping deeply, and after two years of arthritis, his body opened out and his legs were stretched out as if he was running again. Gus was seventeen, he has been slowing down gradually over six years, yet in death he looked like he was in his prime.

We are so glad that he managed to make the move over to East Yorkshire with us, and that we didn’t leave him behind in Cumbria. We have buried him in a special place where he will always be close to us.

There isn’t much more to say about him that I haven’t said in so many blips in the last ten years. He was a gentle soul whose beauty and nature was so clear in the many photographs I took of him. In his frail old age his beauty became more radiant, and our love for him grew deeper. We are blessed to have shared our lives with him for so long. And blessed too that he stayed with us for another eighteen months after we nearly lost him in August 2021 when the vet told us his kidney function was so poor he might only survive three months.

I don’t know where this leaves my blipping. Gus was such an inspiration for photography, whether it was portraits of him or whether he was there to add interest and scale to a landscape photo. And if he wasn’t in the photo, he was almost always with me when I was taking it. One of the reasons my blipping has dropped off so much these last two years is that I couldn’t take him for long walks any more, and increasingly we have stayed at home to keep him close to us. So we shall see.

We’ve lost our little Gussie, but somehow we haven’t lost him. I have this feeling he shall always be with us. Fate brought him to us, it was meant to be. He brought us joy that we couldn’t have imagined, and we gave him the happy home he so desperately needed. And now I see him running up the hills with his great pal Rowan, together again three years after Rowan left us.