I Want a Dog to Find My Dead Body
I don’t know when it’ll be, but hopefully man’s best friend gets the final chew.
“When I die, I don’t want any body to be sad. I want it to be a party!”
We all have a fascination with what will happen once we die. For most, it’s making sure all of your affairs are in order so that whoever is left behind has as little stress as possible while they deal with their grief.
Some people take it that next step. Doctor Who actor Tom Baker has famously acquired his own gravestone for when he passes away, with only his birth year so far listed (as of writing. Flu season is here). Recently, a video did the rounds of a funeral in Ireland where the deceased had a humorous recording of his final words prepared as his family mourn at the graveside.
It’s hard to imagine what goes through the mind of someone who may know that they’re living their final days this side of the dirt. Everyone knows someone who has had to live with either a terminal diagnosis and an ambiguous projection, or something more concrete. What must come over you, knowing your number is about to be called. Like waiting at the dentists, you can see there’s already three people here waiting but are they before or after me? Are they there for something else? As if that has ever happened in the history of you going.
For no reason other than a morbid curiosity that comes hand-in-hand with growing up looking at Rotten.com or the 104 minute Ricardo López video (you can search that one yourself), I’ve often thought what the end will look like for me.
Will there be lots of people there because my spirit touched so many souls in the land of the living, that they want to pay their final respects to a friend, a brother? Or am I going to be so, so, old and alone that I’m the last cowboy dumped into the hole, the priest rattling off his generic script that would usually be littered with inside references and anecdotes about a loved one.
With no one around, will he just pretend he said all the blessings as the groundskeeper dumps a load of earth onto my cardboard box?
Hopefully I’ll be proper old. That’s the aim. An old, fat piece of shit.
I imagine I’ll be sat down. Old people love a sit. I wonder at what age my restless legs will stop? You never see an old person tapping out a beat on the floor, unless they’re full-blown Parkinson’s. You never see an old person scratching at their skin like a mangy dog, like I have been known to (luv u eczema).
In this scenario, I don’t have the shakes or the scratches. I am serene. Maybe I fell asleep in an old chair and just…passed away.
“He died in his sleep” the medical team will say, glossing over that I may have woken up with excruciating pain before choking on my vomit.
“At least he was at peace”
But one thing’s for certain. For whatever the scenario is, I hope a dog finds my body.
I haven’t worked out the logistics. For one, I’m allergic to dogs. I can’t imagine in my final years on Earth, if I’m making an audible sound getting out of a chair, with my immune system being attacked every winter (it’s! flu! season!) the top priority will be keeping a dog around. But perhaps I will.
Perhaps I won’t. Is it a neighbours? A friend’s? A street dog of sorts, like Tramp from ‘Lady and the…’ fame? Is this dog friends with me? Is it in search of food and company when it finds my husk?
What would it do when it finds me? Lick my wrinkled face, I reckon. Lick my shiny bald head, my wrinkly hands. The dog is in the room and it’s found a dead body, but it’s not a search and rescue dog, it’s just a regular curious mutt. Lick lick lick. Walk around. Sit down, bored. Lick lick lick.
Eventually, it’ll get to the point where the dog has licked my corpse dry, like those blocks from Pets At Home you leave for your goldfish when you go on holiday. Just before the rot sets in, the dog will start gnawing at me. Dogs are constantly hungry, and finding a fat mess hunched over, soiling himself before passing away, won’t change that. The dog will go for me, eventually. Chewing at my butt, my gut, my foot and, hopefully, my nut(s). According to studies (myself, watching Yellowstone Journals S01E01), mountain lions avoid tucking into a kill that has laid in the open for hours, fearing disease. I assume dogs also know what they’re doing, as both the dog and mountain lion are animals with four legs.
This train of thought has led me to ponder, when exactly does a dog stop seeing you as it’s best friend down for the count, and instead a big helping of Billy Bear ham? When does the dog, as it lies beside you like Simba finding his trampled father, does your faithful companion think ‘well I am quite hungry…’. In this scenario, I imagine the door the dog made it’s entrance through has closed behind it, so it can’t run off to alert Little Jimmy or his guardian. Because this dog would, if given the chance. It claws at the door, it whines and howls, but no answer. So it settles back down next to me, next to the pungent being it once literally looked up to.
When a loved one passes away, a little bit of them always stays with us. It’s why we maintain their legacy with stories, with anecdotes they regaled us with as children and we listened to in awe. These traits, good and bad, seem to exist within us on a DNA level. It’s the “I’m balding like my grandma!”, or the duality of your mother’s serenity and your father’s impatient-ness battling each other for supremacy in different moments, each parent stealing control of different decisions. Through all their faults and quirks and their humour and their pain that came to define them, they’ll never leave because you are them.
But at what point is that dog, belly rumbling, going to stand over my bloated shell and start chewing my nose off? I’d love to see it.
