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It's hard to say goodbye when you love someone

She entered our family as a puppy in the summer of 2004

My family has the past week mourned the passing away of Cuddles, a Golden Retriever whose fluffy white hair made her look more a Platinum Retriever. She entered our family as a puppy in the summer of 2004 and was an integral part of our lives during an eventful decade: we shifted house from Delhi's suburbs to Chennai for four years and then to Mumbai for two; the children growing up and away; my own sudden arrival into middle-age-hood. Though Cuddles had geriatric signs like cataracts, an increasing hard-ness of hearing, and occasional crotchetiness, she still had her teeth and was not incontinent.
In the end it was tick fever that did her in, the parasite invading her blood and suddenly plummeting her hemoglobin and platelet levels. Three days of intravenous antibiotics did not help; on the fourth morning, after a return from the vet, she gasped a few times before becoming still. I called my elder daughter Mrinalini in California but instead of speaking all I could do was bawl. Every morning since is a lesson in profound sadness, sitting alone at 6am on the living room sofa with-out Cuddles' nose pushing my forearm to scratch her ears and welcome the day.
Our daughters have on Facetime been recalling family episodes starring Cuddles but it struck me that a dog's greatest attribute is living in the moment (despite long memories such as that of Telemachus, who recognised Ulysses after his decade-long Odyssey). In my saddest moments I would uncannily find Cuddles standing next to me, pushing my forearm with her nose.
We recorded many memories, though due to the turnover of mobilephones I have lost some photos of Cuddles as a puppy with my son as a small boy, both happy with wagging tails (metaphorically in Barun's case) - I'm particularly poor at retrieving e-photos from the pre-Facebook era. My father does not like dogs, and always looked ridiculous when throwing his hands in the air to keep Cuddles from licking them. My closest cousin often angrily barked at Cuddles whenever she approached him from behind and licked his hand as soon as he entered our home.
They are like the mullahs who scorned Pervez Musharraf when he seized power in Pakistan and was photographed holding his two Pekingese dogs. My TamBrahm landlady in Chennai behaved as if Cuddles was extra-terrestrial. She never drank coffee at an acquaintance's house, saying she dog hair flying in the air; we stopped offering her coffee. I am not angry at such folk; I instead pity them for they know not the unconditional love of sentient non-human. Perhaps they are dry inside, but who am I to judge.
Strangers always remarked on Cuddles's beauty though she wasn't the brightest dog in the room. I never took the trouble to train her like disciplined neighbours who vote for tough guys. She was perpetually hungry and hung around anyone holding food. She loved to run around on her walk in the park in front of our house, pink tongue hanging and tail wagging. She did not mind being multi-coloured on Holi though Diwali was traumatic. She was spoiled silly by Mrinalini, and now I'm absolutely glad that she was.
Because of Cuddles I appreciate how the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who believed in reincarnation, would stop and listen to a dog barking, in an attempt to recognise a departed friend. I like how Yamaraj, the God of Death, put on a dog suit and followed Yudhisthir, the winner of the Mahabharat, up the Himalayas till the latter left Earth.
I marvelled at Tolstoy in War and Peace, following a dog as he threads his way through the battlefield when Napoleon's troops cross into Russia from Poland. I LOLed at how Mr Peanutbutter, the labrador in the adult Netflix cartoon Bo-Jack Horseman is constantly interrupted in conversation by the arrival of one Erica (I've seen a reddit thread tie itself in knots pondering the significance of Erica; whereas to me she is simply a device to demonstrate the distractability of dogs). Cuddle's death at 13 years is a lesson in the transitory nature of existence. Life consists not of years but of shared moments and connections; and then it ends, as it must. When Barun and I buried Cuddles, I held her corpse and mused that the flesh decays because it is imperfect, and then there is nowhere for consciousness to reside: it is lost forever. Cuddles lives now on instagram and in our hearts but even those are perishable, and thus it is a truism that when everything is gone, consumed by time, all that will ever have mattered is that undefinable, ineffable thing called love.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India