THE DEAD PETS SOCIETY EXPLAINED...

Some years ago I was taking our chocolate Labrador Fuscus (Fuzzy for short) for a walk through Chiswick Park, his all-time favourite haunt.  By the lake, set back modestly on the green verge, I noticed a slender tombstone of some age. The inscription, I saw on closer inspection, was in Latin. As a classicist myself, a lecturer at Trinity College, Oxford, about to hang up my toga, I read this epitaph with some interest, admiring the author’s obvious familiarity with elegiac verse, and found it was a poem in honour of a dog called Lucy. I was struck by how much love was enshrined in these few lines and how clear a picture emerged of a young dog whose death at the age of eight had almost broken his owner’s heart a hundred years ago. How touching it was to read that the animal had possessed ‘all the virtues and none of the vices of humans’ and shown a loyalty without qualification.  I found this so moving, that I jotted the poem down. I looked at Fuzzy very differently as we walked home, realising the transience of the bond created between dog and owner and how lucky my family and I were to have such a companion. 

In due course we lost Fuzzy to a combination of old age and a weak heart, and the house was never quite the same again.  A few days later I came across Lucy’s epitaph in a drawer and decided I would write a similar poem in Latin for our much-loved pet.  As a challenge I used the verse form of Lucy’s epitaph, the elegiac couplet, which had been used by the Greeks and Romans two thousand years ago in epitaphs and also for love-poetry.  The process was lengthy and strangely therapeutic. On a whim, I typed the final version out with an English translation and showed it to the family. They were all taken with it and said it was a real source of comfort, a proper remembrance of all the happiness Fuzzy had given us. Another friend was asked to employ her calligraphy skills and the result, with a photo of Fuzzy, is framed and now part of the house.