A Black Dog Walked Beside Me the Night My Brother Died

I have kept this to myself for eleven years. I am writing it down now because my mother passed recently and she was the only other person who believed me, and with her gone I feel I should put it somewhere before it goes with me too.

My brother Danny was in a motorcycle accident on a wet night in October. I did not know that when it happened. I was walking home from a late shift at the pub, the long way, along the lane, with my headphones in and my collar up against the drizzle. It was properly dark, the kind of country dark with no streetlights, just the odd farm light far off.

The dog joined me at the end of the lane by the old chapel. I did not hear it come. I just became aware of it, a big black dog, waist high on me, walking at my left heel in step with me, matching my pace. No collar. I could not tell you the breed. It was too dark to see much except that it was black and it was large and it was there, close enough that if I had reached down I could have touched its back.

I am not good with strange dogs and I should have been frightened, but I was not. That is the strange part. It felt, and I know how this sounds, like company. Like something had decided to walk me home. It stayed at my heel the whole way, past the flooded field, past the postbox, up the hill, a full mile, never ahead, never behind, never making a sound. When I stopped once to shift my bag it stopped too and waited.

At my gate I turned to look at it properly, to see it in the light of the porch lamp, and there was nothing there. The lane was empty. It had not run off. There was no sound of it, no scrabble of claws, no movement in the hedge. It was simply gone, in the second it took me to reach for the latch.

Inside, my mother was standing in the hall with the phone in her hand and a face I had never seen. Danny had died at the roadside about an hour before, they thought, up on the bypass, alone in the dark and the wet. About the time, if I am honest with myself about the timings, that a black dog fell into step beside me and decided I should not walk the last mile home alone.

I know the folklore. The black dog, the barghest, the grim, the shuck. Every part of these islands has a name for a great black hound that walks the lanes and turns up around a death. I did not know most of that then. I learned it afterwards, looking for a shape to put my night into. My mother knew it. When I told her, shaking, at the kitchen table, she did not tell me I was imagining it or overwrought or that I had seen a farm dog. She held my hands and she said, it came to bring you home to me. She was certain of it in a way that steadied me more than any comfort could have.

The rational part of me knows what grief does, that the mind reaches for shapes, that a real stray dog could have wandered off unseen in the dark. I have offered myself all of it. None of it touches the plain fact of what walked beside me, warm and near and utterly calm, for a mile of black lane on the exact night my brother left the world, and was gone the instant I was safe at my own gate.

I do not think it meant me harm. I have come to think it was kind. Whatever it was, on the worst night of my life, it made sure I did not walk it alone. I still say thank you sometimes, out loud, into the dark, on that stretch of lane. Just in case it can hear me.