The vet prepared the needle beside me. I held Binda's side with one hand and stroked his forehead with the other and his eyes became firmly focused on my own. I knew every inch of his body that I had tried so very hard to nurture and protect for the entire sixteen years of his life. As the vet inserted the needle, Binda's large brown eyes were focused on mine. His eyes never changed and we remained like that until the vet said, "He's gone." Binda had died looking into my eyes. It was complete and unconditional love. He trusted me. I held his old face in my hands. At that moment I felt the 'angelic being' in my body; we had become the one being. I felt that Binda's consciousness was also of this realm and I knew that we were the one soul.
I knelt by his body on the floor at the Parap Veterinary Hospital. I bent down and kissed his forehead. He was still the same puppy I had brought home from The Animal Welfare League in South Australia. His pink tongue rested in his soft grey muzzle. A trickle of watery mucus came from his right nostril. A vet was crying and another one bent to hug me. After leaving me there for a few moments, the vets said that they had to move him out of the surgery. I asked them not to move him until I had left. I wanted to remember him just like that, like he had fallen into a deep sleep from which he would one day wake.
Binda died at 8.00am on Friday 11th February in 2005, at Parap Vet in Darwin. I stood up and walked out onto the street. In the hours after his death, I was lost. I did not want to return to Giuseppe Court, but Kindi was there alone and she needed me. While I returned to look after her, I had lost all interest in anything to do with this existence or the world. The male vet who put Binda down said he should have died before I got there. My mother heard the story and said that it was a miracle that I was able to be with him until the very end. She said that God must have intervened and that she thought it was best that Binda had died first, because now I had to continue for her sake.
But I believe to this day that if Binda had died alone, it would have been too much for me to live with. I thought about this and said, "Thank God." Then every light in the house turned off and on again, the power surge making the touch lamp go up a setting as everything come back on. I murmured "Show me the angels", and all the house lights dimmed. I repeated this several times. Each time I said it all the lights dimmed. Then the overhead light flickered on and off as I went into the bathroom.
After Binda's death I heard the constant singing of angels for the next twenty days. They sounded like endless celestial harmonies in continuous high tones and pitches. I had to be strong for Kindi who was blind and grieving for Binda. The three of us had been inseparable for sixteen years. The worst thing was when the dog groomer arrived and I told her that there would only be one dog to wash today. "Oh no", she said, dismayed. "Not him! He was doing so well and he was such a lovely boy." I looked at Kindi who hung in there, even when it seemed no one wanted her to. She was a lovely girl too. She was all I had left. I croaked, "It was an accident. He swallowed a stone." I couldn't bear to watch Kindi being washed alone so I went back inside. Everything was a reminder of Binda's life with us, from the double booking with the dog groomer, to where he ate his dinner, to the dog hairs on the seat of the car.
Not long after Binda's death and with endless tonal risings and fallings of angels singing, I was told to go outside now. I got up from my chair at the desk and walked outside in the strong light of the unit complex carpark. I looked up at the sky and in the clouds was the shape of Binda lying on his side. He was just how I had come across him lying in the cage at the veterinary hospital on the morning of his death. I was weak from grief and a CFIDS relapse, so I held onto the concrete pylon for support, not believing what I was seeing. I looked back at poor old Kindi standing alone at the wire door. I thought to myself, what are these angels up to now? As I watched the form of Binda in the clouds, the sunlight suddenly broke through some darker clouds above him, thereby sending a golden shaft of sunlight straight through his heart where he lay in the sky. This situation was completely beyond me in this state of mind. I turned around and walked slowly back inside, relatively unshaken and non-feeling, considering that I had just witnessed a miracle.
I no longer wanted Kindi and I to stay at Giuseppe Court at night. I wasn't scared but the atmosphere there had changed and, coupled with the absence of Binda, I preferred that we be somewhere else. So I lifted her into the car and we visited Tricia in Malak. As we arrived, I saw a 'shadow man' move past the back of my car in the driveway behind her townhouse. He was about six feet tall. I saw him for several seconds before he disappeared. There was a head, torso and shoulders, but he had no other distinguishable features aside from wearing a hat. I was not afraid. I knew something would be amiss when I got back to Giuseppe Court that night. I did a thorough check of the unit and the study light had blown again. As we were preparing for bed, the wall light in the bedroom dimmed up and down three times and a loud bang came from the main living area.
