Tony Hogburn and Banjo

Tony Hogburn and Banjo are bound by a deep attachment that persists after Banjo’s death. Banjo’s absence follows Tony into Tranquillum House, where the craving for familiar comforts and the memory of grief at his own front door reveal a bereavement he finds both overwhelming and difficult to account for.

Banjo’s death and Tony’s grief

Banjo lived to fourteen, a good age for a collie, but knowing that his dog had had a long life did not prepare Tony for losing him. During the first week after the death, putting his key in the lock of his front door could bring on a rush of grief so forceful that his knees buckled. Tony regards the reaction as almost shameful: he is a grown man brought to his knees by a dog.

The loss remains raw six months later. Tony has owned and lost three dogs over the course of his life, and he knows that death is part of having a dog. That knowledge does not settle the question of why Banjo’s death hurts so much more. Tony considers whether he could be grieving this dog more than any human being he has lost, and admits that it is possible.

Banjo’s absence at Tranquillum House

At the retreat, Tony sits on his balcony longing for an ice-cold beer and the feel of an old collie’s silky, hard head beneath his hand. The passage distinguishes the ordinary wish for a drink from the scale of what he feels: the longing has become like thirst in a desert, and the sadness like the deepest heartache.

His mind keeps returning to the familiar remedies he cannot reach. He repeatedly starts to get up to go to the fridge, only to remember there is no refrigerator; there is no pantry, television, or internet to distract him, and no dog he can call with a whistle and hear approaching. The absent dog is therefore not only an object of memory. Banjo had been part of the small domestic routines that offered Tony comfort, and the retreat’s restrictions make that missing companionship newly vivid.

The meaning of the bond

Tony’s bereavement resists the tidy expectation that grief should be proportionate to a loss or diminish simply because time has passed. He has experienced other dogs’ deaths, understands that Banjo was old, and has had six months to adjust; none of this prevents the grief from returning with physical force. His frank concession that he may mourn Banjo more than any human loss leaves that attachment intact rather than explaining it away.

The bond also reaches beyond Banjo’s own death into Tony’s memory of his daughter Mimi as a child. When the family’s Jack Russell escaped through a hole in the backyard fence and was hit by a car, Mimi cried on Tony’s shoulder at the dog’s funeral. Tony cried too, carrying guilt for failing to notice the hole as well as sadness for the animal. The memory shows that grief for a dog had once been shared within family life; Banjo’s loss is now Tony’s own, private measure of how deeply an animal can matter.