Apollo Is Sent to a Kennel

Apollo Is Sent to a Kennel is the painful separation that follows his owner’s death: Apollo is removed from the home where he waits for someone who will not return. Recounted by the woman who had taken responsibility for him, the decision is presented not as a simple rejection but as an attempt to manage grief that has become unbearable for both dog and caretaker. The episode makes Apollo’s mourning visible in repeated acts of waiting and refusal, while offering no easy way to tell him what has happened.

The Decision to Send Apollo Away

After the death, Apollo waits by the door day and night. For a time he will not eat, and the woman fears he may starve. His distress also takes the form of a strange, recurring howl or wail. A treat does not distract him; at least once, he turns away from it, and once he growls at the woman. The sounds sometimes wake her at night, leaving her listening until she feels she may go mad.

The woman says she had to get him out of the house. Each return to the sight of him waiting, or to the sound of his keening, makes her fall apart again. Her account complicates any easy judgment of the kennel: Apollo’s grief is real, but so is the strain of living beside it while grieving herself. She believes he cannot understand that his owner is never coming home, and that she cannot make the loss intelligible to him.

The Kennel and the Unsettled Future

The kennel is not presented as a lasting solution. The woman has contacted dog sanctuaries, but the ones she reached have long waiting lists. She does not want to be tied down by a dog she never wanted in the first place, and is considering retirement and more travel. At the same time, the prospect of giving Apollo to a stranger or taking him to the pound pains her because she knows how beloved he was to his former owner.

Keeping him in the kennel is costly, and she objects to the idea that he could spend the rest of his life there. Yet she also doubts that bringing him back to the house would be kind: now that he has been away, she cannot imagine him being happy there again. The choices she describes—continued kenneling, an uncertain search for a sanctuary, or another transfer—remain constrained and painful. The account does not resolve Apollo’s fate in this scene; it leaves the reader with the practical and emotional consequences of a separation that has already happened.

Animal Mourning and Human Grief

The narrator thinks of Hachikō, the Akita who went to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station to meet his master’s train and continued returning after the man’s sudden death, for nearly ten years. Hachikō’s story offers a stark parallel to Apollo’s waiting: neither dog can be told what death means, while people can only witness the behavior and make a story of it. The statue raised in Hachikō’s honor turns his loyalty into legend, but Apollo’s grief remains an immediate domestic crisis, without such public recognition or a clear remedy.

The episode also sits within the narrator’s own continuing address to the dead. The narrator describes the dead as dwelling in the conditional, where what might have happened remains imaginable, and returns to the plain fact of missing the deceased friend every day. Near the book’s end, the wish to call the friend’s name fails in the narrator’s throat, followed by an anguished cry of address. Against that unresolved human grief, Apollo’s waiting and the woman’s inability to console him expose the limits of explanation: loss can be named by the living, but naming it does not make the absent person return or tell the dog why he is gone.