Alan Cumming on loss of beloved dog Honey: ‘The night we put her to sleep I wept more than I had in years’

Alan Cumming was a triple threat last year with successes on Broadway (Cabaret), on television (The Good Wife) and in bookstores (Not My Father’s Son).

But he was also grieving over two big losses: the death of his beloved dog Honey and his native Scotland voting down an independence referendum.

Cumming admits that he enjoyed ‘my longest and most successful adult relationship’ with his collie-shepherd mix who was diagnosed with cancer.

‘The vet said we would know when it was time to let her go, and we did,’ Cumming writes in a column for The Globe and Mail. ‘The night we put her to sleep I wept more than I had in years. I think about her every single day.’

He had rescued her from the pound, a ‘crazy’ puppy with a swath of yellow paint on her side.

In those early days, Honey was ‘prone to hysterical episodes on the sidewalk which, according to the trainer I hired, could only properly be dealt with by me immediately getting on all fours and pinning her down till the fit had passed.’

Of course, such behavior is not only embarrassing but memorable, and many years later I was horrified to be introduced to a society maven at some posh gala who said very loudly to the assembled grandees, “This is the actor I once saw lying on top of a dog in Chelsea!”’

Last September, Cumming found himself grieving again – this time over the Scottish referendum vote.

‘I took the defeat very personally,’ writes Cumming who went to Scotland to campaign during the finals days before the election.

‘I found myself weeping again, this time for the missed opportunity of a nation. I wondered, had I done enough?’