Grief and loss on the Homestead
How do we grieve? How do I even start a blog on grief? Learning to deal with grief on the homestead is almost a rite into the life of a homesteader. There’s a rather biting quote that I’ve heard many times about death and loss on the homestead, “Where you have livestock, you have dead stock.” meaning there’s an inevitability that you will lose animals in this life and some are able to get through their grieving process this way perhaps. I have utilized a lot of methods to attempt to cope with loss, they tell you it will pass but truthfully the burden doesn’t get lighter, I simply get better at carrying it. I have been told to feel my grief, but really what does that mean? I’ve been told to “tend where there is life” but that seems to invite ignorance to the pain. All of this to say, I am a culmination of the animals I’ve lost in my lifetime and the burden grows heavier every year.
The first loss that I took personally and extremely difficultly was before I was a teenager. I was put in charge of a tub brooder full of CornishX chickens; It was during the summer, I had left a heat lamp over the tank not understanding the crucial need for them to get away from the heat. Chore time came around the next morning and the chicks had murdered themselves piling on top of each other at the edge of the tank. I still remember the feel of their wet, sweaty carcasses as my 11 year old self plucked each plump baby Cornish rock out of the tank. That batch of chicks was destined to die though, after I had fixed the lighting at the caution of my mother, I learned that rats can be real enemies of baby birds. I then had to steel myself every morning to coming out to feed chicks and finding the remaining batch of my babies tore apart, dismembered two at a time each day in their brooder. What a gruesome life for an 11 year old.
With homesteading, when loss occurs, there is a very real feeling of responsibility and failure. While others may see that the cause might have been an honest mistake, a fluke or what we call “Learning curve mishap” there’s no denying that these are live animals, creatures that ultimately depend upon us and rely on us to take care of every need and I wish I could say that we don’t feel that most deaths were not the result of some kind of negligence or lack of knowledge on our part. Within so many of our minds death seems synonymous for cruelty. How could I dare to let an animal suffer and die? Yet death is part of life, is it not? It is simply the bookend to the miracle of birth, it visits all of us eventually as well, but our culture deems that we hide it from popular view. When death does occur it is traumatic.
To care for an animal let alone a farm full of them requires the knowledge of a livestock veterinarian without the schooling, and very rarely does a homesteader make enough money to be able to afford to call a vet for a dying $100 goat when they have 50 others out in the pasture that must be fed. So then, with the inevitability of death and trauma, how do we learn to cope?
Some of us grow dark senses of humor with our learning curves, not unlike nurses and military who deal with human death, we must cope to some extent by attempting to lessen the pain that we feel. “You cannot do anything but try to laugh about anything that could be remotely funny.”
And then, there are circumstances like the one I have been through, many equestrians have been through, and I witnessed yesterday yet again; when a person doesn’t know when to call it the end. They cope with looming death by denying it and hoping in something that will never be. As horse owners we get the highs of being able to care for an animal that will live much longer than a dog, is just as trainable, and we spend so much money and many many hours training, caring for and loving on them.
When it comes to the end of the golden years we must, as equine owners, learn to say goodbye. This is the most humbling by far of the lessons that a horse will teach in our lifetime with them. To see an old horse struggling seems entirely wrong, they are meant to be running on open prairies, striding out with their long legs, tearing up the earth beneath them with their hooves, their tails raised behind them like a beacon of freedom.
To see an old horse, hardly able to stand, eyes grey with age and shadowed with hard years… It’s a difficult sight to see. Images of Ginger on the knacker’s cart from the movie Black Beauty that I watched as a child crowd my mind. Skin and bones, wounds peppering the body… If I allowed it to my heart would break. Horses, like any livestock, will go downhill extremely fast. After all, their life depends on not showing weakness as a prey animal, once that weakness has manifested it’s as if they wish they could lie down and die. Their bodies simply give up. But that prey instinct keeps their mind alert, keeps them moving … far beyond the time that they should.
I chose to let my old Ozzy go to sleep gracefully. You see, I watched a beloved rabbit die once of pneumonia; in her death throws she kicked and thrashed and screamed so loudly and then she was gone… Back arched, legs splayed in front of her. I didn’t want that for my old friend. He and I spent so many days together running into the sunset, enjoying the feel of freedom. When it came time to let him go I chose to get over my own feelings and let him rest. See, they’re able to move on to the rainbow bridge to be free again in heaven, it is only my love for them that requires they suffer through with me through their end years.
Instead of allow my old friend to struggle, to possibly colic or fall on a freezing day, or even worse pass on without me with him, I chose a warm day in August, a field full of grass and his family all around him. It was the last peaceful moment I could give him, and I was shocked by how quickly he was gone. I simply had to tell him it was okay.
But, in the aftermath, my coping with his loss hasn’t been as productive as I hoped. I struggle with choosing that, every day. I lump it in with the rest of my failures, my inability to be God and keep a beloved friend from moving on. Maybe my inability to cope is a function of loss of control? Who knows the way humans really work. All I know is that he, like so many before him, is gone. For me it will never become easier or lighter to bear, I will simply grow enough muscle to carry him with me always. I carry him with Fergus my goat who suffered a stroke, like Fred my 15 year old Chow dog who had stomach cancer, like Goob my 2 year old cat who died of heart failure after being neutered, like Sam the cat who got stuck in a tree fork for two days and lost all function to his lower organs and had to be put to sleep, like Mocha the German Shepherd who passed away in my arms when she began to lose her battle to uterine cancer at 12, like Acorn my very first horse whom I never had the chance to say goodbye to. Death is a part of life. How do you cope ?
