Grief Is For The Living
Disclaimer before you read this post:
This post is about death and dying. It is about grief and loss. There are some graphic details about the process of physical dying in this post. If you are not up for that right now, please skip this post or save it for another time when your heart is ready. We can choose when and if we bear witness to the grief that others carry. This does not make us uncaring humans. It makes us real people with limitations. When we are already carrying grief, it can feel relieving to hear the stories of others who are also deeply grieving and at other times, we want a break and a reprieve from the hollow chambers of grief — even if just for an afternoon. As a friend told me yesterday, “Grief brings us to our knees.” I am currently on my knees. If you’d like to join me there, keep reading.
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It seems wrong to be sad in May — it feels sacrilegious to bring my sadness out into this much sunshine — like I want to protect the sun from my tears so it doesn’t get the wrong idea. It’s okay, please keep shining. Don’t mind me over here — continue on into summer. I promise I will get on board with the seasons soon. Yesterday, the first flowers on our yellow rose bush bloomed and our Iris’ blossomed their purple heads. Yesterday, amidst all of the life on our farm, our beloved 4-month-old calf died.
Ruth had a very rough beginning and had Heathar and I (and our entire neighborhood) not intervened, she would have died hours after being born. We fought for Ruth hard in those first few weeks of her life. We taught her how to suck on a bottle, how to stand and keep her balance, and how to hike through the forest in the snow without slipping. It took Ruth ten days to be strong enough to move out of our living room and down into the barn with her mother. That’s a long time for a calf.
After Ruth started living down in the barn, we noticed that her belly button was not closing. We also noticed that her kidneys did not seem to be functioning well. For the entire time she was alive, Ruth peed every couple of minutes while she was standing up. Vets came to our property shaking their heads and leaving with diagnoses like, “Look like she just has overactive kidneys.” For her whole life, mysterious infection threatened to scoop Ruth up, hovering over her like bad breath.
There were moments when Ruth seemed like the strongest cow — running, jumping, bucking and biting just like real, grown-up cows do. For a couple of months, Ruth nursed vigorously alongside us while we milked her mother, taking a gulp from her favorite teat and then pausing to bite Heathar’s hand, lick our faces, and nibble on our chins. There were moments when we saw her growing, saw her getting longer and taller, and saw her tail swishing in rhythm to the flies. There were moments when we could begin to see her own small udders taking shape. There were moments of hope that one day we would be able milk Ruth and she would give birth to a calf of her own. There were strange and curious moments when Ruth tried to moo but instead, produced a kind of honking sound. We longed to hear Ruth moo — to hear what her voice sounded like.
Four weeks ago, Ruth stopped eating. She continued to stand by us during milking time but she would not nurse or bite, she would not nibble or lick. She would stand idly by, letting the sun hit her belly and blink her eyes slowly. Once again, Heathar and I started to bottle-feed Ruth — one of us to holding her mouth open and one of us squirting the bottle into her mouth. This felt like an all too familiar routine. We seemed to be going backward. Along with not eating, Ruth started to develop a cough and saliva that hung down from both sides of her mouth like a twisted rope. Our vet diagnosed Ruth with calf diphtheria. Eventually, calf diphtheria causes cows to suffocate as it works to close their air passageways, creating lesions on their throat and lungs. Ruth’s open umbilicus was a doorway for all kinds of infection that even the strongest antibiotics did not keep out.
During the month of May, Heathar and I have become amateur large animal veterinarians. We have learned to give subcutaneous fluids, shots of Penicillin directly into the neck and flank muscle of calves, subcutaneous shots, homeopathic remedies, and herbal ointments. Our kitchen counters have been overtaken with needles and hydrogen peroxide, syringes and cotton pads. It became hard to distinguish the emergency medical supplies from our breakfast dishes.
A couple of days ago, it became clear that Ruth was not going to survive. It became more and more difficult for Ruth to swallow even small sips of water. Her tongue became dark and dried, like a thin, small peel of purple potato. In the last days of her life, she would walk over to her water trough and hold her head in the water, dipping her mouth into the cool liquid but unable to swallow anything. Heathar and I knew that we were just keeping Ruth comfortable until she was ready to pass. We scheduled a time with our vet to put her down to decrease the time that she spent suffering. The diphtheria was closing her throat and starting to shut down her vital organs. A day before she passed, her bowel movements were white — the color of liver failure.
Each morning, Heathar and I would walk down to the barn arm in arm, preparing ourselves to find Ruth no longer alive. And each morning, she would surprise us. We would find Ruth sitting up — looking weak but alive. But yesterday morning (the day she was scheduled to be put down) we went down to the barn and Ruth did not raise her head. As Heathar prepared to milk Rose, I went into the barn to sit with Ruth. I placed my hands on her belly and I kissed my favorite spot on her head. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. She seemed uncomfortable — like she wanted out of her body.
I left Ruth to rest and stepped out of the barn to muck the larger pen outside. As I was shoveling manure, I heard a loud moo — a new moo that I had never heard before. I stuck my head into the barn where Ruth was lying and realized that the moo belonged to Ruth. Not only was she mooing but she was producing Deep, Guttural, and Primal Moos. She was calling us to her. I yelled to Heathar, “Babe, get in here!” It’s happening. She’s going. Heathar and I sat down on either side of Ruth, holding her and she mooed again and again — strong, loud and vital moos. The Moos of Her Death — the Crossing of the Threshold Moos — the only moos of her life. We held Ruth as she shook the life out of her body. Through our tears we said, “It’s okay. You got this. You can go.” Her body fought death only a little — only in the way that any living thing would fight death. This is the way the soul seems to move as it leaves the body — it quivers and shakes, rumbles and rushes. From the outside, it looked like a war — something I wanted to stop. But it was only the dance of death relieving the body — the vestiges of life dropping its defenses.
It took me a few minutes to know for certain that Ruth had gone. I looked for the familiar breathing in her belly — the breathing I checked for every morning to make sure she was alive. I expected at any moment to see her fur move up and down. I expected to see her ears flick and her eyelashes move forward and back. I expected to see her throat struggle to swallow. I could feel the blood in her body. Her muscles were still soft, her eyes still warm. Is it possible she is still alive? After a couple of minutes of laying my head on her dark, soft fur, I knew that she was gone. There was no movement. There was no breath. Her eyes had stopped blinking.
The day before Ruth died, Heathar and I walked around our property to find the place where we would bury her. As we walked, we found a hidden groove that I never knew existed on our property. As we entered the grove, we found the Cedar tree that Ruth would be buried under. As we kept looking, we realized we were standing in the middle of a graveyard. All around us, rock walls marked the remnants of different graves — other large animals that were part of the lineage of this property. We even found an old wooden cross with a heart nailed into it that had fallen onto the ground many storms ago.
After wrapping Ruth in a blanket, Heathar and I moved Ruth’s body onto a large piece of plywood so that we could carry her to the grave. Even for a small calf who had lost a lot of weight in the last month of her life, Ruth still weighed around 150 pounds. We placed her on the back of our truck bed and drove her as close to the grove as we could get. Heathar and I lifted Ruth off the truck and carried her to her grave, placing her in a white fitted sheet at the bottom of the grave.
With the grave open, we set to work cleaning the grove. We hauled old tiles and broken pieces of glass, plastic children’s toys, and old pieces of wood out of the graveyard. We pulled dead tree limbs and wire out of the grove, we nailed the cross with the heart back together, and hung it on the Cedar tree above Ruth’s grave. We picked flowers, sage and fresh alfalfa from the side of the road to lay inside the grave with Ruth. We hung up our hummingbird feeder above the grave. We placed and sprinkled flowers all over Ruth’s body, we wrote her letters and we burned herbs over her body. We left the grave open. We left the grave open.
When the site was fully prepared, we uncovered Ruth’s body to touch her one last time, to see her fur, her hooves and her teeth. To me, the worst part of losing someone we love is that we lose the ability to touch them and the body that was theirs. Even after a couple of hours, Ruth’s body was not her own. It was no longer soft, no longer tender. It was hard and rigid. It already belonged to the earth.
Graves are for wailing.
Heathar and I sat with Ruth before we closed her grave. We touched her body and we wailed for as long as we needed to. We wailed until our eyes felt like they would fall out of our skulls. We shoveled the dirt onto her grave, covering her body bit by bit and hesitating before we covered her head. If I cover her head, she won’t be able to breathe. When we were done, we placed stones around the perimeter of her grave. We placed more alfalfa and sage on top of her grave. We picked purple flowers and set them in glass jars at the head of her grave. Heathar laid on top of the grave. I sat in the dirt by the Cedar tree and leaned my head against a rake that had twisted and broken in the heat of the sun. We wailed.
The hardest part is now living without her. The hardest part is walking down to the barn and seeing that Ruth is not there. The hardest part is seeing the imprint of her small body in the hay where she died. The hardest part is washing our clothes that are stained with her saliva — we may never wash them. The hardest part is smelling her and yet I want to smell her for a very long time. I smell her in the warm milk crusting on the top of the crock pot on our counter, in the chili and garlic powder we put on her belly button, and in her mom’s manure. Smelling her is the closest I will get to touching her body again.
Grief is for the living, for those of us with bodies. To grieve is to smell.
