On loss, resiliency, and midwifing my way through hard transitions
Taking Root: May 2nd, 2024
I’m not coming with a list of events and happenings this week and that’s probably a good thing. Time stood still at the farm this weekend as we navigated the sudden loss of my school horse, Choo Choo.
I’ve spent a lot of hours showing up for other people’s grief at the farm, online, by text, since Choo’s passing and I’m going to use the space in this newsletter to finally show up for me.
But if you’re interested in my thoughts on navigating barn losses with your kids, you can read them here. It’s a public Facebook post so you should be able to access it even if you aren’t on that platform.
Or if you’d like to read the words I wrote to honor Choo’s passing you can find them here.
And if you’d really like to contribute in a tangible way to Choo’s legacy, consider making a donation of any amount, large or small, to Choo’s Memorial Scholarship Fund so that we can provide equine-assisted services to people who might not have access otherwise to this healing work.
Our inaugural Zoom meet-up for Stable Roots paid subscribers is this Friday, May 3rd at 6:00 PM EST. I planned to not have a plan for our first get-together, but now I’d like to direct our discussion toward loss. How do you navigate losses? How would you like people to show up for you amid hard things? Be checking your email for a post that came yesterday with all the Zoom info. I look forward to hanging out with you.
I would like to say that losing horses becomes easier through more experience, but that’s just not the case.
It’s no wonder that veterinarians suffer four times the risk of death by suicide than other professions. My loss of Choo follows closely behind the loss of Billy (same day, two months later, at the same phase of the full moon — thank you Michelle for pointing this out), and in both instances, I was with the same veterinarian on-call in the wee hours. And even though he does this all day, every day, he was still sobbing alongside me as he administered the drugs that would lead Choo to his final sleep.
People don’t become large animal veterinarians for the prestige or the working conditions — it’s a thankless job that’s in decline — they become vets because they love horses.
Our herd of aged masters are not surgical candidates. My reasons for this are worthy of their own post. So when a horse shows signs of colic — which is a frequent and normal concern for horses — the early hours are spent managing the horse’s pain and working alongside our vet to fortune-tell whether this horse is going to pull through with loving treatment administered on-site.
The vets in the practice that sustain us are masters of helping me sort through the facts to make a clear choice that isn’t based on my emotions but on my conscience. To have the space to make an informed, conscientious choice I’ve learned that I either need to be alone or to be together with a few self-actualized humans who have experienced death and loss and learned how to transform that pain into showing up for people in the worst of times.
Those people are rare.
I am grateful to Michelle Higdon and Christopher Eaton for being those people beside me as we submerged ourselves in twelve hours of tough choices. Choo became ill around 6:30 Thursday evening and his spirit left this world at 6:30 Friday morning.
Sarah Farris and I come together after each loss at the farm and we ask ourselves, what have we learned? How can we do better next time? Because there will always be a next time. Horses are fragile and death finds them at all stages of life no matter how healthy or well-kept they are. It finds them in the wild (more often than you might think) and it finds them in domestication.
Most of us come to horses from a very innocent place inside of us. We might have dreamed of horses since we were very small. The horse takes on a mythical symbolism in our lives. They are majestic and powerful. They persevere. Our thoughts of them are very rarely coupled with weakness, decline, and death.
The horse, whether by choice or not, symbolizes our strength, our progress, the deepest pulls of our unconscious. When we imagine a horse, we are dreaming our hope into being. I’m not exempt. I do the same thing — it’s not just new-horse people who experience this phenomenon. And my hope is not just in the horses, it’s in my livelihood, the farm I’ve built that so many people visit and enjoy.
In the early days, I did everything in my power to hide losses from my clients. It felt like some sort of moral failure when I couldn’t save a horse. I’d leave the side of a freshly euthanized horse tucked away in some distant corner of a paddock where no one would see the body or ask questions and I would put my sunglasses on to hide my swollen eyes, creak my professional smile in place and not change the order of riding lessons for the day.
My grief was compounded by my emotional deceit.
In those days I was following in the steps of my masters who had taught me all the smoke and mirrors horse professionals use to sell horses, to keep people coming back. It’s hard to sell a dream to someone when the reality is ugly and messy and unpredictable.
But reality IS ugly and messy and unpredictable. Even more so with horses.
As my program began to change to reflect the needs of modern humans — re-wilding, a safe place to land, personal transformation, emotional literacy — I stopped needing to lie about what a life spent with a horse is all about. Their passing is a part of my work and no longer something to shamefully tuck into the back closet of the farm.
But I’m still finding language to express my personal grief when a horse passes.
I don’t mind being a death doula for the horses.
Most of my horses come to the farm because they have a complicated history. Many, I know without question, have arrived here to have a peaceful place to die.
At no other time in history have we collectively looked at youth and our prime and physical strength as the only paradigms for living. Normal, biological aging is treated like it’s a failure in our system instead of a natural process of life. This weird, Insta-ready, filtered existence permeates the ground, down deep, in our society.
Spending so much time in this unrealistic pinnacle that we’re all trying to achieve makes it doubly hard to cope with loss, with aging, with sickness, with the ensuing grief. Many of my clients have not experienced loss at all before a horse they love passes, and many have also experienced so much grief in their brief and long lives that it’s nuts that they’re able to function at all.
Resiliency.
Midwifing horses through the process of death has taught me that I actually am resilient. I never really thought of myself like that until horses showed me the way. What if even more people were able to learn that they are resilient? That might be the heart of everything I do at the farm, every service and session and client — you have more power than you think.
How can I help you find it?
The focus of my work both personally and with clients over the past five years has been linking our emotions to the somatic (read: body) responses we often ignore. Emotions are transitory but my cellular memory is great. I hold grief in my muscles, in my skin, in my bones. The trick is being conscious enough of what’s happening to my body to allow the feelings to pass through naturally.
As a control freak, I find this is tough work.
As I said goodbye to Choo at dawn on Friday morning, I spent some time weeping in the field where we had laid him down. As the vet walked toward his truck and I kneeled by Choo at a loss for what to do next, the lightest rain began to fall.
I stumbled around the field for a while as I wailed and let sobs rack me from a place deep, deep down inside the deepest crevices of my heart.
As I opened my eyes, I saw the flowers blooming all around us in the un-mowed, spring field.
I picked wildflowers and covered Choo up from head to toe. Choo was a consummate honeysuckle eater and between those sweet vines and the freshly blooming blackberry strands, all prickly and sweet — just like this remarkable gelding — I made his body into a blooming garden of loss.
And then I walked away and sat on the front porch of the farmhouse, drinking wine and waiting for Sarah to arrive and start work.
Christopher woke a few hours later — he works until midnight or later most nights and I didn’t want him to lose sleep and waste precious days off tending to me so I left him sleeping after the last Choo check of the night. I told him what had happened as I wrapped myself up in blankets and sat with him before he left for work.
I was a pitiful cocoon of loss. It was wonderful to be near someone that I didn’t have to pretend otherwise or show up for in any other way except how I was. Wrecked. Destroyed. At a loss for what to do next or what to say to my clients.
“I’ve got you,” Christopher said. And that was enough. I believed him. I’ve always, at the core of it, wanted to be gotten.
I slept for a few hours and woke to a phone filled with messages.
“Just show up,” I typed to mothers at a loss for what to do with their grief-racked children.
I picked wildflowers with a dear student and answered questions about Choo’s loss, and life, and timing, and love as we laid our bouquets reverently in front of Choo’s empty stall.
It’s a household tradition that we eat Waffle House whenever someone has died. Christopher left work earlier than usual and he picked up a banquet of pork chops and eggs and hash browns and toast.
Gallows humor is essential and a barn staple in tough transitions. I was able to introduce the evening crew to the joy that is Waffle House Failing its Health Inspection in Atlanta. And why we don’t care.
Time stopped meaning anything. Like, seriously, time doesn’t mean anything after a loss. I shocked myself referencing something that happened the day before because I was convinced it had been three days since the thing happened.
Visitors began to arrive.
Choo’s legacy at my farm stretches nearly 15 years. There are grown adults who were shaped as a child by this horse’s vision. My right shoulder became wet with people’s tears.
The visitors are still coming and I’m thankful for them.
But I’m aware of what my body is doing. Grief is exhausting and it’s ravenous. It strips your resources and deprives you of nutrients. I cannot sleep long enough to be rested. I’m simultaneously hungry and don’t want to eat. I’m tired and bone-weary. I don’t know how to rest.
The world is boiled down to contradictions.
It feels like the end of everything and also a beginning.
That’s hard for the human brain to grasp.
So, I’m relying on my spirit. Within moments of Choo’s passing, I felt two horses coming toward us. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they’re coming from. I just know that they’re making their way to Bramblewood Stables.
I’ll keep you informed as I figure out our next steps.
But, for now, I’m just letting myself be. I’m trying to hush the busy catastrophizing voice that nags me into action. I don’t need to be a fortune teller. I don’t need to know what happens next. I don’t need to have the next chapter outlined and drafted.
I can use my words for something else.
That’s what I’m doing here. I’m using my words to describe my personal process. And like death, our processing is messy and strange and unpredictable. It does not follow a standard outline.
Let’s move through this life open to an acceptance of what is. And as we do this, let’s move through it together.
Much love to you all on this crazy, hard week.
Love,
Kim
