Grieving.
After yesterday’s loss of Jazzbo – who joined so very many other of my ‘kids’ in the Great Herd – I got to thinking a little about the grieving process. My grieving process.
Without going into detail, I’ve had loved ones die since I was 12 years old. That’s over sixty years of forever losses. The early ones were pretty much all human losses & those, of course, caused me to grieve the way most (I guess) people grieve. There was a distinct period of time when the losses cut like a knife. And then, slowly, the shooting pain began to subside. And, somehow, I moved on. No other choice, right?
Fast forward a few decades & a lot of water over the dam.
Since founding Tierra Madre, I’ve lost exactly 50 of my equine family members, plus two of the best dogs ever.
And, most assuredly, I’ve grieved each & every one of them.
But the grief around here – around a horse sanctuary – is a little, or a lot, different.
See, you can’t stop & gather your grief around you. And I don’t want this to sound cold – far from it – but you can’t wallow in your grief. That is, give yourself time for reflecting on the love you had & still have for your lost family member. You don’t have time to just be with your grief, to let it encompass you with its sadness & real sense of loss. You don’t even have time to cry.
Because life goes on & goes on quickly. Horses need to be fed & care must be given to those who need it. At once, not somewhere in the near future, when your spirit has begun to try & heal itself. Now. Not a day from now or even an hour from now. Now.
Yeah – I have to admit that that helps a bit. Because those loved ones are anxious to see you, anxious for their feed, anxious for your love. To horses, death is simply another part of the Great Circle of Life. They move on quickly. So, yeah – just being with them is like a balm for the soul.
But what about the loved one you’ve just lost? Doesn’t he or she deserve some kind of eternal communication through the vast reaches of infinity? A little time to just sit there & acknowledge everything that has gone on between the two of you?
As I said, it’s hard to find that time & that space when duty is constantly calling. And that’s a little sad.
But that time & that space finds you – often when you least expect it.
This morning, as I was driving home from my daily AA meeting, all of a sudden, my eyes filled. I felt a tear creep down my cheek.
Jazzbo.
At fifty miles an hour, in traffic, I couldn’t pull over, I couldn’t stop – I just had to keep going. So I wiped the ‘distraction’ out of my eyes &, to the best of my ability, out of my mind. I had to keep going.
Fifty times.
Fifty times this has happened. The losses of what I consider my equine family members. True family members, as close as any humans I’ve ever known.
And fifty times, duty has called.
And fifty times, I’ve grieved. In my own way, I guess.
See, doing what I do, it’s a different kind of grief – one that comes at you at strange, sometimes inopportune, times & not in a large wave that comes at you & then recedes slowly at its own pace.
It’s here. Then it’s gone. Then it’s here again. Then it’s gone again. Over & over.
I don’t know.
I guess that’s it. What ‘it’ is, I don’t know.
I don’t really even know why I’m writing this right now.
Just a little reflection on my grieving process, I guess.
Such as it is.
Thanks for letting me share.
