Just some thoughts about life

Earlier today, I buried a goat. It was a somewhat surreal experience, but let’s back up a bit.

Last weekend, for my birthday, I bought too many plants and drove to West Virginia for three days of gardening. For a variety of reasons, I suppose, or maybe for no real reasons at all, this was not a good birthday. I love my birthday, and so this was disappointing, but I’m glad it’s in the rearview and my plants are in the ground. Much of what I planted last year for my birthday plantathon is thriving (I shake my fist at you, ironweed!); it reminds me that growth can appear so glacially slow that what was alive seems to have died, but in reality, progress is being made. Life is biding its time. Cell by cell, root by root, bud by bud.

Despite my inability to settle, I spent a lot of time with the goats and cats and the peace and beauty of the land and our view. Of our four-turned-eight goats, Lefty has always been the weakest, the gentle lumberer the others butted and picked on to continually assert pecking order. She nearly died three years ago of listeria; her then-owners literally saved her life by literally going above and beyond for many sleepless days and nights.

I also, last weekend, hired a couple to help me pull some shiso (my invasive nemesis!) from the pastures. West Virginians endure so much poverty and hardship. It’s enough to break your heart on the regular. This couple currently lives with their teenage daughter in one room of a house in which dogs are allowed to pee and poo and it’s rarely cleaned up. There is mold, and they wish they could return to the hotel, but they can’t. Lefty loped up to say hi as they started pulling, and they even got to see her turn a left circle (hence her name, from the listeria episode). I hope she gave them a moment of simple pleasure.

Since we adopted Lefty, we have all doted on her. She was often alone, which is not the norm for a herd animal. Tom thought she seemed content; I always worried that she was lonely. In that is such a fascinating perspective on how different people read and experience others. But, that is an explication for another day.

Last weekend, I took Lefty aside each day for a chopped apple in private. She is a slow eater, and I didn’t want her to feel rushed. She loved apples. As she chomped, I scratched her neck and looked into her big brown eyes; they were like pools of simple goodness. Some apple juice ran down her jowls, and it made me so happy. When I left Sunday, I hugged her and said I’d see her soon.

On Friday, our caretaker called to say that Lefty had died. He’d seen vultures for a few days straight and found our girl lying in a sun-dappled dip in one of the pastures. Because he has dealt with livestock death before, he knew to close the gates to isolate her so that the other goats and scavengers wouldn’t meet up.

Yesterday was Earth Day. I’d organized a neighborhood yard sale which was a fun, great success. So many families sold and gave away so many things, hung out together, and contributed to various eco and charitable drives I and some other neighbors spearheaded. Supplies for a local diaper bank, a humane shelter, a family shelter, and a summer art camp for poor and refugee families in our area. The rain we desperately needed held off until closing time. It ushered in a cool front, and I wondered if that might help any smell or bloat we’d encounter when we went to bury Lefty. I thought about how much material stuff was being exchanged and how it was both wonderful and awful. The excess when so many have nothing.

Right now, I’m on my porch watching grackles and northern mockingbirds and sparrows and mourning doves duke it out at my feeder station. They, too, have a pecking order and regularly flex with wing, call, flight, and talon. A zaftig dove has decided to use the tray feeder as a bed. It’s both reclining and eating, and you’ve just got to admire the chutzpah. I am sad and quiet.

We all dreaded finding Lefty today. J was extremely worried about what state she might be in; O and I felt the right thing to do was properly bury her no matter what; T was solemn.

As it turns out, vultures are profoundly capable creatures, and Lefty was but a skeleton, one leg, and a hide. There was a smell, but only if you were downwind or on top of what remained. It was remarkable, really. Like, objectively, we all had to take a moment to appreciate the incredible efficiency, thoroughness, and lack of waste. And selfishly, the vultures’ work made ours infinitely easier, in both emotional and physical ways. What we saw didn’t look like Lefty anymore, and that helped. And, so much of our land is rock with a hint of dirt, but where Lefty lay, we could dig with relative ease. Quietly, wearing masks, Ol, T, and I dug and folded and covered. J pulled shiso, and then we all built a cairn atop Lefty’s grave. In a weird way, the entire afternoon felt rather like a perfectly organic end to the Earth Day weekend. For what it’s worth, I want to be buried like we buried Lefty. A pine box if you must, but just me and the earth would be my choice, with some flowers on top.

I am enjoying a glass of wine and the cacophonous concert of these wonderful birds —a scarlet cardinal has just entered the mix— and thinking of Lefty and the differences between strong and weak, objective and emotional, simple and not. About community and the individuals that comprise each one. About how hard life is for some.

I think, as I so often have, about articulating for the first time how strenuously I wished for a simpler, more still mind. It was my senior year of college, and a boy and I had recently fallen deeply in love. He would be the second and final heartbreak of my life, but I can still only think of him with fondness and gratitude. In any case, our relationship was, perhaps, a mere month old. We were in bed, and he looked at me with his big brown eyes, pools of love, and asked, “Emil, do you ever wish you had a slower, simpler mind? I do.” MANY people call me Em, some call me Emmy or Nichols. No one, before or since, has called me Emil.

“Yes, all the time,” I said. And that was that. We listened to a lot of music together; Tom Petty was a favorite, and whenever I hear “Time to Move On” I am instantly transported back to a room in the Delt house.

It's time to move on, it's time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It's time to move on, time to get going

In the decades since, I’ve gotten tougher, stronger, orders of magnitude so. But my mind? It still runs and races and feels and hurts, and that in this world is…well, it’s hard. Is the goat lonely? Will the couple be ok? Will the ironweed ever grow? Will the shiso be eradicated? Will any plastic bag recycling drive ever make one bit of difference? Will my loved ones continue to grow up and out in healthy ways? Will I get to take the stage for my next act?

Today I buried my darling Lefty. My greatest hope is that she didn’t suffer at all between the last slice of apple and lying down in that bit of valley. I hope she felt love and some peace. Perhaps her mind was always still, perhaps it was at the end. It’s time to move on.

Losses

A teenager at one of my sons’ schools died yesterday. He had been at school the day before. I did not know him. I cannot stop thinking about him or his family. That after all these months into the pandemic, they are suffering a loss greater than anyone should ever bear, in the “best” of times. I look at my own teenager, who is finding his place in the world. It is hard for him sometimes. I remember how profoundly uncomfortable I felt in high school; it was hard. On the surface, both my son and I have/had everything. But the surface is not where real life stews or is experienced; well, not for most of us, I dare say.

I have no idea what happened to this boy, but I know that he was loved by family and friends, that he was valued, that his loss will quake daily in the lives of those who remain.

I have what seems to me, a large number of friends who have lost children. This is a terrible, wrecking awareness. I don’t know what it means. One was killed in a terrorist attack, one seized in utero until she died and had to be delivered, two died suddenly as toddlers from what seemed like the flu, another of a cellular disorder with which she was born. None were older than twelve. All were loved, wholly and forever.

I do not know what to make of these tragic horrors. I have tried to just listen and feed and record and sit. It is a bare minimum, but I haven’t known what else to do. I mean, is there anything? I know that it is something, means something, to show up, to bear witness. I am repeatedly appalled by all who run away instead of toward. But perhaps that is more an indictment of how we allow grief to be expressed in this country, what is appropriate, what is not. We smile and curate and please and make comfortable, and that is a shame, an affront, and a disservice in all too many circumstances.

Many times, often, life is ugly. It is cancer and blood and death and loss. It is divorce and infidelity and poverty and want. It is hunger, violence, desperation, and drought. It is loneliness, fear, and simply wanting someone to ask and then really listen, without interruption, without judgement, without deflection. It is young women performing superhuman athletic feats being abused by their sport’s “best team doctor,” winning gold medal after gold medal, but suffering in the dark quiet of silence and secret until they learn that the FBI has betrayed them and so their only recourse for justice is to sit, more publicly than should be humanly expected, in front of Congress to relay horrific stories of non-consensual vaginal penetration and molestation so that maybe someone will finally mete out some goddamn justice.

Today, a friend had an MRI to see if any of her sixteen brain tumors have shrunk in the face of a daily pill that costs nearly $600. She’s well into her second month of this, she is on Medicaid, and she must take these pills because cancer wrecked her spine, requiring a vertebral replacement and subsequent fusion, rendering her ineligible for chemo until her back has healed. I have not heard from her since just before the MRI. She was terrified; I pushed her to do the scan because information is power, or something like that. We must know if these pills are helping.

My dad is still recovering from his recent surgery, my teenager is navigating a huge high school that he interacted with last year from our basement, and I feel unmoored. Each morning, I help both boys with their hair. This, I can do. I love that they ask, and I feel tethered (though rushed) in those moments when I hoist myself up onto my bathroom counter so that I can have enough height on them to see their heads and help with parts, hair drying, man buns, and product application.

It feels heavy, and hard, this experience of living on a pendulum between youth trauma and older-folks trauma, of trying to be present in each day while realizing all the bad shit that lurks around the corner. That darkness isn’t myth or nightmare; it’s real and experienced, and to not honor that reality seems like the most hideous of invalidations. If you are lucky to have not experienced such things, either be gracious or be quiet.

I drove to WV this morning after dropping Jack off and packing Ol’s sleepover bag for a night at my parents’, a bar mitzvah, and a sleepover with friends. The entire drive was a cacophonous musical of wailing cats and clanging trampoline parts. When I arrived safely, I swallowed gratefully and thought about my freshman roommate, Rosemary, and her advice: “ Sometimes, Emmy, you just have to put on your face and get out there.” That advice has proven so wise and beneficial so many times over the past 25 years. Thank you, Rose.

So, I put on my face and met with an amazing Jack of all trades who is going to fell dead trees for us and also rent us goats to mow the pastures. He wasn’t feeling well so suggested we wear masks, and I was so thankful because that is not the norm here, and then we enjoyed time just roaming the land and talking about fences and baby goats and fainting goats and nasty billy goats, and a castrated man goat named Rambo.

And then I hoed and weeded and planted and mulched and cooked and petted and painted, and then my big boy arrived, with his best friend and darling Tom. And we are here for the weekend, and everyone is laughing and full, and, for a moment, the awfulness recedes.