Memorial Day

A man and his 14 year old daughter came to pick up my dad’s horse from our farm today. My dad had long since lost his desire to ride, and longed to rekindle his lost love-affair with sailing. So we had boarded his mare for nearly a year until a better situation could be found for her. Today, she went with her new family. A perfect 4-H horse project for a young girl with a soul for horses and the calming effect that a guarded horse like this would need.

Hope was the name my father had given her. A 9-year old Quarter Horse with a sketchy background and the given name of Athena for the Goddess of War. One look at her stunning, fiery trot and you’d understand her given name. She had a tendency to snort and huff and trot like she was floating on air when agitated … which was often. She was beautiful and made of fire. But Hope, time would tell, would ultimately be a better name and seemed to define so much of what sustained her and those who loved her.

A bright bay with black mane and tail and a white mark, the shape of Africa, on her forehead, she was no fighter… more of a watcher … the anxious observer of her own life. Her odd history with my family too long to repeat, she found herself with my father again a few years ago, only to experience two very life-threatening episodes of something that even the best research veterinarians at Purdue could not identify. Long nights my father had spent with the mare, literally willing her back to health for days. I watched my father prepare himself to euthanize her with both incidents, holding off on instinct, only to see her turn around in the night and recover from this mysterious illness twice. I watched him lay vigil to his mare, laying hands on her, giving her the only thing the vets could not … his intense, compassionate love.

Now, two years later, she goes … not by death, as all bets would have assumed, but in an attempt to keep a young horse working, having a job, having a human who needs her. This fourteen year old seemed a fit better than anyone had really hoped for. A good match. A good decision.

But even in parting on good terms, there is something to grieve. My 5-year old daughter, though she’d never really ridden her, had developed an affinity for her in the time that she’d been here. She wasn’t a child’s horse by nature but, just the same, my daughter had grown to love her presence on our little farm and she grieved with an intensity I’d not expected the day the mare left.

Her immediate instinct, her way of making sense of what she could not control or understand, was to draw. She immediately asked for her art supplies and paper and drew and authored a memorial book for Hope. She drew her over and over and wrote the small phrases her limited spelling vocabulary would allow. “I love you, Hope”. “I miss you, Hope”. “Hopie Girl” as my father had always called her. Sheets upon sheets of paper nearly covered with hearts, X’s and O’s all speaking what she could not articulate in her spoken words. It was, for her, cathartic.

I’m never not taken aback at what my kids do naturally to heal and honor themselves and their experiences. I am also struck at how difficult it can be for adults to see and acknowledge what is needed on the emotional level in times of stress, loss or crisis in order to grieve when something is lost or endured. A death, a divorce, a business venture gone awry. To survive the perfect business storm, or your own personal 40 days in the dessert … these experiences are so common that some of them seem nearly universal. Yet, as adults, our learned tendency is to muddle through, bury the grief and fear, ignore the tax these things take on us and march on as best we can, wounded or weary perhaps … but still walking.

Without processing the deep emotions that quietly rule our personal and professional lives, we cannot ever completely move on from loss, crisis or demise. When all is said and done, and grieving is allowed to take place (whatever that looks like), you will inevitably be left with hope … the only thing I’ve ever known to universally follow grief and the one thing within us that is impossible to destroy … no matter what the loss.