Getting Comfortable with the Uncomfortable
"Life is uncertain; Death is certain"
- Buddhist Proverb
As many of you are already aware, we lost a precious baby goat recently on Fat Dog Farm. She passed at just two weeks old. As the number of animals has increased over the years on our farm, so have our experiences with death. I now accept death as a somewhat, regular reality that I cannot escape.
When we first purchased the farm in 2011, I had minimal experience with death. I had mourned the loss of a step-brother, who's passing at a very young age forever impacted my family. In my late teenage years, I mourned the loss of grandparents, as well as a few family pets. Still, the experiences were spread out over several decades, and I was surrounded by like-minded communal support and empathy. We all attended the funerals, marking the passage, as well as a way for me to compartmentalize death.
A number of years ago, when my furry-soul sister and farm namesake Samosa had to be euthanized, more or less in our arms, I felt her death in the deepest parts of me. My tears were uncontrollable in my immense sorrow. We held her body and witnessed all of her aging; the tumor on her leg, the decreased muscle mass, and her dry dirty fur. Opposite of the funerals I attended in my youth, where the body's were made to look beautiful by applying foundation powders, and dressing loved ones in their Sunday best.
As I process all of the above, and sit with yet another sorrow, I ask myself, why are we so uncomfortable with death here in the United States? For most people, death is an uneasy subject which we do not care to think about, let alone talk about. We live in a society that often wants to deny it with our never-ending obsessions on youthfulness. Yet, we all agree and know it is a natural, inevitable process.
In the past eight years of farm life, I have experienced repetitive life and death cycles. Death on the farm is simply a sad fact, that you learn to expect and to deal with. I am now keenly aware of an old expression, “If you’re gonna have livestock, you’re gonna have dead stock.”
But this awareness is not just centered around the end. It includes the whole process—from birth to death, from the peak moments of life, to times at its worst. While living on the farm, I am often confronted with mortality as a real and recurring feature.
The art of the farm life means having tough conversations with family and friends which can be centered around why sometimes mama animals abandon their babies, or why a coyote will attack your goats, or why the neighbor's barn cat will sport kill eight of your hens, or why babies of all species die way too young.
In most of these cases there are no intellectual answers. Farm life forces you to talk about what happens and not be scared of explaining all processes around it. The loss of each farm animal still confronts me as a challenge. Yet, my relationship to death has changed. You can feel overwhelmed and really negative seeing all the death that happens on the farm. Except, that the Universe keeps offering new life, blooming and bursting all around.
So, join us, as we do here on Fat Dog Farm by honoring the certainty that death takes us all, and still Life blossoms and goes on. The Yin and Yang duality.
Rosmarinus officinalis, Rosemary, is a woody evergreen native to the Mediterranean and a universal symbol of remembrance used to honor those who have passed. Since ancient Roman times, the herb was used in burials where mourners traditionally tossed bouquets of rosemary on top of coffins.
Shakespeare’s Juliet was bestowed with rosemary upon her untimely death. In Asia, people planted Rosemary on graves in honor of their ancestors, and in hopes for continued guidance after death. In Australia, where on Anzac Day (a celebrated day of remembrance of one’s family ancestors), it is still customary to wear sprigs of rosemary today.
On the farm, we too honor the dead with fresh rosemary. If you want to try this special custom, I recommend my rosemary remembrance tea bread.
—Aleah
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