These are the good times.
Oct. 1st, 2018 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo yesterday I had my mare of sixteen years put down. It was very sad, but she had cancer and wasn’t going to get any better, only worse. And in her kitchen, the-morning-of (horse deaths are frequently scheduled because of logistics and backhoes and stuff), my dear friend asked me when we got to the good times. (Y’know, because it sucks to put your horse of sixteen years down and I’m miserably unhappy and snotting all over her kitchen and clearly this is not the good times that she signed up for.)
I was like “Lala, what the hell do you think you are, a Disney Princess? Songbirds land on your outstretched arms or some shit? Woodland animals come around and do your chores for you?” These here ARE the good times. Right here, right now, these are the good times. And they are the good times because we are here, now. This is as good as it gets.
1. It was a warm, sunshine-y day, the first one in absolute ages during the wettest summer ever*. If you had to pick a day to die, Sunday was a good one.
2. My horse, though rail thin and riddled with cancer, was able to walk onto the horse trailer and be hauled, albeit carefully, to where we needed her to be to put her down. She left the trailer and walked over the hill past the pear tree under her own power.
3. She did not die in pain from colic or a twisted gut. She did not break a leg or wind up paralyzed by a stroke and unable to stand. She was not hit by a tri-axle dump truck. (The dump truck one happened to an acquaintance’s horse two days ago. Not a made-up thing.) No, she got an instant death in calm circumstances. It was not frantic. It had planning and care. It was the best day we could make it.
4. She felt good enough yesterday to have some bright green grass with red clover (her favorite) and some pears from the pear tree before we led her down over the hill to shoot her. I knew it was her last day and I was sad. Nick, though, only knew that that she got to have as many pears as she wanted to eat. She ate four. Four pears, in the warm sunshine, each one eaten from my hand with more enthusiasm than she’d shown anything else in weeks.
5. We are lucky enough to have a person that drops horses in one shot, every time. He’s careful and precise and they go down immediately, just the high crack of a .22 and then it’s done. I listened for it. One shot, 4:10 PM, Sunday September 30, 2018.
These are the good times. The fact that my aged, rail-thin, cancer-riddled horse got to have a timely, appropriate, near-instant death at the end of a lovely, warm, reasonably pain-free day that was full of the things she liked? That right there is the good times. So many horses don’t get that. So many owners don’t get that.
And I also have a filly who is beautiful, well-made, doing a great job eating her milk-replacer pellets, hanging out with her auntie mares, and, at two and a half months old, just exactly big enough to survive and be fine without her dam – that’s the cherry on the sundae, over here.
Yes, I am sad. I will miss her dearly. But to overlook all the things that went correctly in the last year of my mare’s life, right down to her very last day, is to be ungrateful. These are the good times and I am thankful for them.
*Not an exaggeration. 2018 was the wettest summer on record for here.
I was like “Lala, what the hell do you think you are, a Disney Princess? Songbirds land on your outstretched arms or some shit? Woodland animals come around and do your chores for you?” These here ARE the good times. Right here, right now, these are the good times. And they are the good times because we are here, now. This is as good as it gets.
1. It was a warm, sunshine-y day, the first one in absolute ages during the wettest summer ever*. If you had to pick a day to die, Sunday was a good one.
2. My horse, though rail thin and riddled with cancer, was able to walk onto the horse trailer and be hauled, albeit carefully, to where we needed her to be to put her down. She left the trailer and walked over the hill past the pear tree under her own power.
3. She did not die in pain from colic or a twisted gut. She did not break a leg or wind up paralyzed by a stroke and unable to stand. She was not hit by a tri-axle dump truck. (The dump truck one happened to an acquaintance’s horse two days ago. Not a made-up thing.) No, she got an instant death in calm circumstances. It was not frantic. It had planning and care. It was the best day we could make it.
4. She felt good enough yesterday to have some bright green grass with red clover (her favorite) and some pears from the pear tree before we led her down over the hill to shoot her. I knew it was her last day and I was sad. Nick, though, only knew that that she got to have as many pears as she wanted to eat. She ate four. Four pears, in the warm sunshine, each one eaten from my hand with more enthusiasm than she’d shown anything else in weeks.
5. We are lucky enough to have a person that drops horses in one shot, every time. He’s careful and precise and they go down immediately, just the high crack of a .22 and then it’s done. I listened for it. One shot, 4:10 PM, Sunday September 30, 2018.
These are the good times. The fact that my aged, rail-thin, cancer-riddled horse got to have a timely, appropriate, near-instant death at the end of a lovely, warm, reasonably pain-free day that was full of the things she liked? That right there is the good times. So many horses don’t get that. So many owners don’t get that.
And I also have a filly who is beautiful, well-made, doing a great job eating her milk-replacer pellets, hanging out with her auntie mares, and, at two and a half months old, just exactly big enough to survive and be fine without her dam – that’s the cherry on the sundae, over here.
Yes, I am sad. I will miss her dearly. But to overlook all the things that went correctly in the last year of my mare’s life, right down to her very last day, is to be ungrateful. These are the good times and I am thankful for them.
*Not an exaggeration. 2018 was the wettest summer on record for here.
