I wrote this a few years back, when I was hurting. I'm only now able to share it. I hope anyone who clicks on it will read it to the end. It is a true story, and close to my heart. I grew up on a ranch where my family bred/trained/boarded race horses. It was an ideal childhood, until the end, :
To Dwell Near the House of Death
By
Criskin
He had bloodlines running like a coursing river to the days when nobility used his ancestors to languorously while away the days before succumbing to diseases brought on by luxury and excess. His life’s devotion still bore their name, the sport of kings, long after they had ceased to exist anywhere but in history books and romantically inclined imaginations. There was a wealthy widow somewhere in the east to pay his board and collect his earnings, showing her well-dressed friends a picture of her investment over cocktails and small talk. To Dwell Near the House of Death
By
Criskin
At one time his copper coat had gleamed over rippling muscles and a startling spirit, eyes so deep and bright there was no denying great intelligence dwelt within his perfectly sculpted thoroughbred skull.
The days of gaily colored rosettes were no more.
His skin clung to his bones, no longer a horse but a skeleton loosely slung with leather. The vet shook his head in sympathy and offered the easy way out. There was nothing to be done.
“Sometimes it happens; you know the business, know it all too well,” he counseled us in hushed tones as though the horse could understand.
The only thing to be done was to comfort him as he slowly faded into chemically induced oblivion. It was the kind thing to do. I understood, we all understood, and could look back into those sad liquid brown eyes with the confidence only self-righteousness imparts. In the next pasture a mass of blood and muscle and bone radiated health and life, casting a shadow over his antiquated and fading brother.
The widow had the final say, however. Edging on in years had begun to make her come face to face with her own mortality and place a thoroughly human face on euthanasia of any kind. His fate and hers were intertwined on a mental plane we simpletons could never understand. Her brutal words came in eloquent syllables
“He’ll not be put down. That, my dears, is that.”
So, like a monarch passing judgment in days of old, from her castle far away she sentenced her subject to a long and lengthy torture, the humility of rotting into his winter amidst the spring beauty of April, in full view of all that was young and new and beautiful.
There I stood, all of fourteen, a horseman’s daughter, armed with only a curry comb and coat gloss, determined to make everything right somehow. I patted him and brushed him, sprayed and smoothed, trying to coax the luster back into his faded chestnut coat. Like a made-up cadaver, his coat took on the faux shine of glass, glass which came not from nourishment and health but from a bottle I’d picked up at the feed store for two week’s allowance. He watched me patiently, listlessly nuzzled me as I scratched his ears, always refusing to lie down, as though he knew death would find him down there in the dirt.
I told him stories of his grandsires, relived victories he probably no longer remembered, trying the only way I knew to be kind, being kind but also realizing I was preparing him for burial, delivering his elegy prematurely. At first I sang as I brushed but, with vivid clarity, I realized that, notwithstanding the cheerful words of the song, I was singing a dirge. Superstition silenced me after that moment.
I wasn’t there when he died.
His humiliation continued in death as his grotesquely bloated body was trailered for disposal, four legs sticking at horrific and unnatural angles from the battered body. As he passed, my saddle pony caught the sickly sweet smell of death and decay, started in aversion, and emitted a high pitched scream of fear. I was too busy fighting a storm of equine hysterics to take a second glance at my old friend. It was the last I ever saw of him.
A decade later I brush my Grandfather’s silver hair back into place, trying to picture him outside in the open air and not here amidst the stench of urine and antiseptic and lost freedom we call an assisted living facility. His mouth looks collapsed; he can no longer wear the dentures which returned his strong jaw line, and his pleading eyes are those of a child. I button his shirt and he thanks me in slow and halting speech, calling me by my mother’s name because where he exists now, I do not. He tells me he wants to go home and I hold him and say “I know”, all the while secretly cursing his future widow. She says she doesn’t have the money to keep him at home, these words uttered into a telephone in a Reno, Nevada hotel during a slot machine break. She claims it is a place of respite from her pain. She doesn’t let herself consider his pain. In truth he is no longer the smiling, handsome, healthy man who stood in vacation photos beside her and so, to evade her own sense of mortality, she refuses to watch him die. She wants to hear about it in letters and urgent phone calls, wants to cry crocodile tears to her well-dressed friends over cocktails and receive their carefully rehearsed displays of comfort.
Her fear of her own mortality has brought about her abandonment of morality.
And, yet, it is easy for me to pass judgment on her, my copper’s widow queen, on anyone to whom length of life has brought that looming threat of death. Death exists for me, not in any proximity, save for unthinkable disaster, but as a half-intended promise. It is a favor I will call in when the time comes. In the flower of youth it is easy to dwell near the house of death and not feel the chill, to warm fading lives without fear that the warmth radiates from a finite life source.
Mortality is an abstract concept to the young. My kindness and obsession with the dignity of the dying owes, perhaps, to that fact alone. With that in mind, any of my pretensions of altruism are not but that, pretensions. I shall die without dignity, too. So will the widows, as did the kings, as did my Grandfather. No one is proud in the end. Acceptance of the fact brings the consolation prize that is peace. Peace mimics dignity. It is an endless circle which connects all creatures blessed with this gift that is mortality.
I wasn’t there when he died.
