It was almost exactly seven days ago when I stood by the fence, watching the four members of the herd, even the timid rescue Holly who is probably close to my heart mare’s age, express their grief and I would argue even anger at the loss of my heart mare, the oldest horse in the herd (27), as we laid her to rest because her body was failing her. I stood there, my own heart breaking and buried in the dry dirt of our pasture, back against the fence while the horses ran in circles around the place where she was being buried. In that moment I felt a unity with the sacred herd, I felt a transcendence, and I felt grounded in the fact that being someone who can connect people to equine and planetary wisdom, to help them find their wild spirit stories, their wild places inside them, was and is my calling.
I had heard it discussed on a documentary, I believe, about how when one member of a herd dies, the rest will sniff or paw at the body. And then they run around it, and though we are not inside their mind, and animal behaviorists state that they are trying to flush out predators who may have harmed their fallen herd member or perhaps awaken the adrenaline response so that their “sleeping” herd member can get up and run with them, it is also known to be a grief ritual. During this time my heart mare’s filly called out for her, and she, out of all of them, was the most exuberant, bucking and kicking as if all the energy inside her was too much to be contained. Me too, little one, me too, only I wanted to sink to the earth, crushed under the weight of this loss.
My partner stood beside me. The person who was helping us burying her kept working, and his spouse was there and let me know that there would be this type of activity. They’d seen it before. They knew this would happen.
As I watched them, I could not separate my grief response from theirs. Like them, I wanted to rage against the cruelties of a frail body, one that had been structurally unsound from my mare’s beginnings and I had the foal pictures to prove it. But she’d been pain-free, and she’d been loved, and even when there was no chasing away the pain, we did what we could, until we had to make the kindest decision of all, the one that hurt the most.
There was a profound sense of connection in that moment that I dare say I wasn’t even in my body. i was there, with them, running around where their fallen herd member, their leader, their matriarch until the final few years, was being buried. We were all grieving; we were all hurting in our own ways, expressing it as our nature and our biology intended.
The human lenses and the human-centered descriptions fell away. I freely admit I don’t know for sure that the horses were doing anything other than what instinct told them to do. I don’t believe that was the case. Not as I listened to heart mare’s filly call for her off and on for the rest of the day and into the night, waiting for the answering whinny that would never come, the reassurance from her mother that everything was going to be okay, I felt the answering ache in my heart, the knowledge of the hurt that comes when you lose a parent, even though my mother passed eight years ago. There’s still the moment when you would give anything to hear their voice, and you know that it will never happen again in this life.
Though outsiders would look at the herd and think that they had “gotten over” the loss, as I move about them twice a day to feed, and at other times during the day, I know the difference. There’s a subtle shifting, of a life reordering, of finding a new way forward, which is how I, as a grief specialist, was taught to approach grief. Though their difference includes buckets at feeding time, a change of who gets fed where and whether the gates are closed or not (they don’t have to be, not anymore), there is still finding the new way forward, the new path, the new routines.
We are not separate species in this. We are not “humans” and “animals” or worse yet, “humans” and “livestock”. We are grieving, and it’s okay. We’ll be grieving for a while, and that’s okay too. We are just beings grieving together, and that’s how it was meant to be.
