Notes from Grief by Katie Culligan

Every morning at 9 am, I hurl myself into the world; I feed the animals their hay, their burgundy-colored bits, fill their water from the spring, check for injuries, count them all up. Summer afternoons, I give them extra water to make the sun hurt less. It feels like most things in this world are decided by overflow parking, by absolute fucking chance, but I am intentional with myself, at least this summer. Pour the water, lay the hay, buy fresh melon, and nod at people. This same summer, I consider counting to a million, out loud, by ones: this is how possible things seem. 

On Thanksgiving morning, the barn sits around me like its own kind of feast: the syringe full of goopy vitamins, smelling of banana laffy taffy and rot, the hay everywhere, soggy and strewn like a sandcastle in the middle of the night, sheep blood still cresting like waves on the walls. My little lamb is dying, but my hands move her legs in circles, like she’s riding a bicycle, as if she was on her way to the farmers’ market, or to her office job downtown. She’s so stiff; she has been for two days now, unable to push herself off the ground. If I want to hurt my own feelings, I take the orphan angle; her mother died in a coyote attack almost two weeks ago, one that she herself almost died from as well, and she’s holding it in, right here in her joints. In reality, I’m not sure if lambs know who their mothers are. Many, when expressing their condolences for my losses, assure me that I was a very good mother to these animals. I want to tell them that I feel like the opposite of a mother: I feel like a tulip bulb, straight out of the saran wrap. I must try to make myself my own mother first; tie my own shoes and make my own sandwiches. I call my aunt and ask her if this is just it for me; if I am just going to be wounded for the rest of my life. Yes, she says. It’s guaranteed.  

My lamb’s eyes lay kindly like two-day-old concord grapes, wet and seizing around in their sockets, and I try to approximate the traditions of this day that I grew up with. I go around the room and tell everyone what I’m thankful for, and it sounds like radio static: I’m thankful for the sheets on my bed. I’m thankful for everything missing from my life. I’m thankful for the possibility that my joy may someday be as thick and sticky as my sadness. 

Four days after I find my herd dying horribly in the pasture, my grandfather drives to the farm with a picnic basket: baguettes, colby jack cheese, a fresh tomato. He says he’s been listening to an audiobook history of famous philosophers. Occam, he said, created his namesake by literally carving inessential parts of his calculations off with a razor. To history, he’s known for wanting the simplest option; I know him, however, as the man who wrote mind down on, and carved it off of, sheep skin. 

All of my damage analogies have to do with skin. Is my damage leathery and worn, like a baseball glove or the ball of a foot? Or is it stabbed and porous, too many holes in it to hold anything? Is it that nothing can get in, or that nothing can stay in? Is it both?

I sit in the loft of the barn on a mattress I’ve made out of hay and a picnic blanket and watch as my lamb, the last one left, takes tiny steps towards the others. She is looking down and moving in a series of three-inch steps. Sheep are herd animals, defined entirely by each other; I have had to exercise godlike, old-fashioned mercy on these animals in this time, and a good indicator of when to do this was when one was abandoned by the herd. 

As I sit in the barn stretching the lamb, the other three sheep left have congregated outside by the far fence. I can see her eyes all morning, flitting around the room, looking for the others, and when I finally stand her up, she’s determined. She steps and steps, in harsh segments, my little mechanical soldier moving bit by bit toward the fence.

I, too, am searching for the simplest way out of this. What’s simple is what my body already wants; what’s simple is, during these days, complete absence. I hear my grandfather speak and think that I, too, am at the beginning of carving myself down and down.

When she seizes and falls over, she’s almost done it. I climb down the stairs, meet her as she lays still on her side, a few feet away from the rest. On Thanksgiving morning, carrying her little body back to the barn, making her a mattress of hay, too, watching as she dies of penicillin buildup– the collateral damage of trying to make her strong again– I remain convinced that you have to be a god to experience one. 

Is grief superfluous to the human experience I want? Can I scrape it out, whittle this life down into something simpler? The simpler thing, the thing without all this heartache, must be the most correct, if you believe Occam. I want to believe him. I want to pull it apart, to unbraid life and death, have one strand of my life that is sadness, and one that is running errands to the grocery store. But mostly, I want to stop thinking about razors; I want to stop thinking about sheep skin. 

I heard recently about a writer for Late Night with Conan O’Brien who considered himself to have comedy damage — things that would cause “civilians” to howl, riot with laughter, would cause him to stand, hand on chin, nodding. I found the idea of this to be very painful, and I think a lot of this pain lives in the name. In the claim that ideas could be damaged. Processes, verbs, actions, entire phenomena can have damage in them. 

I feel as though, through all of this, I have poetry damage. I have sentence damage and I have heart damage, both folded together. I feel that I have missing damage; that I have become so familiar with this empty pasture as to stop feeling it. With love and missing, the volume is the same. 

I must give my body, soggy with all of this, specific instructions before I can take a check to the bank. When the teller asks how I am today, I must tell myself, “Do not answer ‘Headless!! Do you hear me! Headless!!!’”

In my best moments, I try to become a student of this grief, to notate my biological symptoms and arrange my day accordingly. I notice when I’m hungry; I notice when I’m hot or grumpy or crying in the pharmacy. But even in these best moments, I struggle to find any conclusions. I am, to put it plainly, made frizzy by this grief. I am strewn everywhere. 

In the morning, I corral them into the barn, bucking and terrified, make them stand between my legs; I push the needle into their haunches and deliver the penicillin, the stuff that’s supposed to keep their face-wounds sterile, keep their skin from rotting off. The ones who are left begin to see me as nothing more than this, as just the woman who stands above them, an orb of once-daily pain. 

I become obsessed with the desire that none of them die alone. I sit and scratch their backs as the herd abandons them, torture everyone involved by reading Mary Oliver out loud. I ask, through her, through me, what has a soul and what doesn’t. I watch as their bellies balloon, as their eyes become saggy and skinny. I call them by the names I have always called them. 

When I feel the tears make tiny domes of my eyes at work, when I feel the sadness pushing louder and louder on the inside of my skull: I notice myself breathing and think “I am having a life experience right now, in a world where these have become rarer.”

Coyotes attack the face and neck, literally go for the throat. As the few that are left heal, some of their mouths heal shut. This is what kills the last few. They’re grazing animals; grazing animals looking at a mound of hay, unable to eat. These deaths are slow. 

I rearrange the corpses to hide them from the others once this happens. When an animal dies of starvation, it’s easy to be unsure for a few hours if they are dead or merely waiting. This low-heart-rate stage of life we were all living in, when the glucose and water-weight sheds; I was uncomfortable with making this call. I drag Hilda’s body out of the barn and into the corner of the pasture for burial in the pouring November rain; I knew she was dead once her neck coiled around itself like soft-serve ice cream.

Once something big and horrible happens, it becomes hard to imagine how horrible things aren’t always happening. I start saying to people that it was amazing that this didn’t happen everyday; after all, our fences were short and not reinforced. We hadn’t had a guard animal in almost a year. It’s amazing that they didn’t all get eaten by coyotes and wolves and birds, every day. I say this and I mean it. 

Missing all of my dead animals is a part of this sadness. Another part is the memory of the herd that morning, the ones that were mobile walking like toothpick figurines, like their bodies were held together by floss. The neighbor’s boxers eating the remains in the street. Another part is the memory of carrying handfuls of food to each one individually, begging them to eat out of my hands the morning I found them all in the pasture after the attack; the memory of them, stoic-eyed, opening their mouths to eat, and their tongues falling out, their lower jaws falling off. 

As I drive through the mountains at night, my headlights fall on a family of curly-haired brown cows asleep in a circle. I am knocked out by the sight of this: to be an animal alone in the open dark. The thought alone brings me to tears.

In the first six months, there are some moments that seem to not hurt at all. There are also moments that seem so insurmountable that I feel like a taxidermied deer head on the wall of a time-share hunting lodge. This painful world seems to follow this sine curve; we are all governed by the way the cage door opens and shuts, over and over.

Unfairness is the word I keep coming back to. The unfairness of it. The word itself sounds like pouting after a missed ferris wheel ride. 

While my herd is dead, I have visions of other animals dying in unorthodox ways: chickens get smaller and smaller until they are sea monkeys writhing around in my hands. Rabbits unpeel their skin like sweaters and jump away slowly into the rain gutter. Dairy cows chase each other around a cul-de-sac on roller skates and snap their own kneecaps, all at the same time, like sourdough pretzel sticks. My cat screams on the front porch until he surrenders to the sound of his own voice, like a black tarp over his body. Every night for weeks, while my herd is dead, I have nightmares of my mouth, the inside of it coated with sheep hair. 

When I wake up from these nightmares, I try again to unbraid my herd’s death, to fracture it into manageable pieces, which I can then assign to more animals. I try to spread their death like cream cheese on a warm bagel: the neck wounds to the possum, the streaked blood to the boxer next door, the tongues, detached and fallen out of their mouths, to me. In these visions, we are all hurt, but we are all still alive. We are all in the pasture together, me, the possum, the skinless rabbit, my entire herd, trotting around: we all sit down in it. It is the dead of night, and we share the painstaking breakdown from something to nothing. 

Munchie, my goat, had sideways-pupils and a long, thick beard. She liked to scratch her back on the entire length of the fence and ate specially medicated peanut-butter cookies every day. Henry, our ram, would often hold court at a tree stump, standing on it like a podium, a small and tender meeting, one with no tasks. Little Sister, only a lamb, my last lamb, would stand for hours at a time, two-feet in front of the biggest tree in the yard, and stare right into it; stare like it had taken her lunch money, stare like it was god himself. 

Eventually, it rains; cold, clean and heavy like an anesthesia mask coming for the face. The water doesn’t hit the blood stains on the barn, but treats the holes in the pasture like calamine lotion. The farm smells of roots, of sorrel and wild mint tea, the air like toothpaste, the few animals left laying in it coolly. The next morning, at 9 am, as I feed them, I say to the world, heartbroken, trusting it, here is my concord-grape heart, hanging low and wet in the light. I say it is still wrapped in skin. 

I say would you like a letter opener. 

I say yes or no.

Katie Culligan is a nonfiction writer whose recent work appears in Nimrod International, Hobart, Ruminate Magazine, Geometry, and others. She lives in Warsaw and teaches second grade. She can be reached at katieculliganwriting.com.

18 August 2021