Our chickens, they were four and then they were three

Yesterday, Sam (the brother of Kirk who is renting our cabin), came to visit. He is dog sitting for Pamela, and he brought her large husky. Knowing that the chickens were loose, he left her in the car. But, the window was open too much and the dog got out and gave chase. We ran and ran, yelling, trying to stop the dog, but she killed Little Gertrude. It was quite sad. Liana handled it well, but seemed to think it might get better and wanted to see it again after it was gone. 

A few hours later, talking about how upsetting it was to not be able to stop the dog, Tony said the saddest thing he has said in a while: "They were a family of four. Now they are three."

That strung a cord. It was just a chicken, but it was a sad afternoon. 

Later that night, Kirk brought us a new hen about the same age, but it is still quite sad. 

And this is only a week after Trilly (Jaal and Melinda's puppy) died. I think Liana finally understands about Trilly after seeing the chicken. 

And, I was just checking in on the news and heard about the church shooting in the U.S, and saw photos of all those innocent people that were killed for racist reasons. 

I think about their families, parents and children - the survivors and how hard it must be and how hard it will still be in five years. 

I was about to sit down and continue to do some writing for my Lev blog, thinking about the five year mark, when a friend sent this poem that somehow seemed fitting, with the hen and death and all. 

This is not in the normal tone of the Monteverde blog, which is comprised mostly of darling photos of Liana, and perhaps should be sent to the "missing Lev" blog, but she is at camp this morning, and while I have been enjoying time to myself, our life here isn't all idyllic. Sometimes dogs come and kill a chicken. Sometimes we get stung by mysterious annoying things. And, sometimes we realize that no matter where we go, there we are. Here we are, once again with four chickens. Our family that was four for a long time, and then three for a couple years, and then four once again, with a hole in our open hearts. 

Lead
by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

It is interesting to me, how the deaths of animals can hit us so hard, whether it is a chicken or a dog. It is awful in the moment but it passes fast, giving us a glimpse of grief. 

That glimpse is short but strong. 

I was reading a book last night, The Tiger's Wife, and it had a powerful paragraph that I will share below. The father, who is a doctor, is talking to his daughter who is in medical school. She told him she wanted to go into pediatric surgery as a specialty. 

He sat up, pushed his chair away from the table and rubbed his knees. "When men die, they die in fear," he said. "They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living- in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand - but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on your own. Do you understand?"

 Lev, as a teenager was not a man, nor a child, but somewhere in between. And, I don't know how aware he was of what was happening to his body that night, as he never awakened, but he did at one point in seizure grab my hand and leave it bruised. I remember missing the bruise when it went away a week later, knowing already the pain of losing the connection.