Heart/broke

Reflecting on mortality in a literal way

It's sort of nutso to think that a month ago, I was obscenely in love and prepared to uproot my life, yet again, for a human person, to forge a little place for myself in an unfamiliar territory for the pure joy of being close to the object of my affection. 

Shit changes fast.

I find myself wondering how, after all the let-downs and bum-outs and disappointments and fucking heartbreak I've weathered up to this point, I allowed myself to be in this position yet again. How time after time, regardless of each renewed proclamation that "I'm fucking OVER IT, I AM DONE, I AM CLOSED FOR BUSINESS" I keep falling for the (seeming) myth that love is an actual thing and not some scam dreamed up by the RomCom-Industrial-Complex to drug us into limerence-addled submission. WHY DOESN'T MY SHIT JUST SCARIFY and CALCIFY and DESSICATE and WITHER and otherwise die? WHY DOES HOPE SPRING ETERNAL, ONLY TO SPRAY ME IN THE EYE WITH ITS ACID?

Rude.

The only other time I actually made any sort of a lifestyle-related sacrifice on this scale was when I moved to Lowell, Vermont to work for Laini, who remains to this day one of the true loves of my life, in a completely asexual but nonetheless bizarrely romantic sort of a way. A lot of the time I wonder why in the fuck I left what was a reasonably comfortable, pretty fun and easy life in order to confront my many demons in a frozen wilderness. 

Turns out love is fucking real and I'm frankly not all that thrilled about it. 

Today I got a text from Laini notifying me that one of her girls, a girl I'd known well, died out of no where. 

"Bloated like I've never seen before. She was my buddy. I am so sad."

This, my friends, in case you forgot, is the heart-demolishing truth about dairy farming. Goats fucking die. They die when you least expect it. Out of no where. Even when you've been raising them for 30 plus years. When you've seen it all and made your adjustments, tried to knit a protective cowl around your soft bits, whittled it all down to an elegant science. They writhe in agony, and you can't do anything to help them, and in spite of yourself and your tough salty battle-scarred exterior, it crushes you. 

Punky was one of the first goats whose names I learned when I started milking at Lazy Lady.  She was one of three goats in Pen 1, which seemed to have an outsized proportion of does with names that referred in some way or other to The Ramones (Dee Dee, Punky, Ramone). Perhaps that is why, aided by her relatively new discovery of text messaging, Laini confided this to me. She knew I'd mourn right along with her. That we'd mourn together, she going through her usual over-scheduled day with an extra heaviness and having momentary jolts of sadness punctuating the following days or weeks. Me imagining her doing all of this from afar, those images dueling with ones of poor Punky in her death throes. And slowly it will recede from us like a tide, and the other goats we love will begin to fill that void.

Just earlier today she and I had been texting about a goat CBF purchased from her who has a bum hoof. I'd sent her a video of the way the doe, Frida, aka she of the weird lopped off ears, was standing on it and she offered her remote diagnosis. 

"Thank you for looking out for her," she'd said. 

As though Frida had been a child she'd been forced to give up for adoption. 

When I saw her on Saturday, we'd been talking about another goat from that batch who'd gotten frostbite on her front legs so bad that they'd fallen off. "We had to put her down. She was the sweetest little thing. The SWEETEST."

Goat farming is a ceaseless parade of horrifying little ruminant-level tragedies. It may sound silly to make these pronouncements when people suffer and die all around us, senselessly, unendingly. But when these animals are your entire world, it cuts deep to lose them. 

It is both touching and terrible to see just how tenderly Laini feels towards her goats, how in her own funny, jokey, prickly tomboy-tough sort of way, she cares for them and how even after so many years, so many goats and so many subsequent goat deaths, she feels this grief when they suffer and die. 

So why does she keep on putting herself through it? 

Why do I? 

Why does anybody? 

When we know that no matter what, people and animals will disappear or die or otherwise shrivel up before our eyes and devastate our guileless little souls? Why do we still open ourselves up, cut through the flimsy mummy gauze we've wrapped around ourselves as protection and let other living creatures see inside our blistered red beating hearts?

Goddamned love. 

RIP Punky.