Healing: You've got to play to win

Even my first husband, who suffered from alcoholism to the point of suicide, would have drawn a line between him and the seventeen men and women in my Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit workshop (read the first post on this workshop here). Ron would have said he had nothing in common with them. I heard that same line-drawing from one of the participants, who upon hearing that I was an editor, was eager to share some of his poems with me.

“This isn’t court ordered for me or anything,” the poet said. “I’m here to get clean for my wife and kids.” I hoped that would be enough incentive—I noted he left himself off that list. “And the piece I wrote says I used heroin but I didn’t, I used cocaine. I just thought the rhythm in that line benefitted from the sound of ‘a needle in my vein.’”

This guy was tall with big blue eyes and sun-kissed hair and he followed everything I said with great interest, nodding his head and offering insightful comments about work read by others.

I was thrilled to find two poets among the rehabbers in my "Healing Through Writing" workshop. Emma (left), the social worker who hired me, had told me that some of these people would not be willing participants. Although the workshop was a required component in their treatment, some of them may have no inherent interest in writing. Even she didn't really know what to expect, as the arts component in the program was new, and they'd never had a writing workshop before. She warned me that the participants might be so freshly parted from their addictive substance of choice that they’d be physically unable to sit still and pay attention. Which did happen—at one point, Emma gently chastised a man who, in the middle of the workshop, suddenly snapped open a newspaper and held it before his face as if checking sports scores. Gambling is one of the addictions represented here, Emma had told me.

So I wasn't expecting much. A recovering addict I know, an experienced rehabber, suggested I might expect to reach one person. Then, if I connected with two or three, I’d be pleasantly surprised. But I wasn't without hope: Emma said that this was a motivated group.

Any anxiety I felt was immediately relieved as we dove into the first interactive element‚ filling in the drawing above. It's supposed to be a man, but the rehabbers called it a gingerbread man. My questionable visual arts talents aside, this illustration is an effective tool. The man starts out empty. "What goes inside here?" I asked, and the room bounced to life. As participants called out suggestions, I filled them in. Among other things we added a heart, bones, kidneys, and a stomach. “Vomit,” one of them said—okay, that was a new one. I drew some speckles in the midsection, to their delight.

When they had reached the limit of their biological awareness I said, “How about anger. Is there anger in there?” “Hell yes!” I heard. When I asked where I’d put that, one called out, “All over the place!” We added other emotions and then the title, “The Person With Too Much Inside.”

I moved to the next whiteboard and, as the participants called them out, listed the reasons people might want to write. I've given this workshop in many settings and I’m usually thrilled to get five answers; I’ll fill in the few extra needed to illustrate my talking points. So imagine my joy when this crew came up with 17 reasons—so many I had to go back and squish them in, leading to jokes that I didn’t know how to number correctly. This is what they came up with (excuse the cell phone pic):


They really got into this part of the discussion so we lingered there, talking about all the ways writing can help people. I modified the drawing of "The Person With Too Much Inside" to relive some pressure: the opening in his brain lets inspiration in, the opening through his hand lets his feelings and ideas out. After a break I prompted them to do a writing exercise and to my great surprise, all but one of them shared what they wrote. Some of it was quite good.

Even though the workshop exceeded all expectations, I couldn't help myself: my gaze kept drifting to the one non-participant, a guy with heavy lidded eyes who would alternate between nominally paying attention and checking out. In looks and attitude, of all the people in the room, he reminded me most of Ron. He didn’t call out answers. He stared into space when the others wrote. And during the sharing period, when he finally moved his hand and I looked hopefully in his direction, he was pointing to the person on his left, signaling that I should call on his neighbor rather than him.

When the workshop was over, I saw this guy one last time. As I walked to my car I saw him outside smoking. He was petting Strawberry, the unit's therapy dog, as if the animal were the only being capable of loving him and accepting his love. As our lives diverged I wondered if he was going to make it, because in so many ways, this young man was Ron.

Yet this time there would be no suicide drama. I was free to walk away. And as I did so, I was able to smile at him one last time, and say goodbye.

Healing with the Enemy

The young man reads his hastily scrawled words from a spiral notebook. He has soulful eyes, a short, hard body, and bad teeth. In his story he is high and drunk and stealing and crashing two trucks. While he reads he reaches beneath the table to pet Strawberry, the lab mix therapy dog curled up at his feet.

“I was scared and went to the only safe place I could think of—my grandmother’s house,” he reads. “It was there I was arrested for the theft of two vehicles and DUI and a bunch of other stuff I was too messed up to hear.”

The writing prompt I’d asked him to incorporate into his story: “grandmother’s house.” Is that how you would have used it? Not me.

But this is not my milieu. This young man is now out of prison and doing a stint at the Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit in Potsdam, NY, where yesterday I gave my “Healing Through Writing” workshop. Previously I’ve given this workshop at libraries and writers’ groups and bereavement groups. None of which bandied about words like: Addiction. Prison. Court-ordered rehab. Heroin. Cocaine. Relapse. Escape.

I tried to pretend this was just another workshop. "Healing Through Writing" has always worked its magic before, and I prayed it would do so again. But somewhere deep inside I felt I was crossing enemy lines. For a good eight years after my first husband Ron committed suicide, I’d explain gently to my children (and anyone else who would ask) that Daddy was sick with a disease that had eaten him up from the inside out. I was speaking from my head, through the filter of obtained knowledge. Even my heart wanted to jump on board. But inside my muscles and bones, I held tight to my anger that he would choose alcohol over our children and me. I released that anger, slowly, through my writing.

In any other setting, I would have been afraid of this young man, who told me he writes so that he won’t beat up on people with his fists. Except here in Potsdam workshop, there's a difference: during the break he came up to show me his poetry. It contained sweet, sensitive, insightful musings on life and death—the same kind of stuff I like to write about. I told him his writing moved me. "You have to do something to pass the time in prison," he said, telling me that when he wasn't writing he was reading and re-reading books obtained through the black market.

He told me he writes as if speaking to his best friend, who was killed in a car crash by an erratic driver three years ago. The young man was to pick up his friend that night; instead, he went to get high. This odd fact may have saved his life, and he has some survivor guilt. “But he’s always with me,” the young man said. He shyly rotated his forearm to show me his friend’s name, tattooed on the white vulnerable skin of his forearm.

I asked him if he had hope. Without missing a beat, he said, “Every day. And I’m going to work on my poetry even more when I get to the halfway house.”

Everyone has a story, and if willing to share it, you can find common ground. That’s what I love about these workshops.

I’ll share more about this amazing experience in my next post. For now, I’ll leave you with this:

I just conducted a Google image search for “Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency” to try to find a picture to accompany this post—and while scrolling through the images, on page four, I found the picture of Ron and me “torn asunder” that I created for a previous post. Why would it be there, I wondered—“chemical dependency” wasn’t even a keyword phrase associated with that post. Then, on page five, I found my headshot. When I put the cursor over my face, it said, "Healing Through Writing."

Maybe Google knew something I didn’t. Maybe I was right where I belonged.

From retreat prompt to memorial tribute

While retreating with the above crew at my summer home in Northern NY State in June, I posed a writing prompt I lifted from a post by Kim Pearson, a fellow contributing editor at The Blood-Red Pencil:

Describe a room in your house, perhaps the room you are sitting in now. Describe everything and anything in it – without using any adjectives or adverbs that imply opinion (such as pretty, or dirty, or jarring, or too anything). Use only words that cannot be disputed.

Since it was a beautiful day, I suggested my retreaters might also choose an outside space. Yet when we began writing, no one moved from the room we were in. So I went outside and sat in an Adirondack chair to serve as a role model. The first thing I saw was "Mahn-Go-Taysee," the canoe pictured above. I started writing from this prompt through a filter of loss; my father. who died at the end of April, had loved this canoe. With a little adaptation my writing became the piece below, which I read last Saturday at his memorial service.

[Note: When trying to get your writing life back to normal after suffering such a loss, I recommend you refrain from posting a picture of your father looking youthful and handsome on your blog. It's been very hard for me to add something that would push him from the "front page," scrolling him into my past. I'll do so gently, by sharing here my tribute.]

* * *

Mahn-Go-Taysee

The overturned canoe graces the lakeshore as it has every year, vivid yellow against green growing grass. This year fore and aft seem more neck and tail, curving over sawhorses in a reverent bow. Above it, in the pines, birds twitter strange syllables as if calling its name: “Mahn-go-taysee.” If they could tell the story of that name, I’d love to hear it.

The name was from Uncle Bob’s Hiawatha period. Translated, the Ojibway means “loon-hearted brave.” I never heard anyone venture a guess as to what that meant, exactly. Perhaps Dad approved simply because of the name’s reference to the majestic bird that returns to the lake with its mate every summer to raise its young, just as he did.

I think of this as I place my palm on the canoe’s back. Its warmth surprises me. I almost expect a heartbeat, as if it has absorbed and reflected the life around it. My fingers skim blemishes formed by hardened sap, and stuttering scars left by generations of children navigating submerged rocks discovered too late.

It seems like only yesterday this canoe wintered over in the basement of our Maryland home, its ribs exposed, although in truth it has been some forty years. Dad had asked that we each take short shifts with the sanding; with seven in the family it would be done in a jiffy. But my memory is of my father’s hands on the sanding block, swish-a-swish-a-swish, raising dust into the air that tasted sweet on my tongue. I watched him from a perch on the basement steps. At fourteen I knew nothing of endurance, and tired too quickly to be of much use. But I sensed the importance of the project, and of witnessing it.

I run my fingers over the letters. With a sure hand and the flourish of the artisan, Dad had painted them so bold and thick that even the blind might read them with the hands: Mahn-go-taysee. Was being loon-hearted anything like being “crazy as a loon”? I suppose that phrase refers to the bird’s giggle-laugh that, like the cries of a child relentlessly tickled, is actually a sign of distress. What if being loon-hearted is to be crazed with love to the point of foolishness?

Perhaps it was foolish of my father to spend so much time preserving this old boat, with so many other low-maintenance, hi-tech materials becoming available. Yes, it sliced through the water leaving only its thin wake in evidence, but it was tippy. Dad taught us to paddle in this canoe, as soundlessly as an Indian whose very life depended on stealth. To abandon our mother’s hand-caned seats and kneel in the center if paddling solo while caught in a stiff wind. He taught my sisters and I how to switch places, one crawling through the straddled legs of the other. Balance and harmony were paramount; a canoe was no place for squabbles. And within the confines of this vessel we kept the peace well—as far as I know, it did not once overturn.

I can still see my father in the basement, working night after night within the glow of his worklamp, as alone as the loon can sound with its haunted, hollow call. The restoration would end up taking ten years. Maybe to be loon-hearted means to carry on despite what one knows of abandonment and lone effort. Yet in the end our ever-buoyant father painted the canoe the color of sunshine, building the brilliance coat after coat.

My hand skims the chipped keel. I was married by the time I helped fashion this finishing touch, to Dad’s specifications, from a hard-to-find length of oak with no knots. It is rough now from running the boat onto the sandy shore, time and again, like Mom told us not to. In ways both constructive and destructive, this craft was a family work of art.

The breeze bends long grasses and pushes ripples against the shore but the canoe continues its vigil with the patience of an elder. No one is immune to the ravages of age, not even Mahn-go-taysee. Upon the completion of her restoration in 1985 my dad wrote, “My modest assessment is that it is absolutely gorgeous!” Now deepening cracks cause mildew-edged canvas to peel from her gunwales—but inside, bathed in the spirit of the loon-hearted brave who revived her, resilient ribs have clung to both strength and beauty.

A motor starts, a dog barks in the distance. Beside Mahn-go-taysee, I watch as out on the lake a child or perhaps a renter flails oars, sending a rowboat into a spasmodic circle. I smile; they too will learn. I pat the canoe, soon to earn temporary respite from such training sessions.

One day we will restore her. Even Trout Lakers who’ve traded in double-seater outhouses for indoor plumbing understand the importance of clinging to some aspects of bygone eras. And I am one of Jack Graham’s children: if what stands between one of us and something we find meaningful is simply the acquisition of new skills, the scraping together of elusive funds, and monumental effort over an indeterminate stretch of time, why not go for it?

But before sending her to her well-earned rest, unable to resist the way she is stretched before me, soaking up the sun and the view as my father himself so loved to do, I slip my arms around Mahn-go-taysee and lay my cheek one last time against what warmth remains on her flawed, beloved surface.

My new, smaller family

Men watching

Okay ladies, truth time: if you saw this handsome dude in the mall you'd look twice, wouldn't you?

I'm lucky. I was watching him my whole life.

This is my father, before I ever knew him. He passed away on April 27 and I haven't posted since then. Even dedicated writers experience seasons: a time to record their lives, and a time to set down their pens and immerse themselves so fully that they might live something worth writing about.

I could have written sooner of the shock when I got to the hospital and heard my mother, so small in the waiting room, say, “He didn’t make it.” I could have written of the panic urging me to connect with the only sister within striking distance—“Can you leave work? Come to the ER right now”—so she might witness with us the cooling evidence of this loss. I could have written of the way the chaplain tugged at the wedding band ensconced on my dad's hand ever since my mother placed it there sixty years ago, and the way that struggle left my dad’s fourth finger lying unnaturally straight, never to curve again alongside his others.

But these are observations, and since what I seek on this blog is perspective, I had to wait until I gained some. And this is what I keep coming back to: the differences between my first husband and my father.

I’ve written about Ron a lot on this blog, because for fifteen years I watched him as well. In choosing death, he taught me a lot about life. Because he was fourteen years older than I, one could posit that I sought in my first husband a father substitute, and one might be right [I totally wrote that sentence in my Dad’s voice]. Ron was the hugger my father wasn’t, giving freely the affection I sought to earn from my father. But both men were aloof, and unpracticed in sharing their inner emotional lives. What I learned from them both I learned by processing my observations.

But unlike my father, Ron was overwhelmed by life’s challenges and possibilities, and he committed suicide at just about the same age my dad was when he faced off against the first of many life-threatening illnesses: cancer, encapsulated on a kidney he would lose. He didn’t need it—spirit would fill in what the body couldn’t provide. My dad would continue to fight for his life for the next thirty years, pummeling into remission two more kinds of cancer. During those years he would have and enjoy all of his eight grandchildren.

By the time his first grandson was born—my son Jackson—my father was already well into a string of heart attacks that would lead to angioplasties and stents and quintuple bypass surgery. So worried was I for his life that when Jackson and I left the hospital in 1987 we went straight to another: Ron drove us from our room downtown to my dad's in another section of the city. I wanted to show Dad his first grandson...just in case.

My dad would live beyond Jackson’s college graduation because time and again he reached death's threshold and bounced off. When my mom called that last morning of my father's life to say he’d had a massive heart attack and that the ambulance had just left, I didn’t know what to expect. I grabbed the living will and power of attorney, dutifully, but also his med list. How many times had I driven the hour to get there to find him holding court in the emergency room, greeting my arrival with a hearty, “Well hello, Kathryn. What are you doing here?” On that final drive, until I would observe for the last time his silent, unmoving face, I held all possibilities aloft.

These past few years my dad was frustrated by dementia and a tremor that kept him from two of his great loves, reading and painting. Yet still his body continued to carry him proficiently through all his daily tasks, and he accepted the challenge of finding what pleasure he could in life, much of which involved the treasured company of my mother. When his heart seized this time the end was astoundingly complete. He lived to be 86, beyond any doctor's expectations, and there is some small measure of relief in the fact that this brilliant, creative man did not have to suffer any further the ravages and indignities of dementia.

Ron’s death at age 54 was also sudden and complete, and offered some measure of relief in a household that had weathered the storm of his psychological torment. We hope he rests with a peace he never knew in life. But the torment that was his continued for those he left behind.

My dad, on the other hand, left behind a precious gift: peace. All things must come to an end, we know this, and that includes the life of Jack Graham, fighter pilot, industrial designer, corporate executive, weekend carpenter, artist, writer, devoted husband, father, and grandfather. It was clearly his time to go, and we can rest in this knowledge. Because if it were within his power to stay, he’d be calling to me now from the porch of our camp: “Kathryn, is there any more maple cream?”

I licked it from my fingers this morning, Dad, thinking of you. May the toast in heaven be slathered with it.

Facing Mortality: A challenge

Lately, in addition to writing about my past, I’ve been losing weight and getting fit—in many ways, attempting to turn back the clock. Beyond living life to the fullest, I haven’t spent a whole lot of energy preparing for my own death. And why should I? I’m a busy lady. With so many other people expecting things of me, and me expecting so much from myself, how can I work something like that into my schedule? I mean, come on—like many writers, I don’t do anything unless it comes with a deadline.

Oops. I guess when it comes to preparing for death we all have a deadline. We just don’t know when it is.

You might think I’d be the last person to be caught without the proper documentation when I reach the pearly gates. After all, I’m a writer—how hard can it be to slap together a last will and testament when there are templates to work from? Furthermore, I’m assisting aging parents as they deal with dementia, and have already reaped the benefits of the attention they paid to their advance directives and powers of attorney. My husband’s mother even planned her own funeral, and told Dave she wanted balloons at the party afterward; at his time of grief all he had to do was decide the order in which to sing her chosen hymns.

I should have learned this lesson after my first husband’s suicide.

For reasons that seemed practical at the time, Ron never added my name to the farmhouse he already owned when we married. We were just starting out our happy lives together; who was thinking about what might happen if Ron died?

I found out what happened—as concerns the farmhouse, there was no clear right of succession. You might think property would go to the spouse; after all, I’d cared for it and renovated it and called the place “home” for fifteen years, and raised my children there. The State of Pennsylvania had other thoughts. According to a pre-set formula, the boys and I inherited jointly—and because of that, I entered into a business relationship with my eight- and ten-year-old sons.

Ron dying without a will or power of attorney also meant that after his suicide—at a time when I was in deeper shock than at any other time in my life, and my kids needed me more than ever, and I had, literally and figuratively, a huge mess to clean up—I also had to go to the courthouse and get administratrix papers just so I could close our joint bank account or sell our jointly owned cars.

I did move forward with a will in those first years after Ron’s death, but in a test of resolve that I failed, when I went to sign it, the lawyer’s computer had crashed and she’d lost it. I could not scrape together the energy to do it again…and now it’s more than a decade later.

So it was with great interest I attended a recent series of programs at my church on preparing for the end of life. It was quite well attended—I wasn’t the only one who had put this issue off, and it seemed we all needed to hear the message one more time.

Yesterday, with both sons sitting around the table after Easter dinner, we talked about my will, how I planned to handle things, and what their wishes might be as concerns a few business details. I’m finally going to tend to this.

I have no more time or disposable income than I have had any other week in the past ten years, but I’m going to do this because that church series reminded me of something I’d already known: such preparations are both responsible and a huge gift. Acting on this knowledge is long overdue. I love my children, and should I predecease them, I want my passing to be a time of reflection and remembered joy and allowable grieving, unsullied by legal hassle. And should I linger, I want them to be clear on what I believe is a viable living state so they can make decisions not associated with inner turmoil.

I can help them with that, and I will. My appointment is at 10 a.m., May 2. How about you: are you prepared for your own demise?

The Thing You Can't Do

Last week I wrote about Ron burying one of our goats, something he had to do although I’m sure he never wanted to. Ron loved a challenge—as long as it was related to the carpentry trade. To renovate our farmhouse, he learned wiring and stone pointing and all sorts of framing, drywall, flooring, and finishing techniques.

In other words, he loved to acquire anything he could hang from his tool belt. He shied away, though, from challenges that would stretch him from the inside out. Instead of staying as his father lay dying in the hospital, he offered to take his mother home—a move he regretted so much he mentioned it in his suicide note five years later. I was the one who stayed with Lloyd that last, long night. I’d never seen anyone die before, either—but I didn’t think he should do it alone.

Due to my need to commit Ron to psychiatric treatment against his will, and his subsequent suicide standoff, Ron continued to give me ample opportunities to do things I thought I couldn’t. It seems odd to call them “opportunities,” but in the long view, that’s what they were: each impossible challenge I met made me a larger, stronger person.

It wasn’t a lesson I sought to learn from him, but Ron taught me that sometimes you’ve got to do that thing you think you can’t.

Here are a few of the challenges I faced after Ron’s death, which I write about in my memoir:

1. I had to contest a lawyer’s invoice when, unbeknownst to me, divorce services originally valued at $3,000 had transitioned, upon Ron’s death, into a $15,000 estate case (I had no experience with lawyers; until then I had only ever bartered for the purchase of a Christmas tree).

2. I had to tell my eight- and ten-year-old sons that their father had killed himself.

3. I had to scrape pieces of my husband’s brain off the wall of his woodworking shop, where the Hazmat team missed them.

4. After six months, I finally found a service that could clean up after mace—the police who shot it into Ron's shop, to try to get him to come out during the standoff, had no clue how to help me.

5. I sold my husband’s guns (I knew nothing of guns, was scared to touch them, and felt faint standing in the gun shop).

6. I took a weekend after Christmas, waiting on one toll-free number after another, to cancel 29 active credit cards I didn't know about (I’ve refused every offer of new credit since, no matter what the enticement).

7. Dealt with #s 1–6 above, and more, while teaching my sons—who should never have had to witness any of this—that hope is always possible to find.

8. Watched as a vet euthanized my dear dog Max, because he too suffered from the suicide standoff, and while life left his body I was determined that my loving eyes would be the last thing he’d see—then brought him home and buried him on the farm.

9. Stayed on the farm to raise my children, facing down again and again and again what happened there.

10. Through all of this, held tight enough to my belief in the possibility of a healthy, enduring love that I was able to marry again.

I've learned that all sorts of things are possible. I remember once thinking that I’d never be able to swim a half-mile—then I swam two.

I, like my husband Dave, am afraid of heights—yet we climbed the Beehive at Acadia National Park in Maine (pictured above).

I thought I'd never travel abroad then Dave and I accompanied the boys on their school choir trip to Italy and watched them sing in the Vatican.

I recently thought I’d never be able to lose weight at my age—then, with hard work, lost 15 lbs.

I didn't think I could face caring for my parents, who suffer from dementia—but I am.

I once thought I’d never amass enough words or ideas to fill a book, but the memoir I’m writing is my third. Can I get any of them published? It's harder than ever for a first-time author to break into print and yet... Who knows what other feats I’m capable of?

I've decided there’s never shame in falling short of a goal. Because if you don’t try, you’ll never know. The trying, in and of itself, can add value to your life.

What have you done, that you thought you’d never be able to do?

One hot April day

While it always feels like an anomaly, it’s not that unusual for Pennsylvania to experience a “heat snap” in April that shoots temperatures into the 80s. Since April weather is more likely in the mid-50s, the spike creates an event remarkable enough that we can tie a memory to it. One of mine has to do with the death of Jeremiah in 1989.

Jeremiah (above, background) was an Alpine goat, and quite smart. When we went to meet him, the breeder looked up into his herd and called “Jeremiah!” The goats were spread across a wooded hillside—Alicia, Bettina, Carlotta…all of their names ended in an “ah” sound—but only one perked up his head and trotted down the hill. This farmer sold milk, yogurt and cheese products, so kept only a few intact males for breeding purposes; other young neutered males he sold to butchers. But when a special goat like Jeremiah came along, the farmer would try to find a good home.

We already owned one goat, a baby Nubian named Clementine (above, foreground) that I’d bought Ron as a Valentine (yes, the card I wrote rhymed). When she went off her feed and wouldn’t even accept the bottle of mother’s milk we’d retrieved, we quickly learned that goats are herd animals and need socialization to thrive. That led us to bring home “Uncle” Jeremiah—in the back seat of my Chevy Nova.

Clementine’s interest in food revived. They were so cute together. At first Jeremiah was twice her height, and she would run back and forth underneath his belly.

Lives come to an end, though, and years later Jeremiah died one morning of what we believed to be bone cancer. One April morning, with that day’s temperatures suddenly expected to climb past 80.

My participation was off the table—I was six months pregnant with Marty, and had toddler Jackson to care for. Burying the goat would fall to Ron and my brother Scott.

I’d already buried enough cats in that rocky soil to know what they faced; it would take hours to make a small hole three feet deep. They had to go six feet deep and a whole lot wider. It was a Sunday, so hiring someone with machinery wasn’t possible. With the heat climbing, they had no choice but to get started.

They left Jeremiah in the relative cool of the barn as they dug. I brought water out to them by the gallon as their bodies, unused to laboring in such temperatures, struggled to adapt. Scott was young, and a fitness nut to boot, but I wasn’t sure how 46-year-old Ron would hold up. As home renovators we were used to some manual labor, but nothing this heavy. He engaged in no regular exercise, and he smoked.

More importantly, he was emotionally under-equipped: Ron showed his love for his animals by fawning over them with hugs and kisses. He didn't do the tough stuff. I typically handled their medical care and end-of-life determinations. I’m sure the water running down his face was as much tears as sweat.

By mid-afternoon they’d had it. Ron and Scott deemed the hole ready and went to retrieve the body. Removing it from the stall, which required a few tight turns, was a trick in itself because by that time rigor mortis had set in. There was no way Ron could hold his breath and avert his eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening.

At long last they got the body out to the hole and laid Jeremiah within it.

At least, they tried.

Jeremiah’s rigid legs wouldn’t fit down into the hole. Scott was quick and decisive. “I’m not digging any more.”

“But—?”

“Turn around if you can’t watch.”

Seeing no other choice, Ron turned away while one at a time Scott dropkicked his work boots through the goat’s legs, breaking each until the goat dropped into the hole. Once Scott had covered the body with enough soil to cover the evidence of his act, Ron joined in and completed the burial.

Life on the farm offered up many opportunities to stretch ourselves in unexpected ways—more about that in the next post. Now that I live in Doylestown, though, when the temps hit the 80s yesterday, Dave and I had a bit more fun.

We walked up into town, as may others did, and got an ice cream cone.

Last night though, I watched 127 Hours through On Demand while Dave was at a meeting (if you've seen the movie you'll know the parallel to Jeremiah's burial right away). I may have moved on, but I will not forget.

Do you have any memories tied to a hot day in April?