The Internet and social media have changed the way we see and communicate with one another, for good and for bad. All technologies tend to be like that, they are good and bad, they give and they take away. I find that every time one of the animals at Bedlam Farm dies, I end up having a conversation about grieving with tens of thousands of people, maybe more, some of them familiar with me, others complete strangers.
Everyone is entitled to their own idea about grieving I have mine, they have theirs. Very often, they are not the same ideas. The process that is meant to comfort me often reminds me of how different I am. So it is time for that conversation again.
“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable,” writes Brene Brown, “we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.”
In the new world of online communities, there are no boundaries, we struggle to build them. Our words, stories and ideas shoot out into the ether, they can land anywhere. I’ve written several pieces about grieving and I wanted to write about the boundaries of grief, especially in the age where our grief can be quite public, our lives connected to the lives of so many other people. Grieving is a huge topic on places like Facebook, even as our culture treats death as a taboo, people are drawn to it like moths to the flame.
I find grief an important and fascinating subject, people do want to talk about it, they need to talk about it, even if they rarely get the chance. One way or another, we will all find ourselves in grief, whether it be animals or people or dreams, and there is too little talk of it in our market-driven world, where death and grief is a heresy and taboo. It doesn’t sell much or improve anybody’s brand.
There is always a point in the death of one of our animals where the question of boundaries comes up. Boundaries are essential not only to life and mental health, but to anyone who spends any time on Facebook or other social media, boundary-killers all. If I have learned nothing else in life, it is the importance of boundaries, the structure and foundations of healthy relationships. in grief, I very quickly lose track of the boundaries between my grief and the sadness and need of other people. I am always trying to figure it out, I will keep at it.
How should I feel when many people tell me they are weeping for my dog and my donkey many days after I have stopped. What should I think when people tell me they understand how devastated I am, when I am not devastated at all.
Are they grieving for me and Lenore? For Simon? Or for something else. Are they perhaps grieving for themselves and the pain and suffering in their own lives? Or are they crossing a boundary between their loss and mine?
I am not planning on meet Lenore on any bridge, as many people have assured me will happen. My wish for her is to be free to find her own next life, her next chapter, to spread her love and affection to other people, I do not care to think of her waiting for me at any bridge so we can chase balls for all eternity. I wish more for her, and for Simon too.
I smile at the memory of Simon, and his life. He had a great run for a donkey, he was loved, famous, celebrated, visited, cuddled and fed. He had everything a donkey could have, even a swift and painless end.
I do not believe, when any good thing happens, that Lenore is up in the sky waving her magic paw around. Or that Lulu and Fanny are looking for Simon in every photo I take of them. Or that their spirits and forms are visible in the clouds in my pictures. I know they are looking for grass, waiting for it to come up. I do not understand why Jeannie in Alberta is still crying for Simon, two weeks after his death. She knows what I feel, she writes, she cries for her cat every night, and she died eight years ago.
I do not know what she felt for her cat, nor can she possibly know what it meant for me to see poor Simon minutes from death, covered in sores and lice. Her experience is unique to me, mine is unique to me.
She is haunted, she says, by the idea that Lulu or Fanny might have kicked him before he died, and that he suffered. And I am sorry that Geraldine has not slept since Lenore died, I have slept pretty well. I was glad to give Lenore release from the pain that afflicts so many humans, who can not be released from their suffering. We can do this for dogs, even if we cannot spare our fathers and mothers.
I do not see Frieda and Red pining for Lenore, or looking for her, as so many people see on Instagram and Facebook. I see Frieda looking closely at the pantry where the treats are and Red watching the door, to see if he can go work the sheep. They eat as usual, walk as usual, sleep as they always sleep.
I do not miss Simon every time I go to the pasture, nor should you. My pictures are not about what is gone, but what is present. I do not miss Lenore every time I come into the house, although I do think of her quite often when I write. When I think of each of them, I smile and laugh and give thanks for their times with me. When they died, the ground was awash with my tears, and the tears of others, but their time with me will never be a misery but a joy. It was so much more the second than the first.
I cannot wait to do it again, and am grateful for the chance. You can replace animals, you cannot replace people. A woman called today about selling a baby goat. Not now, I said, maybe later.
But I think of Brene Brown’s wise words, it is perhaps time to set boundaries and hold myself and others accountable. I am accountable for writing the words that cause people to grief, I am accountable for moving beyond those words.
I share my grief, I don’t give it away. It is never transferable.
I don’t know where my grief begins and others ends. I do feel that boundaries are often washed away by the tears and reflexes of unhappy people. I can’t control it, but I do not want those tears to be laid at the feet of my animals, or to pour out of the faucet that is my life. This is not what my life with animals is about, it is not about my grief.
Many hundreds, even thousands of people have told me they know what I feel, they lost their mother or their dog, but boundaries teach us that we do not ever know what others feel, we only know what we feel. Grief is not a universal thing, but a personal and individual, I do not presume to know what it in another person’s heart and soul, or that what they feel is what I feel. That is a boundary for me. Public loss is complex, confusing on both ends.
Today, a librarian suggested that I cancel a scheduled talk because she assumed I would be too stricken to give it, and she worried that the news of Simon and Lenore’s death would be too awful for the families in her town to bear. There might, she said, be children present. I was incredulous. Did the people in her town not know that animals die? This morning, a radio interviewer suggested cancelling a long scheduled interview about the Simon book because he assumed I would be too awash in grief to speak.
I told him I was not in a coma, I was up and dressed and would be happy to speak for my book.
These message and concerns do not seem to be about me, they are not my story, or the story of Lenore and Simon. They are other people’s stories and projections, the things other people need to see and want to see. That is where the boundary comes in, it is the distance between them and me. I felt plenty of pain and sorrow in the last two weeks, but no one needs feel sorry for me, I am into my life fully and happily.
“We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates change,” says clinical psychologist Henry Cloud. Grief is painful. It is, in some ways a choice, in other ways not. It is almost always painful. For me, the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing. I learned this from my time as a Quaker, their humanity will always be a part of me.
All of my animals inspire me to move along and live my life, not become mired in the harrowing and one-dimensional way Americans are taught to deal with death, our great cultural taboo. There is another way, many ways. Death is life itself, really, it is my shadow and my partner in my life with animals.
