If you live on a farm, or live with dogs, or become a hospice volunteer, or work in assisted care, then you will learn a lot about death, as I have, and hope to continue doing.

I’m not morbid about dying, I don’t dwell on it, but I’m not all that far away from it either, and I don’t want to hide from it or not be prepared.

I have learned that death is often sad, but not only sad and that death is not my enemy, it is, in many ways, my sister and brother, because death is not the end of life, but a part of life.

In my work in recent years, I have come to see death in a completely different way than before, I have come to terms with it in a way, it does not frighten me anymore.

If we can’t face death and understand death,  we are strangers to ourselves, and to the very nature and cycle of life, we are taught to cling to life so desperately. I have lost people I love, of course, as has almost anyone reading this.

Death is our common denominator, our universal and inevitable fate. We all live, we all end. Death is all around me – friends, family, dogs, sheep, bears.

Zelda is an amazing sheep, our oldest, toughest and smartest sheep. She’s jumped over and crawled under many a fence in her time, knocked me over more than all the other sheep combined, challenged Red until her legs got too weak.

She is hanging on, we grain her daily to keep her from getting too thin, but we are thinking that we ought to spare her another rough upstate New York winter. When the weather goes below freezing, we will probably euthanize her, either I will shoot her or we’ll call a large animal vet.

I know how to do this quickly and efficiently, and I suspect many animals are safer with me doing it than a stranger with needles. It would be tough to kill Zelda, but tougher still to see her suffer through another winter. Her teeth are almost completely gone, and she has come close to starving.

She is so thin there is little relief for her from the cold.

Zelda is a proud and independent animal, not much like the other sheep. Now that Red is gone, she deigns to come up and visit with me, perhaps to apologize for knocking me down so many times.

You are forgiven, Zelda, you are an amazing animal and we love you. I will not grieve for Zelda, it is her time, she is preparing to go. She is the last animal in the world that would wish to be kept alive, toothless, cold and unable to chew.