I think I've always been this way, in my heart. I remember some nights dragging my melancholy self down to the barn just so I could put my arms around Ben, lean into his neck and have him support my weight. He was such a calming presence. He didn't ask me what was wrong, or try to pat me on the shoulder. He was just there, always.
I learned tonight that an old riding friend of mine's mother just passed away from cancer. I remember her as a cheerful woman, so kind, obviously very supportive of her daughter's interest in horses. She never had a problem picking her daughter up from a freezing barn at 7:00 in the evening on a school night. They were very close, and my heart just breaks for her and her family. I wonder if she has any horses in her life now.
It reminds me of another mother. When I was so young, too young, I was in love with a boy who went away to school in California. I was very close with his mother, Maureen. She was a special lady, and I felt comfortable with her from the first minute we met, which is something for me, being the nervous sort. I remember we visited her in the hospital on prom night, clip clopping down the big white hallways in our fancy shoes, with the smell of hospital air all around us. I remember him telling me that he knew she would be all right because she was such a strong lady. I believed him. He left for school, with his mother's blessing.
She rapidly worsened. She died in February of my senior year, only a few months into her son's first year away at school. He returned in time to see her before she went, but I don't think he ever got over the guilt of leaving her. I remember sitting in the back row of the church at her memorial service, and I remember I couldn't stop all the tears that were coming out of my head. I just couldn't stop them. My heart broke for him and came out my eyes. He didn't even know I was there that day.
Shortly after that I lost my faith in horses. I stopped taking lessons, I avoided barns and horse people, and I sought out my comforts in other things. I threw myself into school, my new boyfriend, and my college plans.
I, too, went away--even if it was just the university in town. I lost my beloved childhood cat that year, and my paternal grandmother.
I didn't really find my way back to horses until my sophomore year in college. I started taking lessons again and riding with the IHSA team. I remembered how much I had missed them, their smell, and the weak feeling in my legs after a challenging ride. I purposely formed "anti-relationships" with them. I didn't want to get attached. I came, I rode, I left. I went, I showed, I left.
At the beginning of my senior year, I made perhaps the most foolish purchase of my life.
I bought Ben.
Ben was everything, absolutely everything to me. I boarded him at my childhood stable, and every time I saw him he was more beautiful, more healthy, more vibrant than the day before. I brought him back from the brink, and I think in no small way, he returned the favor.
I loved him recklessly all the days I knew him for the rest of his life. Despite chiropractic work and careful saddle fitting, he had an annoying head flip and a one-leaded canter--but I didn't care. I could throw my saddle on him and we could go anywhere. Along the trail in the warm summer sun I picked one blackberry for him, one for me, one for him, one for me...the summer he returned fully to health is one of my most treasured summers. When I wasn't working to pay his board and feed bills, I spent all the time I could at the barn with him.
He was the healing my soul needed after I lost my cat. He let me love him with all I had, and we understood each other.
I think I understand as well as most people how it hurts to lose someone you love. If I'm sure of anything, it's that we have all lost. I quake to think of losing a parent, as my old riding friend just did--I really don't think about it because I can't bare to. But I have lost grandparents, uncles, friends, cats and my Ben. I understand that deep hurt is the price that life exacts for love.
And it is worth it.
When a good friend of mine was going through a catatonic breakup recently (I tried everything to get her off the couch), I tried to persuade her to come out to the barn with me, to just be in the open air around horses again. She wouldn't. I understand horses aren't therapy for everyone--but they are for me.
And Chev is my only horse baby now. She enjoys a position of privilege, but I'll never allow my heart to be quite as free with her as it was with Ben.
Still, I'll always remember her and how she was on the day of Ben's death.
When I led her over to his body so that she could see he was gone, she ate the spring grass around him, and went over to him with her nose. I worried that she might try to hurt him--an irrational fear!--that she might paw at him and damage him, my boy, gone forever. But she just calmly whuffed him, smelled his face and his mane. She went back to him four or five times, in between mouthfuls of grass. She accepted that he was gone.
And when I saw her, and I stood with the SO, and we looked at her together, I felt like I had lost one of my children. And I knew that somehow she would be my healing from the loss of him. She was living proof that life goes on. I pledged that I would make sure she had everything that he had lacked for in his life before me, that she would never know hunger or ill-treatment or neglect. She gave me a mission.
So I put great stock in the healing powers of horses. She isn't as patient with me as Ben was, but I'm older now. I am wiser now. I understand her as a unique being, one who loves deeply but in a different way.
And I can't help thinking that somehow, no matter what, horses turn out to be just what I need.
2008: Ben at 24; Chev, 3
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