Death of a Neighbor

When death arrives in the country, the signs go up at the roadside — “Slow: Death in Family” on the front, funeral home name on the back, in case passersby want to send flowers or attend the funeral, or have an ailing relative who might soon need services of his own.

Sometimes we know a neighbor has passed away because of the large number of cars and trucks gathered in the driveway and people congregated on the porch and in the yard, dressed in their Sunday best.

Or, the phone rings and a neighbor who seldom calls lets us know another neighbor is in the hospital or has died.

Or there is new mound of dirt at the Cedar Fork Baptist cemetery.

Or there’s an obituary in the local paper.

This culture likes to think it’s more connected, “wired” in to the world. The reality is that the technology of the day distances us from what matters. That separation has been coming for a century or more, as village life and the interconnectedness of communities have unraveled.

It’s a process accelerated by the arrival of the automobile. A highly impersonal mode of transportation, cheap, motorized travel allowed us to drive away from our community obligations and connections. And now, today’s digital world is putting an end to the daily arrival of the community newspaper, a place where people could peruse the high school football scores, learn who was arrested for drunk driving, read the tedious notes from the county commission, and find out who died.

Our subscription to the local paper lapsed many years ago. Of course, we could still go online to read. That ritual, however, is not the same as sitting down and digesting the local paper over coffee. And for many complex reasons, our new online rituals seldom inform as to the kith part of “kith and kin.” We instead are more current on what Kaitlyn Jenner is wearing or the latest cute cat picture on Facebook.

With the collapse of face-to-face community and the readership of the local paper, so too collapses our local knowledge of the people sharing our surroundings. Sometimes the “Slow: Death in Family” signs don’t go up and we discover the loss weeks or months later, leaving the deceased’s family to wonder why no one grieved with them or offered condolences.

A horrible accident a mile away from our home this week brought home that tragic point. Two cars collided. Three people were airlifted to a hospital and one to the morgue. While speaking with one neighbor about the tragedy, Cindy heard of the sudden passing of another neighbor’s daughter a month ago.

No signs, no gathering of cars, no call, and no dirt in the local cemetery alerted us — a neighbor who lives directly across from our farm allowed to grieve thinking his neighbor callous or indifferent. True, we were not close, but that would not preclude the courtesy of a condolence.

Odd that, as the world gets smaller, our neighbors get further away.

Life and death in a rearview mirror

St. Patrick’s Day 2012 and our guests were arriving in the next hour for an annual dinner of corned pork. We corn a pork shoulder and cook it with cabbage and potatoes from the garden and larder. Invited friends come out, less for any shared heritage and more for a convivial evening of good food, drink, and conversation.

While final preparation moved forward, one of the yearling Katahdin ewes had been trying to lamb. She had been walking around in the pasture showing all the usual signs, and those signs eventually included a very large head protruding from her back end. We left her alone hoping she would get on with the job. Half an hour later, with no signs of progress, we moved her into a lambing pen in the barn.

We were both dressed for the get-together, not fancy duds, but nevertheless cleaned up with fresh clothes. Another half-hour went by and the ewe had made no further progress. We decided it was time to intervene. As I held the ewe, Cindy put her hand in the birth canal and extracted the forelegs. The head protruding showed no sign of life, and it looked grotesquely swollen. Applying pressure in sync with the ewe’s contractions, Cindy gradually pulled the lifeless lamb out. She then began swinging it by all four legs, then handed it to me to continue the exercise.

I grasped the slippery legs and swung, without any conviction that there would be any life in the limp body. But after a few minutes I saw the lamb begin to breathe. Cindy had meanwhile cleaned up the mother and filled up a fresh water pail. The lamb was a striking golden red and huge, at least 10 pounds. She looked exactly like a Hereford calf.

We emerged from the barn spattered with gore to find our guests beginning to pull up in their cars and trucks. We welcomed them, went back out to show them the mother and baby. The lamb was already on its feet nursing and seemed no worse for the long afternoon.

The vivid memory came back in detail this week as I drove my truck to the slaughterhouse. That golden red lamb, now grown with two lambings of her own, had reached the end of her time on our farm. We had decided to cull her. Her mother, as a Katahdin, is a hair breed, but her father was a woolly red Tunis. The cross resulted in a lamb with a thick red wool coat. We do not have any interest in wool or the time or equipment to shear those with wool coats. So, as this past season progressed, we culled all of the crosses.

It struck me how unusual the experience: to be both the giver of life and the deliverer to the executioner. This young ewe was a beautiful creature, noble even, as I viewed her standing in the truck bed in the rearview mirror.

A rearview mirror seemed an appropriate method for considering my role in her life and death: It conveys a vanishing landscape that with a few more turns of the road or an averted gaze recedes and disappears. It is an act of removal.

I pulled up at Morgan’s, turned over the ewe to the care of the man who would kill and butcher her. After concluding my business in the front office, I pulled back onto the highway. A last look in the mirror and nothing remained but the memory and a new view.

 

A Pig Called Snowflake

We knew the time was near, even though we didn’t know the date. Early Monday morning I turned out to do the chores while Cindy headed off to work. I started with the feeder pigs behind the equipment shed, then the chickens and finally off to see Snowflake. Her farrowing date was at hand. She had lost her entire litter the summer before. Was it to do with the heat or some other factor we had not determined? Ultimately we decided to give her another chance.
 
She had been showing a heavy belly for the past few weeks. But her appetite remained healthy. Sometime on Saturday she began gathering sticks and bringing them into her shelter to create an uncomfortable-looking nest. I removed the sticks and brought her more straw bedding, taking the time, as always, to pat her and chat for a few moments.
 
Strolling down into the woods, calling her name, I knew it had begun. No answering snorts to my call, her 350-plus-pound bulk nestled in the hay. I opened the gate. As I approached, Snowflake was on her side groaning, in heavy labor. One small and very active piglet dashed around her. I knelt down to examine her. No distress, so I rearranged the hay and went back to the house to work.
 
I checked on her every hour. By eleven o’clock in the morning, no additional piglets had been born. A hasty call to Cindy and we both agreed to call the vet. As bad luck would have it our vet was at a rodeo in Oklahoma City. He called back on his cell phone and gave me the number of several vets in the area: I left a message with all.
 
A vet in Riceville, 30 miles away, called me back. Typical of a Monday morning, he was covered up in emergency calls. He advised me to put my hand up her birth canal and check to see if there was a piglet blocking the path. If that was the case, I was to remove it and let her get on with the farrowing. He was concerned that she might not have the energy to deliver the rest of the piglets and gave me instructions that included feeding dog food, peanut butter and tums tablets (for calcium). Additionally, I was to give her a shot of oxytocin to induce contractions if she did not deliver another piglet.

OK, I’ve seen All Creatures Great and Small, so how difficult could this be? With some trepidation, I gathered up the Vaseline, scrubbed my arm and went back out to the paddock. Snowflake had meanwhile shifted her body so her butt end was against the back wall. I slathered on the Vaseline and inserted first my fingers then my hand up to the forearm. I could feel the piglet blocking the birth canal, head back. Snowflake howled with pain. After a few fruitless minutes I extracted my hand.
 
Back in the house I called Cindy and asked her to come on home. Before agreeing, she said, “I thought you had watched all of those James Herriot TV shows!” I went back out to put my TV vet knowledge into practice. This time I pushed all the way to my elbow. I pushed with the tips of my fingers on the small body blocking the cervical opening to the birth canal. After a few minutes I was able to snag a leg and begin the process of pulling the piglet out. It was dead, as expected. I left Snowflake in hopes that she would get on with the job.
 
Meanwhile Cindy arrived home and I brought her up to speed. We checked on Snowflake and found that no more piglets had arrived. Cindy called our dog vet to see if we could get a shot of oxytocin to induce contractions. The officious gatekeeper at the counter told her, “WE DON’T TREAT PIGS!” “We are not asking you to treat pigs—we are asking for a shot of oxytocin.” “Miss, we can’t hand out injectable drugs to the public.” Cindy: “This pig could die”. The gatekeeper: “Your human doctor wouldn’t give out drugs over the phone.” Cindy hung up.
 
Calling another vet clinic, she explained the circumstance again. This time, they immediately said that they would have the injection at the counter waiting. I headed out for Crossville, an hour away, to meet two customers picking up our beef at the processor. Cindy headed half an hour the opposite direction to the vet.
 
Returning home two hours later, I found her in the house. She had given the injection and contractions began, but still no delivery. She had to repeat the Vaseline procedure and hand remove all of the piglets. Snowflake ended up delivering four more, each one dead.
 
Here we were again. A sow on her second chance with what we, and our farm vet, felt was some congenital defect preventing a successful farrowing. What do we do?
 
I left on Tuesday morning for a work trip, the one remaining piglet doing ok—but, Snowflake not moving or eating. Upon my return Wednesday evening, the lone piglet had died. Now we were faced with the decision: We can’t sell her for breeding stock. We can’t keep her as a pet. We can’t afford to give her a second chance. And, we don’t have a customer for the meat. We made our decision.
 
Thursday morning, after Cindy left for work, I went to see our sow and brought my Winchester 30/30. She was in her hut. I knelt down and talked to her while I stroked her massive head. Standing up quickly, I raised the rifle and fired one shot aimed directly between her eyes. She died instantly.
 
Livestock serves a real purpose of providing protein in a convenient package. I am comfortable with the choice of being an omnivore. And, I’m equally comfortable with the decision to put her down. Still, she was a beautiful pig called Snowflake.

This Farm Note from the archives was written in April 2011. This is before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived Notes.

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Reading this weekend: An Island in Time: the biography of a village by Geert Mak. A well written work examining the decline of a specific village in the Netherlands; and the larger decline of village life globally.

Robbie

Robbie, our six-year old English Shepherd, was put to sleep yesterday. I picked him from the veterinarian’s office packed in a box and drove home. I started digging a grave in the middle of the garden. Cindy came out and got a spade and joined in the work. In very little time we dug down three feet a tidy rectangle.

Cindy went back to the house. I opened up the box and took Robbie out, such a beautiful dog even in death. For a working breed he had lovely quiet disposition, sometimes too quiet and easy going for his job as farm dog.

He was the classic “lover not a fighter.” The exception was with Becky or a strange dog; from time to time they would without warning tear into each other. Just last Sunday as we walked in the woods, Becky and Robbie sparred for a full ten minutes, leaving each other bruised, bloodied and ready for more.

On Tuesday morning well before dawn, we let Robbie and Tip out of the mud room; Becky stays out all night. By the time we had coffee and Cindy left for work, Robbie had traveled the quarter-mile to the road, been hit by a car, walked up the drive twenty yards and collapsed in shock.

Cindy spotted him curled up in the grass at the side of the driveway and rushed back to get me. Using a blanket, we wrapped him up and put him in my truck and took off to the vet. Not Robbie’s first rodeo: a fractured tibia from catching his leg between metal slats jumping off a hay wagon, a severed artery of unknown cause.

The x-rays showed a smashed pelvis and hemorrhaging in the chest cavity. Two nights and three days in the hospital and he came home. The internal bleeding had stopped, but they couldn’t do anything with the pelvis. Cindy took Robbie to a vet on Friday that specializes in surgery on dogs. They did more x-rays. This time they discovered that the pelvis was worse than originally thought, but they could fix it for around $3000. No guarantees, but a reasonable prognosis with a long recovery. Surgery was scheduled immediately. First, though, bloodwork in response to Cindy’s observation of urinary incontinence. The vet discovered that Robbie’s bladder had ruptured. Repairable, with more surgery. In the blink of an eye, we were now looking at vet bills totaling $5000. A decision had to be made immediately.

What is the value of a loving and loyal pet? Do we love our pets more or less when we make decisions based on cost? There is no easy or correct answer. Cindy, who was back at work, would probably have opted for the surgery. In a hurried, emotional phone discussion, I suggested it was time to let our much loved Robbie go. We made the choice, and I called the vet and asked them to put him to sleep.

He was still warm when I pulled him out of the box. I held him for a few minutes before laying him on the dirt. Shoveling dirt, gently at first until covered and then faster, until the grave was filled and mounded over the top. Cindy went out later and spent time at the gravesite.

He now belongs to the future as much as the past.