A dying horse, Bayo Akomolafé and the strange elation of grief
A dying horse, Bayo Akomolafé and the strange elation of grief
A while ago, the very old mare at our farm died. After a day, a night and half a day of her and us fighting, hoping and then losing hope that she will make it, she collapsed. These 24 hours touched my system in curious ways which many of you may know who have been in hospice with another living being. Being with Viola, offering her my presence to communicate what she needed, offering her my presence to address her confusion of what was happening to her physical body, felt like I was guided by something outside of my or Viola’s decisions.
During lunch break we heard the ominous sound of her body having fallen onto the floor. We came running, sitting around her in a circle as she was looking at us, confused and knowing at the same time. We were holding her head as her breathing had gotten really heavy. And then there was a moment in which we all knew that right there, she was leaving us. The vein above her eye still pumping. And then no more.
We all cried. We opened the doors. We put on music. We shared stories of this stubborn, sweet old lady of a horse who must have been way beyond thirty years old when we first took her in our care. She survived amongst the odds of a psychotic pre-owner that let some of his animals starve to death, she mothered an abandoned baby steer, and she always let anyone know until her last hours with her high whinnying that she was here and alive and that she wished to connect.
Just like the process of dying had had its own rhythm, so did the grieving. It came in ebbs and flows, unpredictable, rattling and healing, offering me wide open space to grieve much more than the loss of this horse’s life. I came out of this feeling deeply connected and illuminated. I found that mind bending. Grief, when fully let into the house, just seems to be so deeply seated in our DNA as a wondrous way to digest and transform loss into depth and connection. Chapeau, grief, thank you for doing your thing on me.
Some weeks later, this gratefulness lit up again when listening to Bayako Amalafé talking about the power of stepping profoundly into grief:
„When we grieve it’s not instrumental to anything. It’s an opening, it’s a performance of indeterminacy {…} As a recovering psychologist I was taught to help grieving subjects recover. To probably offer pills or something. To help you get back in the game, to get back into the cycle of productivity, to pull yourself together. And this noticing has manifested in my writing as a need for us to find spaces where we can fall apart which is what I call grieving. I think of grieving as a falling apart. Not as a falling apart in only human terms but as a falling apart that is part of the motions part of the processes that is stitched into the fabric of matter itself.“
Listen to this beautiful Podcast to hear how Bayo envisions spaces for falling apart in our current world:
(minute 32 of the podcast starts about the part on death).
I find grief’s little tentacles trying to catch me more often than I would like. When I read about the latest ppm of CO2, when I see the toads on our road being run over, when I watch a family from Gaza trying to find their day’s worth of food.
I usually try to keep grief at bay, to not bed flooded, to not drown. Viola’s death in early February made me experience the power of grief as deeply transformative and I have a feeling that this power only unfolds when we let it flood, drown and roll through us.
If you would like to see a peaceful picture of Viola when she had just transitioned, you can scroll a bit further down.
