The weight of entanglement

And also the gift of it.

Hello all,

This past week has been heavy. Something happened, and while the event itself only lasted a couple of days, it’s lingered somehow. It is, in a way, still happening.

All traces have been cleared away, but the air has changed somehow. When I go to work or to meet friends, I can put it all aside as if it doesn’t matter much. But once I return home, it descends upon me again. Like a weight. As I turn onto our local unpaved road, there’s a noticeable shift in my breathing, a sense of gasping honestly.

I had a good, long cry one night, but it didn’t help all that much. There is more to be released. More to process. And the only way I know to do either is by writing. So here it goes. A story I wish I wasn’t writing. A story I don’t like the ending to. A story that waits to be told anyhow, and if not understood, at least integrated.

Take care of yourself and each other out there.

---

thursday, 5 sep

Standing under the shade of a hazel tree while Rio, my 16-month old, sleeps. There’s a strong smell. Not an unpleasant one per se. It’s creaturely. I’m close to the sheep pasture now. Black pellets cover the ground.

I move into the shadow of the next hazel tree and realize, this is where she gave birth. The black sheep had twins early this morning. Right on this ground. Here’s all the amniotic fluids and pieces of the sacs drying in the grass. Suddenly I feel as if I’m treading on sacred soil. I back away in reverence. 

That’s the reason I’m headed down to the sheep pasture. To check on her and her lambs. I saw the rest of the flock in the forest, but the mama sheep got left behind. Maybe her newborn lambs can’t walk that far yet. I wonder if she’s hungry. Or thirsty. Has she been able to eat or drink anything?

As soon as Rio wakes, I’ll try to find her.

“In a graveyard” by Rufus Wainwright begins to play in my ears. I haven’t heard this song in ages, but I recently found some old piano sheet music in a folder from my university days. This morning I decided to sit down at the piano for the first time in years. For whatever reason, I pulled the sheet music for “In a Graveyard” and began to play. Now I want to hear the original song. I search Spotify and find it quickly.

Wandering properties of death…¹

The other ewes wander up from the forest back to the paddock. They didn’t find enough food again. My neighbor tells me they’re even eating nettles and other weeds they don’t usually eat because food is so scarce. We’ve been trimming everything we can to feed them. Now they walk right up to me and beg for something to eat. Their baa’ing wakes Rio up.

Hazel and bracken, art by Elaine Kazimierczuk

It’s such a warm day. Summer returned very suddenly yesterday. The air is hot, thick, sticky. Flies swarmed around the ewe’s bottom this morning, still covered in blood and birthing fluids, and all around her twins too. Both lambs were licked by their mother, but their freshly-earthed bodies attracted all sorts of things. Flies and even birds tried to get at their eyes.

I snap some branches covered in green leaves. I take them over to where I think the mama sheep is. She sees me and gets up, gladly takes the branches. Only one of her lambs is with her. It’s her firstborn, who is all black except for a white streak of wool on its forehead. I get worried about the second lamb. There are predators in this area. Back in early summer, I found sheep legs lying on the forest ground, a whole set of four. Some animal, I don’t know what, had eaten through the entire lamb body, leaving only the straight black legs and a stench like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

I begin to clean up the sheep pasture, removing all of the big branches. Mama sheep comes over for more food. I give her leaves, and some apples too. She begins to stamp her back legs again, just like she did this morning. Heat buzzes in my ears. Flies buzz all around her. 

Suddenly she squats very low and out of her body comes a rushing river of fluids. It rushes and rushes, and I remember the feeling during Rio’s birth. Could there be a third lamb in her? Or is this the after birth maybe? I don’t see anything resembling a placenta though. She wants to be alone, I can tell. I take Rio in my arms and we walk away. 

Her firstborn lamb is crying out for her. I can’t help the little lamb because she doesn’t want me near it, and I don’t want to stress her. Rio and I walk up the hill to the house for a while. From a distance, I see her go to the crying lamb, then lie down in the grass. 

We go back down a couple of hours later. Both lambs are with her now, and there’s not a third. As the flock makes their way to the forest again, the mama sheep gets up and begins to follow, just as she’s always done, but after a few gaits, she stops and looks back. Her lambs aren’t coming. She looks back at forth between the flock and her lambs, yet eventually goes back to the lambs. She can’t leave them alone in the paddock. There’s a sense of agitation in her body. She seems so restless. At times she even kicks her back legs. But she’s just given birth today – twice, I remind myself.

I throw out some more apples and cut some more branches. 

I can’t believe no one is paying me for this. How can someone pay me to write one-line zingers for a LinkedIn post and not pay me to do this caretaking work that, to me, feels enormously more important? 

By evening, both lambs seem stronger than ever. They’re darting around and bleating loudly in their sweet lamb voices. It’s the mama sheep I’m worried about now. I think something’s wrong. She’s trying to take care of the lambs. Whenever they cry, she hauls herself up and goes to them, she licks their bodies and lets them nurse. But her breathing is strange. She’s becoming more distant too. When I feed the flock, she doesn’t come. 

When we go in for the night, she’s lying at the edge of the pasture, as close to our house as possible. Her breathing is rapid and laborious. A black raven circles above.

“I hope they make it through the night,” I say to my husband. Something feels off. I feel silly for worrying. I don’t even know why I’m worried. Of course the mama needs time to recover from birth. Of course the newborn lambs are adjusting. All of this seems natural. No one else seems worried. And what do I know about lambing?

A week later, I wonder if I did know something. What did I know exactly? I don’t know.

I go back through the photo library on my phone, looking for her. 

Trying to put the pieces together.

– There she was in spring, when the pasture was overflowing with food. 

– There she was in July and all throughout the summer while her spring lambs were growing, before they’d separated the flock. 

– There she was crying out in distress as the farmer drove away with her lambs in a trailer. 

– There she was with the other ewes sitting by the fence day after day, refusing to go to the forest to find food, because they were waiting, hoping, for their lambs return. 

– There she was in late summer, getting bigger and bigger. I didn’t think about her being pregnant. Aren’t lambs born in the spring? Wouldn’t she be under the farmer’s supervision if she was pregnant? 

– There she was just two weeks ago, chomping on apples and fighting for leaves on a large apple tree branch we’d sawed down for the sheep. They’d eaten through the paddock and the forest now, resources were so scarce that there were signs of aggression between them at times. I’d called the farmer and told him they were hungry. He said someone would get here soon.

– There she was last Tuesday. Following her flock yet keeping her distance. By Tuesday evening, she stood off the side. She wouldn’t eat either. I went over to her and caught her eye. You feeling okay? I asked. I selected a handful of the finest apples I could find and offered them to her. She turned her head toward the forest.

– There are all the white ewes on Wednesday evening. The black sheep is missing and has been missing all day. I decided to take a walk in the forest but never found her there either. 

– There she is very early Thursday morning with one of her newborn lambs. Now I understand. I understand why she was missing the day before. I understand she’d chosen in a secluded place to labor in. A place where no one and nothing could find them. I understand why she’d been distant the day before that too. I thought I understood everything, but I didn’t. 

– There she is at noon on Thursday, with two lambs now! Now I understand more. I understand why she’d been stamping her legs earlier and not letting her firstborn lamb nurse so much. She was still in labor. Now there are twin lambs. I thought I understood everything, but I didn’t.

– There she is on Thursday evening. Plopped down at the edge of the paddock, as close to us as possible. I could almost reach out and touch her. Her breathing was heavy and fast, it didn’t seem normal. I called the farmer again, and he said to call some other guy. I’ll message you his number, he said, but he never did. A whole day goes by.

– There she is on Friday evening with both lambs. We haven’t seen any of them all day. I’m so relieved to see them now. But mama sheep is limping. She’s refusing food and water. She can hardly stand, and when she does she quickly collapses. I call the farmer again and tell him, I think she’s in trouble. She needs help, I plead. Her lambs too. She can’t take care of them, but oh how she’s trying. With all of her strength, she’s trying to stand so they can get some milk. She’s trying to answer them when they cry, but she keeps losing consciousness. The farmer tells me to call another guy. I call that guy. He answers the phone. I tell him everything. He’s shocked that she’s had lambs. He had no idea she was pregnant. 

As we talk, she hobbles off the forest. Or tries to. Her lambs follow. Maybe she’s trying to get them to the forest for the night because it’s safer there for them. Her flock is already there. She isn’t following the flock anymore at all. I tell the farmer everything. About her abnormal breathing, about her rejection of food and water, about her limping and collapsing. He says that he or one of his colleagues will get there as soon as possible. 

I go down to the pasture and see her slowly making her way to the forest. For the last time, I try to offer her a branch of leaves. She looks at me. Her eyes tell me everything. They tell me, I am going to die. I tell her no, someone is coming to help. Someone is on their way. She gets up and hobbles onward, just a few meters before collapsing again. Her lambs go with her, stop with her. She hobbles a bit more. I try to get close but she bleats aggressively at me. I need to go, now let me go, is the message I get. 

– There she is on Saturday morning, in a back corner of the forest, right by the river, lying on her side. Her beautiful blue eye is wide open. She isn’t breathing. Her body is cold and lifeless. Flies are clearing away patches of wool.

The two lambs follow the flock back to our house. They cry and cry. Their mother cannot answer. She cannot come. Their mother is dead. The other sheep reject them. I feel a sadness I haven’t felt in a very long time, but there’s no time to grieve now. I’ve been feeding their mother for weeks. Now it’s time to feed them. 

My neighbor has already collected the bottles and powdered milk for lambs. We go to her house to mix it up. We measure the powder, we measure water, we measure the temperature of the water. I’m holding one of the lambs. It shivers in my arms, covered in sticky poop. Once the formula is mixed up, the lambs can’t figure out how to suck on the plastic nipple.

“Where’s the farmer?” I ask my neighbor. “Oh, he had a boating thing today,” she tells me. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. She can’t believe it either. Both of us are changing our plans and giving up our Saturday to take care of two newborn lambs we aren’t even responsible for. Because their caretaker didn’t want to sacrifice his boat outing.

“Any news about the mother? Do we know what was wrong with her?” My neighbor tells me that no one ever came last night. No one called the veterinarian. The farmer I’d talked to, the one who’d said, I or one of my colleagues will get there as soon as possible, never called his colleague. He’d stayed at a party and gotten drunk. He was still too hungover this morning to help at all. It was nearly evening by the time his colleague came to pick up the lambs.

For several days, the mama sheep laid in the forest being picked apart by insects and birds. But still, I went to visit her. I stood there trying to imagine what it must have been like, as a mother, to know you were going to die and leave behind two newborn babies. To know that they, too, might die, because there was no one else to take care of them. Ewes reject lambs that aren’t theirs. It’s just not in their nature to adopt another sheep’s lamb. The farmers didn’t know she was pregnant, and even when they heard the news, they couldn’t adjust their plans. I believe the black sheep had stayed close to our house for a reason. But still, maybe we had failed her in some way too. Maybe we could have done more – a thought that still haunts me.

For the next few days, we fed the remaining sheep. We sawed down more and more branches to give them. The sheep fought over the leaves more and more aggressively. I called the farmer again on the weekend, and then again on my way to work Monday morning, but he didn’t answer. I told everyone I met that the sheep were hungry and needed to be moved to better pasture, hoping word would spread around the community and something would be done.

Finally someone came to take them yesterday. I was at work, but my husband sent me a picture of the remaining ewes being loaded onto a trailer. After that, they took a wheelbarrow out to the forest and finally collected the black sheep. I don’t know what they did with her body. 

I miss her. I miss them all. I miss their presence here, how grounding and peaceful they were. I miss their voices and our interactions. I won’t claim to know much about sheep, but I do believe I connected with the mothers. Which began as soon as their spring lambs were taken away. I recognized their pain of separation. I recognized their cries of helplessness. Every time I walked around the forest with my own baby, they followed us, as if intrigued. As if I might answer their question, where have they taken mine?

I won’t claim to know much about lambing, but I recognized the mother in the days before and after birth. I recognized some of her instincts, as well as her social dilemma, being pulled between her old flock and her new lambs. I recognized how far she pushed herself to stay alive for them, and eventually her acceptance of the inevitable. What I didn’t recognize at all was her lack of resistance to it. I need to go now, is the last thing she communicated before hobbling off to some corner to die.

I won’t claim to know how she felt. I only know how she made me feel. Which is a mixture of many things, as grief often is. And I’m still processing. Her life is still rippling. Her birthing fluids are still sinking into the soil. The grass where she laid her body to rest is still flattened down. Her coat of wool was left behind and is still decomposing. Her lambs are still crying out for her, if only in their sleep. And when they cry, her voice reverberates.

To most, they’re probably just animals. But they were a part of our life. Entangled with our life, really. Or we became entangled with theirs just by being here and responding to them. They made me feel part of something so much bigger – something beyond me and all the human echo chambers we live in. They took me to new edges of birth, and then death, and everything in between, all entangled, which was so beautiful and so tragic and so clearly a gift. Every life is just so clearly a gift.

Take good care.

xx Beth

1. I have no idea how significant this song is yet. I’m standing at a birth site unaware that it’s also a graveyard.