Episode 7: Farming in the face of inevitable grief and loss

“I walked outside and I probably got like 50 feet from the front door and I could hear you and dad crying from Ace’s pen,” Lisa’s son Mitch said.

Losing Ace, our most beautiful guanaco, was devastating. It helped that our son Mitch was there that day, but still, it was our initiation into a part of farm life that people don’t often talk about. And unfortunately, it sent us into a tailspin. When he got sick, we had to make difficult choices. We had to face his eventual death and grapple with the questions, “What did we do wrong? Where did we fail him?” Three months later, we were faced with more life or death decisions. This time, we ended up having to ponder the bigger question, “How can we continue raising guanacos and being fiber farmers in the face of inevitable grief and loss?”

“What a day,” Lisa says to her son Mitch.

“Yeah, yeah, I actually had quite a few personal conversations with my friends after that day about,” Mitch said.

“What did you say? What were the conversations about?” Lisa asked.

“They were like, well, like, do you think they’re gonna keep doing this?” Mitch responded.

I think of it like this:

Facing death, losing loved ones, it’s a universal experience.

But it can challenge you to the core. In the gut-wrenching sadness, death can make you question everything about your life and your choices. It can make you feel fragile and afraid for what’s to come. And, here’s the thing….because death is so much a part of everyone’s life, it can also invite you to connect–even in your pain–and invite a comforting kind of intimacy with others who share your same experience.

In this episode, we are going to tell you about some beautiful guanacos that we held in their last hours. We will pay respects to those beautiful boys by letting you in on the experience. It’s a hard episode to publish. But I hope you listen to it because, in the end, there is something important that we learned and we want to share with you. Something that might possibly change the way you see farms and pastures and the wool sweater you love to wear. And it might just help you remember that we all have grief, we all face death, and in that basic human experience, we are all connected and held.

“So why don’t you talk a little bit about our beloved Ace,” said Lisa.

“Okay. So Ace was Georgia’s baby that was born in California. And he grew into a very, very large, very aggressive guanaco. But he was a beautiful guy,” Greg said.

“He was so beautiful, I think because of his size. And his youth, he just looked regal,” Lisa said.

“And intimidating sometimes,” Greg said.

“Yeah, he was,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, I took care of him, cleaned his pen, and brought him food. When I cleaned his pen, I just didn’t feel comfortable turning my back on him. Because he had, you could just see in his eye that he had some question about who was the Alpha animal in his pen at any one time,” Greg said.

“So when did you first start to notice changes in him?” Lisa said.

“I remember noticing that he just wasn’t as aggressive as he normally was. He was still eating. He was still doing all of the stuff he did. But he was just a little slower. A little less reactive. Just didn’t quite seem like his usual personality. And that went on for a couple of days. And then he just seemed weaker to me. And so we called the vet to come to take a look at him,” Greg said.

“So she took blood,” Lisa said.

“She took blood. We could sedate him enough to take blood, she took blood and was going to have it analyzed and get back to us the next day,” Greg said.

That night after Dr. Sandi drew blood, we watched him closely. Every 10 minutes or so we’d go to his pen and look in on him, hoping to find some improvement.

“And I remember just sort of feeling frozen, staring at him from the outside of his pen, wanting to help him to do something, but not being able to because, if I went in there, I mean, it’s not like you go pet, an intimidating male guanaco and say, it’s gonna be okay, you know?” Lisa said.

“Right. I mean, we didn’t know what laying hands on him was, how he would react,” Greg said.

“Exactly,” Lisa said.

“It’s so hard to see a powerful animal in pain and right that I’d never really seen that before, just sort of frozen and shaky in pain. It’s such a contrast,” Lisa said.

“And very heart-wrenching. Very painful to watch,” Greg said.

The next morning we went to check on him again. On our way to his pen, Dr. Sandi called to let us know that his blood work didn’t look good.

“She said he had a fatty liver, which camelids can get. We didn’t know why but that there wasn’t any way to make him better,” Greg said.

“And during the time that between the time that she called and she came– First we were standing outside his pen, just staring just not knowing helpless, powerless, not knowing what to do for him. Willing him, like literally to just die quickly because of his suffering. And I remember just wanting her to come quick, quick, quick like Hurry, hurry, hurry, but she’s about an hour away” Lisa said.

So we stayed with him, watching through the chain link. Crying. Leaning on each other. Shivering in the cold early morning.

“There was nothing we could do, but watch him suffer until he was so overcome with the illness that he fell over and you and I rushed in,” Greg said.

“So there we were rushed in this pen together with this large, sick animal. And I mean I was wondering, what if we were more comforting him or comforting ourselves or what good we were doing or, but there was no choice other than just to be there? You know?” Lisa said.

“Yes. I think the only choice was to try to join him in whatever way we could,” Greg said.

“Yeah, exactly. So you were holding his head. I was holding his legs. I didn’t want to pet him. Like, because I knew. That’s not something that guanacos find reassuring. And yet I really wanted to pet him because his fiber is so lovely and warm. And I would reassure myself, so I didn’t want to rouse him, you know?” Lisa said.

Greg’s tears dripped down his nose onto Ace’s head. My tears wet the fur at Ace’s hip. He was a huge beautiful animal in his most vulnerable moments and we were with him – with each other. Greg reached and laid his hand on my back. I breathed in his support and we did the only thing we could do. Wait.

“It was very hard. And if I can just say this, I mean afterward, I sort of realized we were holding him a bit as this place holds us. And trying to protect and care for him the way this place sort of protects and cares for us in a way. And it was very hard,” Greg said.

“And then she finally arrived. And we said goodbye,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“So, you know that experience for me was just devastating. And I remember just feeling like a complete failure. And wondering how on earth we would sort of bounce back from it,” Lisa said.

“Well, and wondering if there was something we did even inadvertently, right?” Greg said.

“Retracing everything,” Lisa said.

“Right to try to figure it out. I mean, we try so hard to care for these animals. And to try to figure out if there’s something we did that. Did we give him bad hay? Did we give him something?” Greg said.

“Yeah, just endless questioning, right? And the necropsy didn’t reveal anything conclusive. So we couldn’t go by that,” Lisa said.

“That was really hard,” Greg said.

It was awful.

Ace was gone, but farm life goes on.

That’s the absolute truth. The other animals need care. Fiber sales happen. So, the routine of farm life provided enough of a structure that eventually the sadness of losing Ace didn’t hurt quite as much. We never got the answers to what happened with Ace so we did the only thing we could do. Pay closer attention to our other animals’ care. Do another round of parasite testing, sweep all of the pastures looking for noxious weeds, watching, monitoring and cherishing.

And then, our baby boy guanaco, Andes, who was born on this farm, the very one that we told you about in episode 6. The one that I carried across the pasture while Greg held off his mama from attacking me. The one that we worked so hard to get to nurse. The one whose fiber looked so light-lighter than everyone else’s. The precious one. He got sick.

“A couple of months later, I noticed that Andes is having trouble urinating and he’s straining and in an odd approach for guanaco he’s sort of staring at me for help. He sort of won’t leave me and wants me to help him somehow. So we called the vet again, because he’s having trouble urinating and you know, guanaco camelids can get stones, urinary stones. But Andes was and it’s generally males who have been wethered that get them and older males who have been wethered. But Andes was like six or seven months, seven, eight months old, and was intact. And we couldn’t figure out what was wrong,” Greg said.

“That was New Year’s Eve. And so Dr. Sandi comes again,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said.

“And does some doctoring,” Lisa said.

“Lots of doctoring. And John was here to Dr. John,” Greg said.

“And she tries to find the stone – all that kind of stuff, Lisa said.

“Right. She can’t find them,” Greg said.

“And we have to make that decision about whether we’re going to do surgery because if we leave him overnight, his bladder could burst. Right? And he could die. Or she could do surgery and try to give him what is it called?” Lisa said.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” Greg said.

“A stoma,” Lisa said.

“There you go, try to bypass the urinary tract and have him pee out of an aperture that she would create,” Greg said.

“Right, so we’re faced with the decision and we decide we can’t NOT do it,” Lisa said.

“Right, we have to try,” Greg said.

“We have to try. Oh my god. I can’t believe we did this, Lisa said.

“She sedates him a little bit, enough so that he Is loopy and handleable. And we load him in the back of the Subaru Forester,” Greg said.

“God, we put the seat down,” Lisa said.

“The seat down with me sitting back there with him and holding him down his neck. So it’s not, he’s not whipping around and trying to get loose,” Greg said.

“Oh my god, it’s nighttime,” Lisa said.

“And it’s nighttime. And we haul him up to her. Her house, which is also her clinic, about 30 miles away,” Greg said.

“And I’m driving, John is in the passenger seat. And that was the long we were. I was afraid that Andes was going to get woken up enough. And we would have this wild child going on in the backseat. But we get him there,” Lisa said.

“Because guanacos likely do not like car rides,” Greg said.

“Yeah, how many people do you think have ever transported a guanaco in their Subaru? Lisa asked.

“I don’t know. I would guess we may be the only ones. That’s just a guess,” Greg said.

It was another long night. Dr. Sandi had called very late to let us know that he’d made it through surgery, but his condition was still guarded. Then with another call the next morning she told us that she was going to have to do more surgery because Andes had started bleeding. We grind our teeth, do our chores and wait. For several days we didn’t know if he would make it, but he did start getting better and she brought our little guy home.

“And we need to begin post-operative care for him. She tells us how to do it. And every day, we have to go in his pen and get a hold of him,” Greg said.

“It was like this choreographed dance that we learned together where we go in and he learned it too. He participated,” Lisa said.

“Well, he eventually learned it and eventually welcomed it, but we would have to wash off his wound and care for him and make sure everything was okay. And it meant getting a halter on him. And holding onto him at first we had to tie the halter onto a post very close so that he wouldn’t try to flail and get away and then afterward he just sort of accepted that this was part of his relationship with us,” Greg said.

“He wouldn’t welcome us, but he would accept our touch right and accept me restraining him and holding right. While you took care of him,” Greg said.

Andes was doing well. We were feeling hopeful. His fur around his surgery site was growing back. He seemed comfortable and was still so soft and precious. But after a while, Greg started to notice that he was straining to pee again. And our hopefulness turned into worry.

“And eventually, he stopped being able to urinate and we had to call the vet again and have her come out and put him down. There was nothing else that we could do. And it was horrible. We both tried so hard. We had invested so much of ourselves in trying to get him healthy that… Talk about feeling like a failure. It just didn’t seem to work. And the next day after she came out late in the afternoon it was almost evening and the next day I was part of the morning chores because he was small I dug a grave for him before I could even go in the house. And we transported him out to the grave and buried him. It was very difficult. I was so full of grief that I just didn’t know if this whole raising animal thing was the thing for us to be doing,” Greg said.

“Yeah, me too. I think we were so in it that all I wanted to do was find a way out of it like I can’t do this. I can’t face another death. I can’t watch you dig another grave. I can’t. I can’t do it. It was so tragic and painful and feeling helpless and powerless against it all, you know?” Lisa said.

“Right. I mean digging that grave was the biggest act of grief I think I’ve ever done in my life,” Greg said.

Remember I told you about how death can make you question everything? Losing Andes, after losing Ace took me straight to Zillow. I couldn’t imagine making it through another loss. I couldn’t imagine staying here, raising animals that I knew we’d eventually have to bury. The question that our son Mitch’s friends had posed was the same one we were having. Can we even keep doing this?

“So I even went on Zillow to try to see if we could sell this place and find something easier. I mean, I even talked to realtors about possibilities, because I was just so overcome with the fact that I couldn’t bear it, you know? I didn’t sign up for so much sadness and difficulty,” Lisa said.

“Right. And we were supposedly quasi retired here. And things, we’re going to be easy and peaceful,” Greg said.

Again, life on the farm goes on. There are animals to feed and care for. There is fiber to process, trees to prune, and logs to split. Which also meant that Kooper, another of ours, was left in the male paddocks all by himself.

“And then poor Kooper. Kooper was left alone in his paddock over there where Ace was and where Andes had been,” Lisa said.

“With no friends,” Greg said.

“And that’s a very bad situation for a guanaco because it means you’re out there for the wolves and cougars to get with no herd to protect you,” Lisa said.

“Well, they’re herd animals. And they just do not do well by themselves. They just don’t. And I mean, us going out there is not the same thing,” Greg said.

“No, he does not want us, that’s for sure. So we had to face that as well. When Andes was in the hospital, Dr. Sandi had a mirror up for him,” Lisa said.

“Right. So he could have an imaginary friend,” Greg said.

“So he could have a friend, which he apparently really liked. And so that gave me the idea. I donated my full-length mirror to Kooper. And we installed it in his pen,” Lisa said.

“Where Andes would have been,” Greg said.

“And strangely, I think it worked,” Lisa said.

“It worked very well. Kooper would spend hours, his new friend in the mirror,” Greg said.

“He admired his friend, and he was really admiring himself. And he would stand in the perfect situation where he could see the whole body,” Lisa said.

“His whole body and stand there for hours and look at his friend,” Greg said.

“Oh, but it was funny. And it was just tragic. And then you thought of the goats. Right,” Lisa said.

“Right. I started thinking well, the other thing he seems is interested in the goats who were in the pasture up above him. So what if we let them down in the little alleyway beside his paddock and let them just hang out with him? Yeah, so we did. And he loved that,” Greg said.

“He loved the goats,” Lisa said.

“He followed the goats everywhere. He took care of them. If we started messing with the goats because we needed to do something with them and they were objecting he would get all upset and start running around and throwing his head. They were his babies,” Greg said.

“They were! Then what about that time that Daisy got in with him?” Lisa said.

“Yes. Oh my god. So she squeezed under the gate and got in with him,” Greg said.

“As a good goat would do,” Lisa said.

“Like a good goat escape artist would do. And gets in with him. And he starts trying to go over and sniff her and smell her. And she’s trying to headbutt him, as he’s trying to sniff her and I’m going, “Oh, he’s going to kill her,” Greg said.

“All you have to do is one big stomp,” Lisa said.

“Right? One big stomp. And she’s done. And I’m trying to get her out. And she’s running away from me. And he’s mad at me because I’m trying to catch her,” Greg said.

“His beloved goat friend,” Lisa said.

“And she gets up on her hind legs and starts eating his food. And when that happened, I went, oh my god, this is really the end. He’s really going to kill her now. And he just liked it. It was okay that she ate his food. And eventually, I got him outside of his little house and I closed the gate and I got ahold of Daisy. And we got her back in her pen and secured the gate so she couldn’t get under it anymore,” Greg said.

“So he had the full-length mirror. And his service animal goats who were helping him with his loneliness and his grief and it was very good. And that was a while. We were trying to figure out what to do and what the next step would be. And we knew that we just couldn’t leave Kooper like that,” Lisa said.

“We had to do something that was a little bit more permanent, we thought. So we started trying to figure out well, maybe we can get an alpaca,” Greg said.

“Yeah, we did. We went down that rabbit hole,” Lisa said.

“And I didn’t want to take on alpacas. They just didn’t go with our guanaco theme here,” Lisa said.

“Right? They were very sweet and nice. But yeah. It just wasn’t going to be a made for Aliento kind of thing,” Greg said.

“So I think it’s a big bounce back, right. Instead of alpacas or a full-length mirror,” Lisa said.

“What did you do, Lisa?” Greg said.

There are very few times in my life that I can remember being compelled to do something–so much so that it seemed like I was being directed. It was late at night, Greg was already asleep, and I texted Paige to see if she had a male guanaco that we could buy. First of all, it was a marital pact that we’d never deal with Paige again. (if you are curious about this–please go and listen to the episode called The Darker Side of Our guanaco adventure–it will tell you everything you need to know about why this is the case). Anyway, I felt like I was sneaking. But when I told Greg that I’d texted her and that she did indeed have a guanaco for us, his eyebrows went up very high and he smiled big. What did I do?

“I found an unrelated male guanaco. That’s right, to go in that pen. And he came with two others,” Lisa said.

“Two females,” Greg said.

“Which was just great. And, you know, I think that was a whole I mean, I say bounce back, but it was also sort of this soul searching thing about are we going to escape this? Or are we going to face it and sort of embrace it as part of what’s part of farm life? You know?” Lisa said.

“Right. Are we going to choose this? Or are we going to avoid it?” Greg asked.

“Yeah. And I think the honest truth was, I was so in it already. And so in love with this land, and in love with this life that I couldn’t imagine anything else,” Lisa said.

“Well, that is true. I mean, you know, I felt the same way,” Greg said.

“That there was a sense in which this land was holding us. It was caring for us. And we just needed to let that happen. We needed to let it hold us. And not that the grief would go away. But that the grief would be a part, a smaller part, of what this whole experience was for us. Of what it meant for us,” Greg said.

“Yeah. So the day that Pedro came was a big deal,” Lisa said.

“It was, especially since he’s such a wild little guy,” Greg said.

“He is a wild man. But there we went again, leading him in, right into that pen. I mean, it was like he was supposed to be here, you know?” Lisa said.

We’d bounced back, come full circle, however you want to put it. It was hard, but the loss taught us something very important.

“I should have realized that every time I put on a wool sweater there was birth and death behind it. I didn’t,” Greg said.

“I think the other part is, is that this the whole having gone through that experience of losing Ace and Andes has opened my eyes to the fact that every farmer goes through this and that, you know, you look at pastures of beautiful, caring for animals and I hadn’t had the thought of the tragedy that could also represent. That as much life and vibrance, there’s also loss and death on a farm,” Lisa said.

“On every farm,” Greg said.

“On every farm,” Lisa said.

So now, whether it’s putting on my favorite wool sweater or caring for my beloved guanacos, I do notice a strong sense of connection with other farmers. And in the times when it seems a bit too unbearable or scary, I just replay that moment in Ace’s pen when Greg reached for me and I can feel his loving hand on my back.

And in those moments, I can also imagine miles of pastures and thousands of barns and find solace in knowing there’s a farmer somewhere dealing with the same thing while farm life goes on. And in that connection, I feel like I can keep going because I feel held by something bigger than our farm.

Thanks for listening. I hope you hear a morsel of resilience or support or comfort in these stories of grief and loss. And just remember, when you wear that wool sweater that is so warm and soft, it connects you to the farms and the farmers who raise beautiful animals who grow that wool. Let your sweater be more than a sweater. Let it hold you with something bigger.

Tune in to the next episode when we talk about the challenges of shearing guanacos and how I had a crash course in processing their exquisite fiber that ended in the most astounding surprise.

And speaking of the next episode–it happens to be the LAST episode we have scheduled for Season One of A Fiber Life. We are going to be working on Season Two next…so, I’m wondering if you could help us out. There’s a link to a short survey in the show notes. If you go there and answer those 3 or so questions it will help us know more about what you’d like to hear next!! Thanks for your answers. And again, thanks for listening.

Credits:
I want to give a shout-out to Mandi from Labor of love farm. She sent me flowers all the way from Indiana when she heard about Ace. Her words of wisdom let us know that she was another farmer who’d lived through loss and has found a way to cherish the animals she cares for and keep going.

I also want to let our oldest son Mitch know that we love him and cherish him. Mitch, you are so dear in the way that you support our crazy farm endeavor. The same is true about our other two kids, Sam and Ruth. It is very wonderful.

And finally, I once again want to thank Bright Sighted Podcasting. Steve does the audio editing and mixing–which makes everything sound so professional. And Christine just plain does everything else–which is a lot. Thanks, you guys.