Last night Roxy, my last chicken, passed away, ending a 12 year chapter of my life.
It was back in 2010, towards the end of April, I got eight spring chicks (on a whim) from one of the farm supply/hardware stores. Four Rhode Island Reds, four Ameraucanas. I was 19, and I'd never kept chickens before, and didn't fully know what I was getting into. I ended up learning a LOT. About birds (especially chickens), about grief, and about myself. I learned patience, felt frustrations, accepted heartache...but mostly I guess I learned about love.
Loving pets was nothing new--I’d had 6 cats that meant the world to me when I was 9, and at the time of getting chickens, still had three of them left. (Tigirl was concerning since I felt confident she’d eat my chicks given half a chance. I didn’t give her that chance, but I caught her watching them with an intensity that didn’t ease my fears.)
Okay, so Van Buren gets to be front and center of the chick pics--she was the one I had the least amount of time with, as she died (sudden death syndrome) a week or so before her second birthday. Yet I still managed to gather many cherished memories with her despite our short time together.
(She was a shoulder chicken, always jumping up to perch on me even when I was busy doing something else.)
Her sisters learned to like perching on me out of spite and jealousy. If one chicken was gonna get on me, then that meant the others had to as well. (Oh god. The coop was in the process of being BUILT in that photo.) O_O
I spent many long hours devoted to chicken care. I was guardian and protector for my tiny flock. None of them were killed by predators nor died by violence. They did succumb to various respiratory infections over the years, and dealing with their declining health in illness was one of the most difficult things I’d have to come to terms with.
Y’see, about half a year before I got my girls, my maternal grandmother, mère mère, had passed away. And her death had left me with a deep rooted bitterness, frustration, and helplessness. She got sick and didn’t get better. She’d had breast cancer, had a partial mastectomy, went through chemotherapy, and then never got better. The drugs she was on would ultimately impact her quality of life to the point where she simply got sicker and sicker until she died of a staph infection. (After losing the ability to enjoy all the things she loved in life, shattering her hip, and breaking her ribs. We didn’t realize the drugs caused such a brittleness in her bones until it was too late. It was before the internet for us.) I was guilty that I hadn’t gone to see her in the hospital, but I didn’t want to see her intubated--I didn’t want my last memories of her to be of her suffering and dying like that.
I wouldn’t fully realize the extent of how much that haunted and bothered me until I had to take care of my sick chickens and accept that, even when I was doing my best for them (there aren’t always a lot of options for vet care for poultry, it depends on where you live and what sort of animals the vets in your area specialize in), I couldn’t save them.
Little Red was the first of my girls to succumb to a respiratory illness. I think she was about 4 at the time? I don’t remember exactly now. But the guilt of wondering if there was more I could’ve done to save her would bother me for a while.
Owl-Girl would end up getting sick, too. It might’ve actually been cancer in her case. I don’t know, because I couldn’t bring myself to do a necropsy. I would still be haunted by the guilt and worry that maybe there was more I could’ve done to save her.
Goldie also succumbed to a respiratory infection...The same feelings of guilt and inadequacy would haunt me. Had I done as much as I could for her? It was probably around then I started thinking of the parables between their deaths and my mère mère’s. Was I doomed to always watch my loved ones sicken and die? To what end? It was a wearying thought.
Oh Stripes. With her always sleepy looking eyes. Stripes had a chronic respiratory infection that had left her with a stuffy beak that would tend to drip a lot. She used me as a a tissue, wiping her beak on my shirt like a snotty nosed toddler--it was both gross and adorable. Ironically, her illness had improved somewhat when she died very surprisingly and suddenly. It was the first death since Van Buren that I didn’t “see” coming. The helplessness dealing with her sisters’ illnesses bothered me. The feeling of not being able to save them. That’s the thing I really couldn’t accept. The fact that I couldn’t save them. And here is about when I finally really accepted all the frustration and bitterness I’d been ignoring since mère mère’s death. Sickness happens. It sucks. It’s not fair. And sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you fight, sometimes you can’t save the ones you love. You’re allowed to be angry, and hurt, and hate it. But you have to ACCEPT it to move on.
Life will always be full of heartache. But if your heart is hurting, it means you LOVED. Loss is terrible. But love is wonderful. And you can’t know the depths of sorrow if you hadn’t first felt the fullness of the joy in life. So feel your feels. Let that hurt hurt. And when you can, when you’re strong enough, take out those memories of love and turn them over to look at them again. The hurt will still be there, but instead of bitterness, let it be bittersweet.
Pecky with her intense yellow-eyed stare succumbed to a respiratory illness as well. But This was the first time I was finally able to let go of the guilt. I did everything in my power to try and get her well, and I made sure she was at least comfortable and happy. It still hurt, but the bitterness wasn’t consuming me. I finally accepted that I was doing my best, and if it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t my fault.
Abu, my scary dinosaur girl. She made monkey noises as a chick (she sounded like Abu from Disney’s Aladdin, hence her name), but she grew into primal screams of pure rage. She got broody and I refused to let her sit in the coop. SHE RAGED. If she had had teeth, she would’ve taken chunks out of me. She had a brief bout with illness before passing. But it was okay this time.
Beautiful (and so soft) Roxy. The last of my girls. She was 12 years old. She’d outlived her last sister (Abu) by two years. She was the queen among them, in that she was the top of the pecking order. I worried she would die before her sisters and I didn’t know how they’d decide on the hierarchy after that. But she outlasted them all. She turned into a lap chicken in her old age, sitting on my lap for hours each day. I kept her company, fed her all her favorite snacks. And, yes, she succumbed to a respiratory illness. (Well, possibly at her age some other things were failing. She’d always had crop problems, a bum leg, and this year she’d lost mobility in her wing. It might’ve been cancer, coz there were a couple suspicious lumps, but I didn’t do a necropsy.)
...A twelve year chapter of my life has ended. What happens next? Where do I go from here? The lessons of life learned along the way shan’t be forgotten. The long hours of introspective self-reflection have taught me much.
