Death and Dying and a Homestead

As a culture we don’t like to talk about death. At least not any more. When someone loses someone close we don’t know what to say. Beyond sending flowers, a sympathy card and maybe sending some food over we don’t know what to say.

We have to read from psychologists that the best thing we can do is just sit with the person. That holding space for that person to process their loss for as long as they need to (even if that means years) is what we are suppose to do, that the best thing we can do is sit with them in the uncomfortableness of it all. And most of us are not brave enough to do that. We don’t know how, we haven’t had it modeled, it can take a lot of energy to just sit there and hold space.

My kids have been lucky so far. They have not lost anyone super close to them that was human. Not yet anyway. They have witnessed my husband and I saying goodbye to our grandparents and friends and the unexpected deaths that happen in life but that is all they have seen of human death.

They have had to say goodbye to 3 cats, some expected and most sudden. Since we have had farm animals since 2015 we have said goodbye to several ducks that were close favorites of my eldest. I have had to break the news while on vacation that her favorite duck died while she wasn’t home. And witness the violent ugly sobbing that followed.

But what amazed me is that after about 10 minutes of ugly sobbing she took a deep breath and moved on. She was okay. While she still talks about that duck and misses him, she was able to process his death and move on.

We have come down in the morning once to find a dead duck inside the duck house, and this past weekend the same thing happened to one of our pigs. In both cases we didn’t know it was going to happen and we had done all we could, but life doesn’t always work the way we want too and death is part of it.

We have not hidden this from our kids. We did not hide the truth, we talked about what we knew had happened or what we thought had happened, where we might have made mistakes, and how we think we could prevent it happening in the future. We have also talked about runts and ow sometimes they don’t survive as long as you would like them too, no matter what you do.

My younger two kids have been happy to help when it came time to harvest our meat birds and my 7 year old actually seems to like the process and the gallows humor that seems to come out when one is harvesting and butchering meat. This past weekend my hubby and I got to do our first pig, being somewhat unprepared but not wanting the meat to go to waste.

Not the most pleasant of jobs, but we have always been honest about death with the kids. Like fairy tales that can feel like they have very dark sides, life does too. My girls could see as much or as little of the process as they wanted and my 10 year old helped move the body to where we could deal with it and talked about how weird it felt as this pig had been alive the night before.

I don’t think any of my kids will end up in therapy over our homestead. Maybe they will as you can never know how another person is going to react and put things together in their mind. But they all really understand where their food comes from. And that to eat, things must die whether they are animal or plant. We can also help them reproduce and live again, but in the end for us to live other things must die.

It’s a hard truth that these days no one wants to talk about. And yet it is so important that we do. It is okay to shed tears when saying goodbye to a beloved pet, or just an animal that you raised to later go in your freezer. It is good to thank them for sharing their life with you. For even though we are not always perfect, and we do not have 50 years of farming experience, I know that every animal that has lived with us has had a better life than they would have had in the commercial meat industry.

And that is changing our little corner of the world.