29 Apr On the Loss of a Bull

by Heather Brubaker

On the Loss of A Bull

I’m on my knees in the entryway of my home, my face level with my six-year-old daughter’s. She’s standing in her socks, still padded in snow pants and a mint green coat sprinkled with tiny stars. I hold her waist with both hands. Her arms rest on mine. She looks at me with eyes full of tears and questions. 

A few minutes earlier, Naomi had come home from school and asked to speak to me privately, away from her older sister. Then, she told me what she had learned that day: Carlos the Bull had died. She wept and folded herself into my arms. In between sobs, she told me how she was feeling: 

      “I’m just so sad.”

      “I didn’t know I would never see him again.”

      “It’s hard to imagine the world without him.”

      “I don’t think I can bear it.”

I’m moved by the depth of her grief. During the deep COVID years, we spent lots of time with Carlos at the Retreat Farm; you could build an entire day around a visit. My girls, 3 and 6 at the time, never tired of witnessing his size, his phalanx of flies, his loyal goat friend, his lumbering gait. But they are older now, busy with school and activities. It’s been months since we visited. 

I’m also rattled by a sense of deja vu. The words coming out of Naomi’s mouth feel so adult. As a volunteer at Brattleboro Area Hospice, these are words I’ve heard from people in their thirties and their eighties and everything in between. Yet, here they are, bubbling up in my six-year-old at the loss of a beloved bull. The word for word replication of these phrases in a child who is moving through one of her first losses makes me wonder. Are these feelings essentially human? Does our grief have a shared shape, even as it resides within each of us as individuals? What was this bright line connecting my daughter to so many others as she mourned?

A few weeks later, my parents lost one of their dogs. My girls had grown up with him, a sweet-natured terrier called Clancy. The day we broke the news to my daughters, I once again held Naomi as she cried. After she recovered, she turned to me and said, “I want to call YaYa.”

“Do you want to talk with her about Clancy?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she replied. “She must be feeling very sad.” 

Here was a second startling lesson. Having recently experienced loss, she could imagine what it might feel like for her grandmother, who had lived with and loved this dog for the last fifteen years. We called, and Naomi offered comfort, across seven decades, to her elder as they shared memories of a companion they both treasured. Sometimes, grief can turn us inward, as we navigate what feels like unbearable pain. But, grief can also be an opening: to connection, to companionship, and to community in this fragile, beautiful world.  ~ Heather Brubaker