The First Light on the Path

Gibson: March 16, 2010 - April 15th, 2024

Dear Reader,

There will not be an audio version of this essay. I hope you understand.

-j

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There is a path through the woods on this farm. It used to be an old deer path, and when my ex lived here with me, they made it their project to turn the unruly wild trails into a proper hiking path. With nothing but a pair of loppers and determination they created a beautiful loop that started near the fire pit/gathering area behind the barn and meandered through the forest, stream, and pond.

You could walk it every season, through the flat forest trails and then down into the gulch stream where the brook trout hide. The trail took you to the banks of the farm’s pond, where we would spy on turtles and mallards or the occasional sleeping doe with her fawn. It was littered with wild berries, acorns, mushrooms, and wildlife. This path became our morning routine. With a mug of warm coffee we’d head out after chores with the dogs, and together, all four of us would start the day bathing in forest light and fresh air.

One November day my ex told me told our relationship was over. I was completely blindsided. In three days they packed up everything in their hatchback with their cat and I knew I would never see them again. All that intimacy, love, trust, time together during a lockdown and pandemic, working, farming, fixing up this place... All that gone in a decision I was helpless to change. You can’t hold onto people that don’t want to be held.

That summer after the breakup I noticed that the path was starting to grow back. Part of me wanted to let it, to help me forget. But like everything else that they did to lift this farm to a better place, I refused to let anything backslide. I would not only keep the farm, gardens, fences, flowers, and barns in the new and improved shape, I would continue to make them better. I was not going to let the effort someone put into me and this farm go wasted. I even made notes on when to clean the filters in the vacuum they bought and left behind.

Gibson came to me 2 weeks after signing the mortgage papers.

In an exercise of grieving the living, I not only kept the path tended, I did things to expand and improve it. I cleared more brush from the stream. I added offerings and little alters. I set up solar lanterns along every step of the way, turning our small footpath into a magical doorway into dawn and dusk.

If you want to know magic, happen upon a fox trotting under the glow of fairy lights on a June night.

And so, even after it became a one-woman farm again, I always tended the path and what once was about heartbreak became about family and honoring a lost person’s effort. Mornings meant coffee and the path. Evenings meant walking right at dusk when the lights clicked on and the world turned blue and gray, but not quite black.

And making that transition from tame backyard to our wild magical place, was the first lantern on the path, like a lighthouse flame leading us home.

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Gibson had been fighting late-stage cancer and I didn’t even know until it was far too late. The diagnosis happened during a routine vet visit less then two weeks ago, and while not surprising to hear about in a 14-year-old dog, it was still devastating.

I didn’t know what to do with my grief that day so I made him an entire Thanksgiving dinner. I roasted a bird, made stuffing and mash, cranberry sauce, gravy… the works. And he couldn’t believe his luck when I presented him with that giant plate. I could barely touch mine.

In the two weeks since that vet visit, he declined so fast. He went from morning walks on the path with me and Friday until one day he started to stumble and fall. When I had to carry him back to the farmhouse, I knew we were nearly out of time.

This past week this farmhouse has been a hospice. I made him a bed in front of the wood stove and kept up with his medication and painkillers, monitoring everything, cleaning up the accidents he couldn’t control, holding him up by the ribs so he could drink and pee.

In those last few days I thought he was dying in my arms a few times, and the grief was transcendent. I have never experienced anything like it. It swirled and alchemized with so many other losses over the years, like waves that kept building and crashing. The loss of this dog I don’t know how how to live without. The loss of that relationship that built a path. The loss of love. Wailing names I missed so much I still see their shadow in the grocery line. And I think it changed something in me I don’t understand yet.

Everything feels different now.

I know he was a dog. But as a single, childless, woman running a farm alone, he was so much more than a pet. He was the person I had spent the most time with in my life. More than my parents, more than anyone. He arrived at this farmhouse two weeks after I signed the mortgage papers. He got to live the border collie dream, 14 years with a stay-at-home owner with his own flock of sheep. This place was all he knew, all he loved.

This dog raised me. In the 14 years I spent with him, I went from being a terrified girl to the woman I am today. And in all that time, we only spent two nights apart from each other. Two nights in nearly a decade and a half. Last night was the third. Tonight is the fourth.

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Yesterday I made the gutting decision to have Gibson put down. I didn’t want to have to do this. I wanted him to pass peacefully here, watching his sheep, sun and wind on his fur. But the disease was wasting him away and when he stopped eating and drinking and seemed to be in so much pain; I wasn’t going to let him suffer any longer, even another day.

So I made a bed out of the back of my Subaru, a thick comforter and pillows like we were going to the drive in. I lifted him into it, and opened every window and the sunroof to let in all the wind and light for his last drive together.

We parked in a corner of the vet’s office lot that faced a grassy lawn and forest. We watched a black lab puppy run around with his new owner, a tall thin man with a beard that was clearly in love. It was so beautiful to watch.

Gibson was euthanized outside so he could see the sky. The doctor was so kind. I covered him with a sheet Friday and I had slept in the two nights before. I wanted our scent with him.

When I brought him home from the vet, I showed Friday he was gone. She understood. I then walked with her down the path, just the two of us. I brought a small tray and together Friday and I filled it with the natural clay deposit that collects in one spot in our stream along the path. I pushed through the dirt and stone in the water until I felt the smooth clay and grabbed a clumsy fistful.

I made an impression of his limp paw in our farm’s clay. The same clay his paws walked over a thousand times. The clay from the path someone else forged for him, that I kept tending. I wanted that memory.

I had been digging his grave for days. I knew when he had trouble walking it was almost over, so I put my grief into the shovel. My lower back wasn’t used to digging for hours and I didn’t care. I kept digging. The back pain felt better than grieving. I went so deep I hit water. I also broke the shovel using it too hard.

I made a bed of hay in the farm’s work sled and laid him in it, wrapped in the sheet. I covered it with flowers, the new daffodils and forsythia were exploding everywhere and the day was so sunny and warm. I brought him to the grave I had covered with a tarp. It was dug at the entrance to our lantern-lit path.

I buried him with message in a bottle explaining who he was. A short note with a lock of his hair and some polaroids. A picture of his face and another of him years ago at the brewery in town, smiling on the bar floor looking up at the people he loved.

I covered the grave, decorated it with stones set like tiles, and transplanted a clutch of daffodils to be a headstone next to the skull of a ram lamb he once herded. Then I took a small locust branch and set it over the flowers and skull with another solar lantern.

Now Gibson is the first light on the path.

This morning Friday and I walked the path with coffee and birdsong, like always. When we passed his grave I pat my thigh and told him to come along, it was time to walk the path. I didn’t even mean to, it was muscle memory from a thousand mornings. I closed my eyes as Friday walked briskly ahead and it felt like he was right behind me, ambling at his elderly pace, about to slide past at a slow trot to catch up to his girls.

This dog deserves an entire book. He deserves to have his story told in full, from the earliest days learning to farm as a pair of exuberant greenhorns to the middle-aged solid partnership we became. In those years this farmer and farm slowly healed and improved, thanks to the people and love that I had been lucky enough to have.

We can’t control when people leave us. We can’t control when good dogs die. But we can respect their memory. We can keep tending the path. We can plant flowers over his grave. We can remember.

I love you Gibson. I promise to do my best to keep your farm safe until I follow you once again. I promise I promise I promise.