When death comes to the sanctuary…
Xena should be here…
We were supposed to be celebrating her adoption anniversary…Instead, we’re counting the days since she disappeared…
Twenty-eight now…
She was only with us three years…barely…But she carved herself into every corner of this place…I can’t walk by the hay bales without expecting to see her curled deep in the straw, squinting up at me with her half-sleepy eyes…greeting me with a soft meow and a lazy stretch like I was the best thing that happened to her all day…The driveway feels desolate without her army-crawling her way down it or trailing behind Sushi on their daily walks like some kind of cosmic joke…The evenings are brutal now…too quiet…Empty of her commentary, her supervision, her purring little heartbeat beside me on the nights I was up tending to someone sick or struggling…She made those nights bearable…Everything about her that once anchored me in peace, now just brings a deep longing for something that ended much too soon…
Every time I looked at her, my heart did something involuntary…It melted…Just looking at her brought a sense of wellbeing…A sense that the chaos of the world was somehow unable to reach me as long as she was there to keep me company…Like beauty could just exist…soft and alive…She was pure love in a sweet, adorable, furry package…No other explanation needed…
And now…she’s gone…
No body…
No closure…
Just a silence that gets heavier every single day…
Three days after she vanished, Arnie had a stroke…He went down hard…Couldn’t move…Couldn’t lift his head…Howling in pain…And I knew…KNEW…what had to be done…I told Mike I’d shoot him right there…End his suffering…Do the only humane thing I could…
And Mike looked at me and said, “I don’t think you’ll be able to live with yourself if you do…”
So, we carried Arnie to the truck…Howling…Scared…And drove him to the vet…He died before we got there…And even with all of the pain and fear and futility…That’s what it looks like when we get death right…
He didn’t die in a cage…He didn’t die cold…He died surrounded by the people who had loved him for more than fifteen years…We couldn’t take the fear away…We couldn’t stop the pain…Sometimes the best we can do doesn’t feel like ‘best” at all…It just feels like not abandoning them…Like staying by their side…Like holding it together while everything inside you falls apart…That’s sanctuary too…It’s not just saving lives…It’s being the one they die near…It’s being the last voice they hear…The last touch they trust…And it’s having to keep going…
People think sanctuary is noble…But there’s nothing noble about holding the weight of two deaths in three days and still showing up for the morning feed…There’s nothing noble about calling a horse to dinner when your voice is still cracked from sobbing…There’s nothing noble about dragging yourself through the motions with a body that feels hollow…like it’s being lived in by someone else…
It’s not noble…
It’s just necessary…
Because forever means forever…And it’s not just about doing the hard thing…It’s about doing it the same way…every day…
Horses don’t understand grief schedules…They don’t care that you’re broken…or that something just died inside you…They only know rhythm…Safety…Pattern…
So, we feed on time…We show up with calm hands and steady voices…We carry on the rituals like nothing’s changed…Because for them, nothing can…If we unravel, they unravel…If we stay broken, they don’t heal…So we don’t…We cry…and we keep the rhythm…We break…and we keep the promise…Because they need us to be steady more than they need us to be okay…
And forever means this…
It means Xena, who should’ve had decades, vanished without a trace…It means Arnie, who gave us everything, died in the cab of a truck because the alternative was worse…It means every single animal here will die…here…with us…Because that’s the deal…That’s the vow…We don’t hand them off…We don’t “find them homes”…We are the home…And when death comes…We face it…Even when something deep inside us is breaking permanently…We maintain our focus…Because we chose this…Because this life, as brutal and beautiful and back-breaking as it is, is the only one that makes any real sense to us…
And you need to know this part too…When a horse dies, it doesn’t disappear like it does in storybooks…
We have to make the call…Find the machine…Schedule the person…We drag 1,200 pounds of still-warm body out of the field…We choose a place on this land…We bury them ourselves…Sometimes it takes hours…Sometimes days…And while we wait…We feed…We clean…We lift…We lead…We do it with tears on our faces and lumps in our throats…Because that’s what we signed up for…That’s what it means to take them for life…
And NO…I’m not writing this for sympathy…or donations…I’m writing it so you understand what it takes to live your values when they’re not hypothetical…When they’re covered in mud and blood and fur and grief…When they cost you everything, and you still say yes…This is what love looks like in its rawest form…Not curated…Not poetic…Not pretty…Just real…Just consistent…Just devoted…
We break…And we don’t quit…We cry…And we feed anyway…We lose what we love…and somehow…We still love again…Because the truth is…There’s more room in a broken heart…
That’s sanctuary…
That’s values in action…
That is the Missed Path Sanctuary.
