Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Tena Starr of Barton.
We’d set out to have a small dinner party. Instead, it turned out to be a wake. For a horse.
It’s tough to explain the love of a horse to someone who does not love horses. Anyone who does intuitively understands. The backhoe operator – a horseman himself — who came up here to bury Roheem — took one look at me and said, horses are the worst, aren’t they? He said he’d been unable to bury one of his own, had hired someone to do it because it was just too painful.
Roheem was Arabian, a breed I’d never had a desire to own. He was old, although I have no way to know how old, and he never acted it. I’ve had horses for nearly 50 years, but Roheem was a remarkable fellow.
He was a sort of accidental, or fortuitous, purchase. I was recently divorced, had loaned out my beloved quarter horse to a friend while I got my life back together. But my friend called me one morning in tears to say my horse was dead. A bear had frightened the horses out of the pasture, and mine had been hit and killed in the road by a speeding pickup.
His name was Night, a derivation of his horrible registered name: Go King Reed. I’d bought him when he was 4 and starved to a point that makes a person want to weep or bang on someone’s head and say, “What is the matter with you?” But he had a gleam in his eye, dignity and pride, despite his diminished condition. He was a tryer. You could see that through the bones and the bad coat, and when I got on him bareback, he stepped out like he hoped to make an impression.
That horse followed me like a dog, was eternally grateful to be fed every day, and sometimes got loose and did nothing more than stick his head in the living room window, or stand at the end of the driveway with my daughter waiting for the school bus.
I had no intention of replacing him when he died.
But it was a year later, my birthday, and for the fun of it I went to look at a horse advertised for sale as an old-fashioned appaloosa. I have affection for that breed because my grandfather, a lifelong horseman, used to sit in his old red Ford pickup with me in the driveway when I was a child and pretend we were going to Wyoming to find ourselves “paloosies,” as he called them. The Indians favored them, he said, a good indication of their virtue, according to my grandfather, a horse logger, who might never have been out of Vermont.
The appaloosa did nothing for me. But there was a bay fellow, who so resembled Night they could have been twins except for that classic Arabian head, with its dished face – a sign, in other horses, of bad temperament, but not in an Arab.
I said, “What’s the story with that guy?”
The owners said they did not ride him. If I wished to take the chance, I was on my own. I took the chance, and it was immediately clear that the horse was smart and had been professionally trained sometime in his life. He was graceful, intuitive, and paying a great deal of attention to his rider. He appeared to be a fellow who needed someone to understand him. Another tryer.
I shocked myself by buying him on the spot. I said, it’s my birthday. He will be my gift to myself. One of his owners said it happened to be his birthday too, and it was a gift to have him gone.
I knew this one thing – that horse and I needed each other.
The following weeks were a puzzle. I called the vet for some reason. He looked at the horse and said, “I know him, we’ll be here all day. We’ll never catch him.” I walked out and said, “Roheem, come. ” He did. The farrier showed up and said, “I know this horse.” He, too, was skeptical. But Roheem stood as if chained.
There are many kinds of love, and most people love their animals with varying degrees of intensity. I grew up on a dairy farm, and animals died. A pet dog hit by a car, a hunting dog mauled by a raccoon, a cow down with milk fever, or bizarre incidents like the heifer Alicia who stuck her tongue in the PTO of the corn wagon, which pulled it off, and we had to kill her.
We grieved for those animals, but I have never grieved for the loss of an animal more than this one.
Roheem was a lesson. He was a lesson in resilience and courage and perseverance and intelligent optimism. He was an honest horse who did his best, and his best was remarkable.
Who knows how many homes he’d had, what life he’d lived? That’s the life of horses.
It was clear some of his lives were bad. He would not take a bridle until I bought a very light bit and coated it with molasses. Someone had feared him and hurt his mouth with an unnecessarily harsh bit. He could not be tied without going berserk. Not much of a problem since he never went anywhere if he wasn’t tied.
The day he died it took three lethal injections to kill him. The vet said, “He’s a trooper, isn’t he?” A tough old bastard.
That he was. He was a calm and thoughtful fellow who walked past mailboxes and giant marshmallows, and killer chickens without a qualm. He was the staunch, handsome guy who went through life with bravery and curiosity, with trust and loyalty where it was deserved. He was fast and beautiful and intelligent, and I will miss all of that.
But mostly I will miss his strange, adventurous nature. Roheem wanted to go somewhere. I will never know where now, and I will always regret that. I thought we’d have the time to figure that out, where in the hell it was he wanted to go. Unlike every other horse on earth, he simply wanted to keep going and never tried to turn back and go home.
The decision to kill him – and I will not use euphemisms – was harrowing. He lay there nickering at me, in pain. The message was clear. Help. He had come to trust me in those last years of his life, and this was the last thing I could do for that good horse, that good friend. Steve, the vet, knew what decision I had to make but left me to make it.
“What do you want to do here, Tena?” he asked.
I could see, through tears, that Roheem was dying. His eyes had lost their great luster, their tremendous interest in the world. It was a matter of time, and how much suffering he could be spared.
There is no particular point to this story maybe beyond my own need to express a great grief for the passing of a character who was quirky and brave and beloved. But maybe there’s more, or I would not grieve so badly.
Roheem had lived a long life before he came to me. He had seen bad times, and it showed. But he was also a feisty old fellow who held no bitterness about his past lives, only moved on to this one where he was loved and understood and knew it and said it, and forgave whatever had come before.
He died holding on to my eyes, sure I’d help. But there was nothing I could do anymore to help this good horse, except to sit in the dirt and pet him, tell him I loved him, and let him go.
We could all take a lesson from him. Get over past hurts, live life bravely, march on, know who you can trust, be generous in spirit, and remain hopeful about what’s around the corner. He did all those things.
My son got up the next morning and went out to where Roheem lay dead, said his own good-byes and plucked some hairs from the horse’s tail. He quietly braided them into a bracelet and put it on my wrist. “Now you can have a part of him with you always, Mommy,” he said.
I always will, and I’ll be much the richer for it. Good-bye, old boy.
