The Loss of Little Lights

Chickens, fatherhood, and mortality

It is unfair that anything young should die, unfair that little lights should be lost. 

In a stroke of cruel irony, we experience such losses primarily in spring, when so many young things enter our good green world: a newly planted tree that did not set, a lamb rejected by its mother, a child born unwell if ever born at all. We endure these disappointments in the season we associate most with new life and young vitality, the season when hope should abound and the cold of winter shaken from our spines. A harsh juxtaposition to which we never truly become inured. We try though. We look back at all of our losses and sorrows and tell ourselves we are becoming more resilient and stoic, less soft and vulnerable. With every loss and every grim keening, we remind ourselves that we have dealt with harder things and that we are stronger for them. We know the truth though. 

The pain of loss, especially the loss of the young, does not become easier. The grief is uncontrollable. We know this deep down and may refocus on what we can control, on what we can mitigate and prevent going forward. This is likely true for all parents, but it is especially true for fathers -- we stubborn fathers who seek to shore up every wall and guard every threshold. Do not judge us too harshly when we reflexively attempt to solve a problem instead of lending an ear, when we scan the doors and windows of a building as we enter, when we seek to control the boundaries. It is but our nature and it is often all we can do.

This was all too evident for me this past week when we gave our daughter twelve baby chicks. We have wanted chickens for some time, and she was ecstatic when we told her. She gathered hay from the field on Easter weekend when the sun shone and dried it of its winter-wet. “We need to keep the chicks warm, Papa!” she shouted as she bounded through our field, hugging bundles of long warm straw. She was prepared for joy, and she would receive it. She lined the brooder cage with care and received her reward: twelve peeping chicks, nipping hungrily at her fingers on the ride home from the hardware store.

The Age of Innocence, Sir Joshua Reynolds (c. 1785)

I have raised many types of animals growing up and am not a naive man. My wife and I had even planned to lose a few chicks by no fault of our own, maybe even on the car ride home. Sometimes baby animals just die. I grew up in the country; I am no stranger to watching little lights flicker and fail. Despite this, despite all my experience burying animals old and young, my graying beard, and sorrows I will not share, the pang of watching one of these twelve little chicks waste away on only the second day in our home was present. It is amazing how fast chicks grow, so it is clear when one does not. This one just did not grow like the others. It instead slept and slept and died.

A dead chick is a small, mundane thing to many. Nothing to get worked up over. Nothing to write about. I am a sensitive sort though and this one presented a problem for me. What would I tell my daughter? She is young enough still where she has not experienced death. She does not know of our mortal coil, of the snuffing out of little lights. As parents, as fathers, we guard our children. We also teach them, however, and are tasked with guiding them to understand the realities of the world and the next. “This will be a good learning opportunity” I thought as I watched the sickly chick falter. “If it dies, we can tell her and maybe she can help bury it.” 

A lofty idea. 

When the chick died, I did not tell my daughter. I did not make her bury it. I did not teach her a lesson. Instead I thought of her running through the field hugging her bundle of warm hay and my instinct to guard her innocence, her little light, won out. Let me hold onto it for just a little longer, world. Do not take it from me just yet. Not today. Not now. Let my little girl run through the fields and forests without knowing that we will return to the earth one day, that our hearts will become loam and our veins bough-dappled light. Let her gather sun warmed hay for just a while longer.

I brought the body of the little chick to the woodline and walked it into the forest, dark feathers against the white of the spring snow unmelted under the trees. It would not be there in the morning. It would, like us all, return. 

As I left the forest, I noticed the crimson buds of the maple trees had begun to emerge. It is remarkable how bright they are, how much promise they hold, how they endure through the winter-dark.

A forest of little lights brightening.

A forest of little lights reminding us that nothing ever truly dies.