Death of a Hen

If life is a precious gift that is over when it is over, how are we to stomach a death that comes too soon?

Growing up on a farm, I was deeply aware of life and death. The watermelon seeds we planted six inches apart in furrows grew into seedlings, then sprawled into a mass of vines sprinkled with fuzzy, oblong fruit that grew into striped balls bigger than my head. After we harvested out the watermelon to sell at the farmer’s market, the vines browned and shriveled and were tilled into the ground. I watched crop after crop—big, bursting heads of lettuce, emerald spinach, elephant-eared summer squash plants, rows and rows of broccoli—as their hollowed-out remains were flung into the air by the blades of the tiller. The cut-up pieces rotted and slimed, were subsumed back into the black dirt. I thought, too, as I ate green beans straight off the plant, or as a Sun Gold cherry tomato dissolved into the back of my throat, that something just seconds ago alive was now at the pit of my stomach, devoured.

I knew that I would also be devoured soon enough. That the cycles of life and death—the life that burst forth from death—did not exclude me. Pieces of me would break down, become the food of bacteria and bugs. The plants and animals I consumed would consume me. One day, just as suddenly as I had been born, had existed as flesh and bone, I would not exist.

*

On my eleventh birthday, my father gave me a journal. It was my “golden” birthday, since I was born on the eleventh of September, and though the journal was Hello Kitty-themed and filled with pale pink lines, I felt as if my father had given me a lifeline to adulthood.

It wasn’t just a journal to write in, he’d explained in the opening pages; it was a “secret” journal, complete with a lock and key. He called it our “Question Book.” I could write down any question I wanted to ask, and he would answer. A couple of days after my birthday, breath stuck in my throat, I wrote: What happens when I die?

In time, my father offered his answer:

We have such a strong sense of self, such a strong sense of our own existence, that it is nearly impossible to believe that part of us will end, that part of us could simply be extinguished when we die. Nobody wants to believe that. Everybody wants to live forever.

But here is what I have come to believe. In short, I believe that when it is over, it is over. I think that when I die I will be gone. There will no longer be a Henry except in the memories of the living and in the bodies of the organisms that feed on my body.

I believe that death is followed by nothingness. What is frightening about nothingness? Nothing is nothing. If you aren’t there to experience it, you can’t be afraid. There is no room for pain or suffering or hunger or thirst or despair or sadness in nothing. People imagine nothingness as darkness, but nothing is not black; it is not darkness. Neither is it light. It is nothing. Nothing cannot be experienced because there is nobody there to experience it. It has neither taste, nor smell, nor feel, nor sound, nor sight. No matter what you can think of, nothing is not that.

I think that once you accept death as inevitable and accept that, when you die, you no longer exist in any way, shape, or form, life becomes much more precious and beautiful. You had better enjoy the warmth of the sun on a cold, winter day. You’d better revel in the beauty of a snowfall. So my advice is to live life—because eventually it will come to an end. If you truly live while you are alive, then you can die in peace.

And I think that when that day comes, you—like me—will be able to say, “So be it. I have lived my life the way I wanted. While alive, I lived. Now I can die in peace and without fear or regret. Thank you, world, for hosting my existence.”

And your loved ones will take your body and lay it in the ground and perhaps plant a cherry tree on your grave, which will flower each spring. And seeing the blossoms, people will say, “Ah, Zoe Brockman lies under that tree. They say in youth she was as beautiful as the blue sky. She lived well and died well.”

And perhaps your grandchildren will pick the cherries in July that you, in your death, helped make so sweet.

Goosebumps shot up all over my arms as I read this for the first time, alone, in my room. The image of the cherry tree made joy bubble in my chest, but it couldn’t wash away my gnawing dread. My father explained the state of nothingness as something that I should not be afraid of, but trying to imagine a future that had no color, shape, or feel made my stomach churn. If it was truly over when it was over—if my spirit could not keep floating on without my body—then each moment, no sooner present than past, could not be wasted. The ticking of the Mickey Mouse clock on my wall echoed in my ears. I did not want to become nothing. Not yet.

*

I found the hen a few years later, in the winter, when a fresh sheet of snow hugged the frozen ground outside our house. For most of the afternoon I lay slumped on the couch in front of the woodstove while snowflakes meandered down from the grey-black sky, erasing the zigzagged print of my earlier boot tracks one flake at a time, until all proof of my existence vanished into an expanse of untouched white.

When the sun began to set I turned my gaze to the living room window: It was getting dark, and it was time to do the evening chores. I dragged myself up, pulled on my red winter coat, clambered downstairs to the basement to grab an empty white pail for eggs, shoved my feet into winter boots, and made my way out to the red and white barn. A world of white seemed to stretch infinitely around me as I stepped softly onto the newly fluffed snow. At first, when my fresh boot tracks disrupted the beauty and innocence of the path, my heart sagged. But as the cold air cleared my cluttered mind, the ground looked more and more like a canvas that I could mark with my textures and shapes, spinning myself around and dancing in that vast newness.

The moon shone a spotlight on me, lighting up the snow crystals like fireflies. My footsteps started to sound like a slow drumbeat, so I opened my mouth to sing, swinging the egg bucket to the rhythm. The words and the melody came to me moment by moment, and the moon seemed to hang on my every sound. Once at the barn, I switched to a hum and used all my weight to push the metal barn door open. I smiled as the sound of the chickens squawking and cooing filled my ears. My two goats, Mandy and Star, looked up at me from their place in the bedding, then hoisted themselves up, grunting and bleating all the while. Some chickens milled about, scratching through the hay and into the dirt, digging for insects. Others drank, filling their beaks with water and tilting their heads back to swallow.

Over to my right, in one of the nesting boxes, a hen lowered her heavy head into her feathers, letting it rest finally on the pillow of her body. I tiptoed past her and gathered all the eggs from the other empty nesting boxes first, transferring them gently into my bucket. Then I squatted down by the hen and reached under her feathers to see if she was hiding any eggs. I found one warm egg nestled under her legs, and touching it made me remember the first time I’d watched a hen lay an egg as a six-year-old. I had seen the pinkish shell emerge from the hen’s body, half and then suddenly whole, still wet and hot in my palm when I picked it up.

I placed the warm egg into my pail and whispered my apologies to the sleepy hen as I softly pushed her out of the nesting box and toward the roosts, where most of the other hens were already settling in for the night. “Thank you for the eggs,” I told them, remembering my great-grandma’s oft-quoted advice to always thank the hens for their precious gifts of delicious, yellow-gold-yolked eggs.

It wasn’t until after I’d given grain to the goats and filled the water pan that I noticed something was out of place—the tall copper-colored piece of plywood used to cover the entryway to the pasture was lying flat on the ground. Each morning I slid it open so that the chickens and goats could make their way outside, and each night I slid it back into place. That board had somehow toppled into the pen. How did that happen?

I stepped around a few hens milling about to get to the side of the pen. The board was heavier than I expected, and I had raised it halfway before I noticed a strange shape underneath. A hen lay there, crushed into an almost perfect rectangle, her eyes caked with blood and dirt. I stood in shock, a lump forming at the back of my throat. I had placed the board against the wall that morning, like I always did. Suddenly my hands felt alien, a little tingly, as if I’d just finished strangling her between my fingers. I imagined the hen in her last moments: pecking insistently at the dirt; the board teetering and falling in slow-motion while she dilly-dallied, unaware; and then she was slammed—pancaked between wood and ground.

I looked around. The hens settled onto their roosts to sleep. Mandy and Star ferociously gobbled their grain. They were probably munching on their hay when the board fell, I realized, and hadn’t even stopped, even as the world shifted irrevocably, and a life departed.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said, over and over. My shoulders slumped as I made my way outside the pen and found a small square sheet of glass to carry the hen on. I reached toward her, but snatched back my hand immediately. I couldn’t bring myself to touch the flattened hen. After a few tries, I sucked in my breath and picked her up by her feet so that she was upside-down. My father had shown us how this position calmed the chickens when we moved them to new pens and pastures. It seemed so wrong to hold her like this when she was heavy but limp, so I moved quickly to carefully place her on the glass. As I laid her down, her still-warm feet curled around my fingers. I gulped. Was she still alive?

Her blood-caked eyelids did not move, nor her chest, so I brought her outside on her glass stretcher to the woods. I wished I could dig her a real grave, but all I could do was use my bare fingers to brush away the snow. I placed her there, among the crystals sparkling in the chill moonlight, and sat, fingers numb, singing her a lullaby.

This hen’s death was meaningless. A waste of life. If, as my father had told me, life is a precious gift that is over when it is over, how are we to stomach a death that comes too soon? The hen was young and healthy, but she did not live until she was of ripe age. At least when foxes and owls mauled and ate the chickens, the cycle of life was fulfilled, and the gift of the hen’s life was transferred to the predator. But this hen was killed for no reason at all, by a board that had been improperly placed. She had been killed by my mistake. Death came swiftly and left no answers.

And so it might come for me, too, even when I was young and healthy and strong. It might come for my father, or for my brother. Then those of us who were left would have to reckon with the knowledge that they were forever gone, into the nothingness.

I trudged back to the house, the egg pail hanging from my wet, freezing hand. The lights of the house could not reach me fast enough. It was as if something I could not see was following me.

*

A couple of years ago, in the early fall, I lay alone in my bed. A windstorm ripped at my window, thrashing the shrub just outside the pane against the glass again and again. My body filled with a deepening dread as I recalled the uncooked tomato sauce I’d eaten earlier that day. My mother had canned the sauce the summer before. She canned whole trays of tomatoes at once, twenty quarts at a time, cutting out rotting portions of ultra-ripe tomatoes, chopping the remains into bits, and dumping them into an enormous pot. While the pot bubbled on the stove, she sterilized the gallon-sized mason jars and lids in boiling water, then filled the jars with ladles of sauce. Once all the jars were filled, she slapped hot lids on them and placed the jars into the boiling water of the canner, and left them to seal for half an hour.

If any part of the sealing process was done incorrectly—if, for instance, the jar sloshed over while it was being put in the boiler, and that little splash of tomato sauce compromised the sealing of the lid to the top of the jar—then bacteria could fester in that jar during all the months it sat on the shelves in the basement. Even worse, there was a strain of bacteria that was known to paralyze you, or even kill you, if you happened to consume it. My mother, always cautious, warned me over and over that I must always cook the sauce for twenty minutes before eating it, just in case, to kill off any bacteria that might be there. But that afternoon, in a haze of exhaustion and hunger, I’d neglected to cook the sauce for the required twenty minutes.

For the rest of the work day, I tried not to worry; whacking away at the weeds around baby lettuces on the farm the rest of the afternoon gave my mind an easy distraction. When the work day ended, though, the wind picked up and I was left alone for dinner. I couldn’t help myself; I peeked at the Wikipedia page for botulism, the name for the bacteria-borne food poisoning. I scanned my body for signs: weakening facial muscles, difficulty breathing and swallowing, drooping eyelids, dry mouth, lightheadedness, weak arm and leg muscles. I felt fine. But then it seemed, suddenly, that it was more difficult to swallow the rice I was eating. I stopped breathing for a second, then giggled. Nothing to worry about, I told myself. I tried to think of other things: how I’d be leaving for Japan to visit my parents in a little less than a month, how the farm season was almost over.

But then I felt something strange: My left arm felt limp. And so did my right foot. When I stepped onto my foot, I couldn’t fully sense the sole of my foot touch the surface of the floor. My mind raced. I’d read that the symptoms of botulism could appear up to ten to twelve hours after ingesting the bacteria, so feeling the effects of it now was plausible.

No, no, no, I thought. My body is fine, all is fine, I’m going to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep, as hard as I tried. I texted my partner, my messages becoming progressively more terror-filled. I was all alone, there was a violent wind crashing against the house, and at around two in the morning the electricity went out. My phone was almost dead. If something was truly wrong, I couldn’t even call 911. I stayed up all night, clenching my jaw and fists. It felt so wrong to die then, away from those I loved, drowning in absurd thoughts I could not control. I wanted to tell my partner and family and friends I loved them one last time. I wanted to prove to my parents that I could hold our farm together while they were gone. There was so much I still wanted to see in the world: Egypt, the stars in a clear desert sky, auroras in Canada. I wanted to write books, read everything I could get my hands on. I wanted to grow into the mature, loving person I knew I could be. And I wanted to hold a child to my breast, sing them lullabies, see the world through their young eyes.

When dawn broke, the sunlight that streamed in from the window seemed almost impossible. The windstorm had died down, and the electricity was back on. I had survived; or rather, there had been nothing wrong with my body in the first place. It had all been in my head.

*

I still think of my great-grandma Henrietta every time I collect the eggs. Sometimes it feels as if she is speaking through me, her voice within my voice, when I call out to thank the cooing chickens.

Before Great-Grandma died, just before her 102nd birthday, my grandparents took me to visit her in a Lutheran nursing home in Danforth, the small Illinois town where she farmed and raised three children through the Great Depression. Sometimes during our visits she’d sit up and hold my hand, look me in the eyes, and give me a slow smile. But most of the time we’d arrive and she’d be fast asleep, a frail body of bones and translucent skin curled on a small bed, in a small room at the end of a cramped hallway full of closed doors.

I didn’t want Great-Grandma to die. I kept wishing, year after year, that she’d keep hanging on just a bit more. I needed her to live. But during those journeys to the nursing home, I saw where she spent her days: the musty, clinical smell of the building, slumped people in wheelchairs not talking to one another, each person, in their own way, awaiting death. When death finally came for Great-Grandma, I could not cry, though I tried to. At her funeral, when the wailing of an older woman two rows ahead of us finally ended and the service came to a close, I felt a relief settle onto me.

When life becomes weary, I now understand, there can be joy in passing on. The fragments of memory and body slip into the living. You no longer carry the weight of loss or shame or guilt on your shoulders. You make way for another life to grow strong in your place.

I still panic, some nights, about death, of the abyss of nothingness that is to come. But these days I wonder if my fear of death, put differently, is my will to live—my fire that keeps me awake in the world, the kind of sheer will that perhaps helped keep Great-Grandma on this earth for over a century. If death in its many forms approached me now, I would beat it off with all my might. And isn’t that, in the end, what my father wanted me to feel? To not take life lightly, to hold it precious but with an iron grip, to run and run the marathon until it is over—so that when I tip off the edge of the living and into nothingness, my heart will be full and satisfied?

As a child I often dreamed of becoming a goddess, forever looking down on our blue planet, following the stories of humankind and animals and plants. But how lonely it must be to only look; to be just eyes. And how blissful it may feel, one day, to finally quiet my chattering mind and unclench my jaw and fists—to give in to the unknowable, to trust-fall back into the black-loamed bosom of earth, to be tasted as sugar droplets in the fruit of a cherry tree.