Everyone I know lives with grief. Grief is, for human beings, a natural state of mind.

We may find ways to block our grief, or to disguise it. We’re not supposed to be grieving. We’re supposed to lead “happy” lives. As a result of this kind of thinking, we put a lot of work into denying our grief.

I’ve put a stupendous amount of work into denial. As an adolescent I thought I had discovered that “confidence” was the essential ingredient in “success,” which was the key to “happiness.” My notion of confidence included disavowing most of my anxiety and sadness. To be confident I thought I needed to feel safe. To feel safe I needed secure barriers between me and the pervasive sadness of the world.

Decades later I realized that I was refusing to recognize the sadness in others because it called up the sadness in me. 

When I talk about grief or sadness, I’m not talking about depression. Clinical depression is a serious illness. It needs to be treated by the best means available. It’s dangerous and destructive. If you believe you may be depressed, reach out to a professional trained to help.

Grief and sadness, on the other hand, are normal reactions to a world that fails to live up to our expectations. 

Each time our heart expands to contain a beautiful new vision – a fulfilling job, a gracious home, a loving relationship, world peace, economic justice, a work of art, a successful family, a really nice car – it creates a space for a little grief to occupy when those visions are lost. And they are all, every one of them, eventually lost. Every single person and thing we can love on this earth will disappear, some of them while we watch. Some of them may survive until we disappear, as we know we will.  It seems we are designed for grief. We idealize. Our careers, our relationships, our homes, our societies, our idealisms and our bodies all ultimately fail to match our aspirations. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is perfect. And so we grieve.

Our visions of human goodness are difficult to sustain. People often fail to live up to our expectations. We might catch our spouse, or our child, in some small (or large) dishonesty.  Perhaps we obsess over our own moral failings. More often we’re angered and saddened by popular depictions of our species brutalizing one another, and the planet we live on. Five minutes spent watching the news can convince us that the world is a seething cauldron of human greed, lust, manipulation and violence. It isn’t, by the way. As a longtime journalist, I’m well aware of how the news media tend to compress and extrude the ugliest narratives of human affairs. Almost everyone is trying to be generous, moral, honest and kind. And I think most of the time, most people succeed. It’s just that none of us succeeds all the time.

Our idealized visions are not realized in this world. Even when circumstances converge to perfectly support our visions, those circumstances don’t last for long.

In his sweeping book about our present age, “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” the writer John Green says it has taken him all his life to “fall in love with the world.” To fall in love with the world, he says, “is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.” Then he acknowledges, “When my breastbone starts to hurt and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends.”

“We all know how loving ends.”

We all know, but we are so often unwilling to acknowledge it. Loving ends in grief.

To love anything or anyone wholeheartedly, we must be ready for grief. If we really want to love, it’s possible that we’ll need to accept grief as our natural, and inevitable, companion.

My dad, Lonnie, was raised on a small, dry, barely viable New Mexico ranch. He was a soft-hearted boy. He loved all the ranch babies: calves, lambs, kittens. He nuzzled the tiny newborn chicks in his hands. He carried lambs to shelter and bottle-fed orphan calves. My oldest photograph of him shows him as a toddler, in bib overalls and cowboy boots, astride a tolerant turkey, his arms around its neck. 

Of course that turkey and most of the other ranch animals were killed for his family’s table. He was wounded by their deaths. At an early age he learned how love ends. He remembers the routine of raising and killing animals as emotionally devastating. As soon as he could, he got out of the ranching business.

He stayed on the ranch longer than he wanted to, though, because he was the youngest of 10 children and by the time he hit adolescence, his aging parents needed his help. He got a license at age 12 so he could drive them. He stayed until his father died. Then his mother moved to town and Lonnie left the ranch forever. 

That soft-hearted boy grew into a gentle and soft-hearted man. He loved and cared for his parents through old age. He nursed his mother-in-law in his home for a decade. Then he cared for my mother during years of struggle with terminal bone-marrow cancer. He watched those people die under his care. I watched him grieve.

As he always had, he recovered. He married a second time at age 80. He and his wife, Mary, enjoyed five years of love and laughter before she began periodically to lose track of things like the day of the week, where she lived and, finally, who, exactly, he was. Now he visits her twice every day in a “memory-care facility.” That euphemism artfully masks the pain and grief that reside there.

Lonnie knows that love ends, inexorably, in grief. He’s ready for that, it seems. And so, he can keep loving.

Big Grief is not rationalizable. When we lose a child, a spouse, a parent or a close friend, grief hits us with a disorienting force. We may find that the grief owns us. For a time, it owned me.  After Noah died, Carolyn and I asked ourselves and each other many times, “Will we always hurt like this?” The answer seems to be that pain, like everything else, varies. It has many textures and dimensions. So we don’t always hurt the same way. But it seems like we might always hurt just as much.

 We say, “Oh, well.” Just, “Oh, well.” We speak it to each other as an acknowledgement and a reminder. We have no words to console ourselves or change our circumstances. But we have each other’s understanding. And we have our lives to live. “Oh, well,” we say to each other, meaning, “Oh, well. Let’s live. Even if living is painful.” 

Until it was destroyed by grief, we had an idealized vision for our lives and the lives of our children. Then those fantasies were swept away and we were left in a painful reality. “Oh, well,” was our way of saying to each other that we could accept that and carry on. 

As we’ve become more accustomed to grief as our daily companion, I think we’ve come to recognize it more readily all around us. Sad things happen to people we know every day. Marriages end. Illness and injury come to carry dreams away. 

The news is full of terrible grief – wars, epidemics and famines rage continuously somewhere in our world.

As I’ve become accustomed to living with my grief, I find myself at least a little better able to attend to the grief of others.

When you open a hard-shell acoustic guitar case, the moment you pull the instrument free of its protective pads you can feel it come alive in your hands. Your touch, the moving air, every little thing draws a delicate, random music from the strings and the resonant wood. It’s a music you can feel more than hear. When you return the guitar to its case, it sings until you force it down between the cushions. 

When my heart was broken out from its hard shell, it resonated in a new, more sensitive and responsive way.

That surprised me. I think I might have expected grief to harden me, to toughen my emotions. We often portray the survivors of grief and trauma as grim veterans: stoic old soldiers beyond the acknowledgement of their own pain, or the pain of other people. 

My experience was quite the opposite. I felt much more sensitive. I resonated in a new way with the pain of others. Even more surprising, I found that I wanted to keep resonating like that. I discovered a world full of people who hurt like me. My heart thrummed in recognition. We share the sweet, sad, music of human life. 

For a long time before I encountered Big Grief, I believed that I could make my world less sad than the world inhabited by other people. I created hundreds of little stories in my head describing the ways I was exceptional (virtuous, smart, hard-working, health-minded, blah, blah, blah). So I was different from the people who were suffering. 

The effort was, I find in retrospect, exhausting as well as uncompassionate. 

Life is a pavement of griefs, most of which we roll right over. As small children we cry and throw tantrums when we’re hurt or disappointed. We show the world our grief, regardless of how trivial its causes. We don’t feel compelled to put our disappointments in any larger context. So we feel no shame when we grieve. Maybe that’s why children seem to recover so quickly. They don’t feel shame over their grief. There’s no need to dwell in it, trying to rationalize.

 When we get a little older, most of us stop crying over every small thing. We learn to control our feelings, or at least to hide them. But we keep hurting. 

We rationalize and create little internal narratives to ease small pains. When a friend cuts off contact, for instance, we may tell ourselves our friend was neurotic and probably had some narcissistic reason for ending the friendship. Or we might decide that ending the friendship was our own initiative. We wanted to focus on new relationships. Either of those stories may ease the pain of losing a friend. 

Yet missing our friend, acknowledging the loss and the sadness, might be less trouble and work than creating and maintaining a story that’s less sad, and less true. And in a way we haven’t really lost our friend until we stop feeling affection for them. If I love you, you’re my friend regardless of how you may feel about me.

How many of us work to maintain a false narrative about our physical appearance and experience a pang of grief every time we catch sight of our image in the mirror? 

Don’t most of us try to believe we’re at least a little more generous than we are? More intelligent? More fair and accommodating? Even more happy?

Our careers provide many opportunities for experiencing and rationalizing disappointments. Almost no one achieves everything in their work that they set out to accomplish. I suspect many of us feel the occasional stab of pain when we contemplate career failures of one kind or another. The temptation is, of course, to create stories that minimize our responsibility. 

“No one could have foreseen those circumstances.” 

“My boss was an idiot.” 

“My competitor cheated.” 

“My employer exploited me.”

It might be a lot simpler and more productive to accept our losses and the accompanying grief, and focus on learning the lessons of that experience. It stings, of course. But if we don’t acknowledge the reality directly, it somehow has a way of eventually penetrating our complacency anyway.

I used to think of this process – the process of creating stories to rationalize and numb painful realities – as a valuable adult skill. I’m not so sure about that any more. It might be more grown up to accept, simply, that life doesn’t usually conform to our idealizations, even though that can make us sad. 

Sustaining our dubious narratives requires attention and energy. We are, quite literally, invested in our rationalizations. When they break down, we are left vulnerable. 

Big Grief thoroughly exhausted me so that I found that I didn’t have the energy for negotiating with my many little griefs. When I was defeated by grief, exhausted and unable to sustain my fantasies, I had a strange and unexpected new sensation of spaciousness. Spaciousness to think. Spaciousness to feel. Spaciousness to hurt. It wasn’t a welcome sensation, exactly, but it wasn’t unpleasant. The boundaries I’d been maintaining to secure my delusions of safety and superiority were both protective and confining. When grief tore them down I was both exposed and liberated. I was liberated to feel what I was feeling, because I didn’t have the strength to do otherwise. And very gradually I found I wanted to hold on to that new freedom, even if it left me exposed. I wanted to hang on to that capacity for accepting my own moment-by-moment experience, rather than constantly trying to replace it with a “happier” narrative.

As new experiences began presenting themselves to my broken heart, among them was an unexpected change in how I felt joy. My grandson smiled. One of our dogs did something funny. A friend called unexpectedly. And then there it was. Joy felt different with a broken heart. It felt more intense and more pure. I didn’t feel my old compulsion to create a story about why I felt joy. It just arrived, in the moment, like a cool breeze on a hot day, and I was grateful. I didn’t need to reassure myself that I could preserve any specific source for the feeling, because I knew that was impossible. I didn’t have to put in the context of my “happy” life any more, the way I used to. I no longer depended on life being “happy.” 

 I no longer believed I could protect my sense of joy, nor that I needed to. If it could show up now, under these circumstances, then it could probably return at any time. Possibly for the first time in my life I could accept and appreciate a kind word, a hug or a gift without making any assessment of whether I deserved it. When my self-regard was based on a complex system of narratives, many of them about how exceptional I was, those narratives also anaesthetized my feelings of vulnerability. I reassured myself that when good things happened I somehow deserved my good fortune.

Regrettably, I was straining to believe I deserved my good fortune more than others would. I deserved to do well. Others deserved it less. And so I was inclined to check on the status of my exceptionality constantly, especially in good times, to make sure I was special enough to keep the good fortune rolling. In my experience there’s nothing more effective in dampening a sense of joy than the absurd belief that we need to be special, somehow, to deserve it. 

When my child died, I no longer believed I deserved good fortune. If I were required to deserve good fortune, then I must somehow have deserved the terrible thing that had happened to me. 

I just couldn’t, for a while, feel special any more. And, to my surprise, when joy emerged in my life again I felt it with a new intensity, unconditioned by the need to justify it in any way. It seems sadness doesn’t occupy a space separate from joy. They coexist in a single space, our mind, simultaneously and continuously. As we recovered from the initial impact of devastating grief, Carolyn and I both began noticing occasional, vivid flashes of pleasure. The joy we felt didn’t dispel our sadness. It appeared there, sharing space with the sadness. 

Carolyn compares the coexistence of grief and joy to the experience of gazing through a glass marble as you turn it between your fingers. Many different colors, lights and apparitions can appear, dissolving slowly from one vision to the next. We turn the marble of our experience and look out at the world through its prism. 

Blue. 

Green. 

Red. 

Joyful. 

Sad. 

Joyful.

Jojo is an Ornate Box Turtle. She lives in our vegetable garden. We first encountered her about 15 years ago, minding her own business among the okra. At some point we learned she likes to eat a grub worm if you offer her one. Or a cherry tomato. She sometimes shows up for a shower when we turn on a sprinkler.

 The first time we saw her, we figured she was passing through. We hung out together for a few days, and then she was gone for weeks. Then we saw her again, just about where she was the first time. Then she disappeared for the better part of a year.

They don’t call Jojo’s species “ornate” for nothing. She’s an object of elaborate beauty. The top of her shell is a network of abstract rosettes in bright yellow on a dark green background. Her face and front legs are dabbed with yellow circles, like bright little suns. 

We’ve cohabited with Jojo for a decade and a half, but we don’t really know much about her. So when she appears, two or three times each summer, we’re delighted. And we’re fascinated by her mysterious life.

Just last summer my wife Carolyn witnessed, for the first time, Jojo disappearing. She found her half buried in a patch of mud, gradually descending into the muck. Box turtles in Kansas apparently spend a lot of time underground, sometimes as much as two feet deep in winter. 

The species was common and widespread across the Great Plains until we started farming here. A creature that needs grass, shade and open water – and especially one that spends a great deal of time in a shallow burrow – suffers when the prairie is plowed or paved.

Lots of reptiles share our property. We see at least four species of snake regularly and several varieties of skink. A few times each summer I discover I’ve killed a snake while mowing the grass. I hate that but I haven’t figured out a way to prevent it. Even mowing very slowly I can’t seem to pick them out ahead of my mower in the grass, and they evidently don’t know how to get out of my way.

One of my horrors is that I’ll hit Jojo, buried in the garden, with the rototiller. To maintain some control over the garden weeds we have cultivated the garden several times over the course of each summer. Every time, I wonder whether I’ll crush or dismember Jojo with the machine. 

Partly to minimize the tilling, we’ve been building raised garden beds from old lumber. It’s easier to control the weeds inside the beds and they can be tilled by hand with a garden fork just once or twice a year. Also, my aging gardener’s body prefers weeding on a stool, so the raised beds are at a friendlier height.

Minimizing our tilling has other benefits as well. Soil is packed with life. In a single gram (a quarter-teaspoon, roughly) of healthy soil scientists find 200 million individual bacteria; a million fungi;  100,000 algae; 10,000 protozoans; and a thousand nematodes. Tilling, just for one summer, can destroy two-thirds of those living things and then it takes years, or decades, for them to return. 

Farming and gardening connect us with all these other families of living things being sustained by – and sustaining – this land. It’s sort of a group project. When I sink a trowel in the garden soil to remove a thistle my interests are obviously different than the thistle’s, not to mention the hundreds of millions of soil microbes whose lives I’m disturbing. But we’re all seeking our livelihood here, side-by-side, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating. We all ultimately benefit from a healthy system. If we can contribute to the general well being we have a chance to improve life for everybody. 

As we distribute manure and irrigate our flowers and vegetables, we try to nurture and improve the health of the soil. When we nurture the soil we are, in fact, nurturing the billions of creatures on whom the soil’s health depends.

And healthy soil creates more valuable food for us, as well. Healthier soils produce more nutritious foods.  

Soil is not dirt. At least not the dirt we usually refer to when we say “dirt”. The ground beneath our feet, when it’s healthy, is a souffle of minerals, organic matter and myriad creatures. This living alchemy generates beauty, nutrition and oxygen. The health of the soil is fundamental to the health of every living thing.

Under a microscope healthy soil is revealed to contain a menagerie of tiny hyperactive denizens: bacteria like tiny grains of rice or beans; hairy protozoans and worm-like nematodes that feed on the bacteria; and predatory arthropods, relatives of lobsters and crabs, with armored bodies and powerful jaws that prey on the nematodes and protozoans.

Grubs and earthworms are the dominant leviathans of subsurface life. The pudgy, pink earthworm is an omnivorous titan of the underworld. They eat both plant material and every variety of microorganism, leaving behind slime-lined tunnels and trails of fertile waste, which in turn nourishes plant roots and new generations of microbes. 

Grub worms are larvae, destined to emerge next spring as one of 350,000 species of beetle. The most iconic, and some of the most common of them, are the scarabs sometimes known as dung beetles.

As a kid growing up in the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico I was enchanted by a flying scarab known as the Green June Beetle, which we called June Bugs. Their shells appear  a gorgeous, iridescent green, an effect scientists call “structural coloration” because microscopic structures on their surfaces are designed to reflect blue, turquoise and green light frequencies, so in the sunlight they offer the vivid, shifting appearance of precious stones. 

 More common than June Bugs in that desert was the comical ground-dweller we knew as the “stink bug,” the Pinacate Beetle perpetually stalking about the desert floor. Easily riled, the Pinacate Beetle’s defense mechanism is to raise its hind end and squirt a noxious chemical. I could never smell it, but the beetles were everywhere so it must have worked, somehow, to repel predators.

Both the glamorous June Bugs and lowly stink bugs are dung beetles. Their larvae are grub worms that feed on the feces of larger animals. The grubs will live in a pile of dung if they can find one spacious enough. Shit is their food, and often their nursery.

The ancient Egyptians revered dung beetles as symbols of transformation and resurrection. In their hieroglyphs a beetle literally meant “to become,” or “to transform.” Some scarabs form balls of dung and roll them across the ground. The beetle-faced Egyptian god Khepri, in identical fashion, rolled the sun across the sky every day, literally equating the source of all life – the sun – with a ball of shit. The ancient Egyptians seem to have understood soil health and its importance to living things pretty well.

Now we have science to help demonstrate that the soil, and the dung that fortifies it, are as important as the sun to energizing earthly life. 

From first-hand observation the Egyptians knew, 5,000 years ago, that dung nourished the soil, and soil continuously recycled waste into new vitality. This cycle remains as important today as it was during the reign of the Pharaoh Wazner. 

The soil’s vital efficiency is reliant on the diversity of its resident species.  Soil microbes facilitate biochemical reactions in a critical chain of events that is interrupted by the absence of diversity. When we kill off a percentage of the living things in a field, the plants grown there are less successful and the food we harvest from them is less nutritious. 

A bunch of stuff we’ve been doing lately – plowing, applying pesticides, applying industrial fertilizers – has negative effects on the living diversity of our soil, and its fertility.

Like the soil, our bodies also contain a surprisingly diverse cast of characters. More than half the cells in your body are not human. Only a little over 40 percent of the cells inside your skin carry human DNA. And because human DNA is relatively simple, with fewer genes than other organisms, if we add up all the genes in a human body the microbial genes can outnumber the human genes a thousand to one. The total number of non-human living creatures in a normal adult human being’s digestive system is said to be between 10 trillion and 100 trillion. 

Healthy soil, by volume, contains just about the same number of microorganisms as a human body. But recently our bodies and the soil have both been depleted of their microbial diversity by modern lifestyles and industrial agricultural practices. Our homes, bodies, pastures and fields have become dramatically less hospitable environments for microorganisms, lately. It’s becoming more and more clear that the health and diversity of the soil biome is most likely related to what’s going on in our bodies. We’re beginning to suspect that health of the soil is necessary to the health of our bodies, including our brains.

We’re just beginning to study myriad health effects of changes in the populations of microorganisms in human bodies, which are generally referred to as the human “ biome.” We know quite a bit about specific gut organisms that can make us sick – Typhoid, Shigella, Salmonella, etc. – but very little about the thousands of species that peacefully share the space within our skin. However, there’s a bunch of new evidence that the health and diversity of a person’s biome has a profound effect on individual health and studies have connected a lack of biome diversity to obesity, heart disease and, astonishingly, a number of psychiatric diseases.

The longest nerve in your body is the vagus, or pneumogastric nerve that connects your brain to your heart, lungs and digestive system. It also branches off to the laryngeal nerve to control speech; and to sensitize parts of your ears. It creates your gag reflex. If the vagus nerve is stimulated by something perceived as harmful in your stomach, it makes you vomit. It controls hunger. When it’s damaged, a person may eat uncontrollably or not feel like eating at all. It can carry the sensation of orgasm from your sexual organs to your brain. If you are frightened suddenly, it’s the vagus nerve that causes you to pee yourself.

Artificially stimulating the vagus nerve can help patients with severe depression. A damaged vagal nerve can cause tiredness, dementia and paranoia. 

Parkinson’s Disease is believed to start in the gastrointestinal system and spread, via the vagus nerve, to the brain. Scientists are investigating the possibility that microorganisms in the gut, when they are injured, may be sending messages through the vagus nerve that have a negative effect on the dopamine reward system, and that this negative effect could eventually induce Parkinson’s Disease.

We don’t yet have an understanding of the biome’s role in all this. We know that most of the non-human living things within our bodies are in the gut. We know our biggest neural pathway, the vagus nerve, carries information from the digestive system to the brain. 

So just how many of our thoughts and moods are influenced – or dictated – by the microbes? That, we don’t know. Maybe a lot of them.

Unhealthy soil can create an unhealthy gut, which may create an unhealthy mind. 

Some scientists are suggesting that we should view human beings and their microbial inhabitants; the soil; the plants; the bacteria in the air and in our food as one “superorganism” connected through a microbiome that transcends the barriers between species. The trillions of living things that share our bodies migrate in and out through our food, drink and air. When you pick up a bell pepper at the farmer’s market, put it down and then rub your eye, you’ve most likely distributed some of your biome to the environment, and some of the biome’s environment to your body. And so, with each passing moment, your body transforms with the introduction or depletion of new residents.

This might be disturbing. We have, after all, been trained to avoid “contamination” by “germs.” But from another perspective I sometimes feel thrilled by the notion that my existence isn’t conscribed by my skin, my brain or even my species. It feels like a great thing to be part of the “superorganism” that inhabits this planet, carrying on its immense, communal life around the globe for eons.

Compassion, in that context, is also self-interest. The health of the planet and its myriad creatures can’t really be meaningfully separated from the health of our own bodies.

We accuse narcissists of “navel-gazing,” or living in a state of preoccupation with themselves. So it’s ironic, and maybe amusing, that to contemplate our own navels, stomachs, intestines and organs is, in fact, to contemplate a vast menagerie of creatures that live there, and influence our lives in profound and mysterious ways.

We’re building garden beds and retiring the roto-tiller because, in part, we were worried about Jojo. We don’t want to kill her with our machine. That sentimental concern has led to the contemplation of many layers of cause and effect, from a turtle, to grub worms, to soil microbes, to dung beetles, to vegetables, to our stomachs and back to our own minds.

You and I share a gift. We can feel compassion for those we do not know and will never meet. We can feel compassion for future generations. We can feel compassion for other creatures. And we can attempt to take action to minimize suffering – human and animal, near and far, today and in the future. 

As far as we know, this is a uniquely human trait. Even in the act of killing we can, and do, try to minimize suffering. Of all the world’s predators, humans are the only one, best as we can tell,  that tries to kill humanely. 

I find myself grasping for a noun to represent the adjective, “humane.” According to the dictionary, that word is “humaneness.” But that’s hard to say, looks strange on paper and just sounds weird. So, by instinct, I usually grab the word “humanity.” 

But that doesn’t sound quite right, either.

I think maybe “mercy” is the word.

Mercy can’t be measured. Mercy is a goal, not a characteristic.

I stopped at the kitchen window one spring morning and noticed something strange going on outside between our house and the barn. We had about 100 very young lambs at the time and our border collie, Flash, seemed to be devouring one of them on the lawn.

We had Flash and three Great Pyrenees guard dogs helping us care for our sheep and cattle. Flash was a four-year-old veteran, a gifted sheepdog, and generally very protective and skillful with the lambs. All sorts of unexpected things can happen among the animals, but it seemed very unlikely that Flash had killed a lamb to eat it. 

Every year a few lambs die, of course. The dogs routinely camp out and protect a dead lamb for a few days. After the dead body has begun to decompose, they eat it. 

Thanks to centuries of breeding, both Border Collies and Great Pyrenees dogs are generally protective of livestock. Instinctively, they are also protective of their territory and their food. All these instincts, combined, provide a pretty effective deterrent against outside predators. Where we live coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions and stray dogs are all threats.

Flash was particularly attentive to baby sheep and he had a special gift, a strange and amazing aptitude for bringing stray lambs back to the flock. He spent all day, in lambing season, on patrol. Young, inexperienced little lambs often fall asleep in the pasture and get left behind when the sheep flock moves away. Border Collies feel an innate compulsion to keep flocks of animals together, so an abandoned lamb presented, for Flash, a problem to be solved. When he was about a year old Flash developed his own technique for addressing this situation. He would go to the stray baby and stimulate it until it stood. By “stimulate,” I mean he would nuzzle it, mouth it and even pick it up and drop it, repeatedly, until it stood up. Watching this, you could easily reach the conclusion that he was going to hurt the lamb and we ran out to stop him a few times, only to find the baby was perfectly fine and ready to run back to its mom. Passers-by have even driven to the house to tell us Flash was killing lambs. He wasn’t. Not ever.

Once Flash had the sleepy lamb on its feet and fully awake, he would lick it and nuzzle it until it imprinted on him. Newborn lambs will imprint on anyone. If you pick one up to carry it for a few seconds, its instinct when you put it down is to follow you. Flash convinced lambs that he was the licking, nuzzling, attentive guardian they should follow, and then he would lead them back to the flock. When he got close to the adult sheep, he would speed away to the far side of the flock to push all the adults back toward the wayward baby. Once the baby was back among the sheep with its mom, Flash would move away.

I know this sounds like a scene from a saccharine movie, but we’ve seen him do this dozens of times. It’s a dance he choreographed himself and knows well.

When I got to the wounded lamb on the lawn that day, it was alive and struggling as Flash ate its entrails directly from its abdominal cavity. It was a grim scene. I ran for a sharp knife, shooed the dog away and killed the poor lamb by slicing through the arteries in its throat.

I can see, in retrospect, that my decisions that day were guided by quite a bit of specialized information. I knew that coyotes had been pressuring the flock for several days, taking a baby from its mother just two nights before. I knew our farm dogs’ breeding reliably protected our living lambs from their predatory impulses. A dead lamb, on the other hand, was different. A lamb whose organs were spilling from its belly was probably in the “dead lamb” category, from the dog’s perspective. That is to say, “food.” 

So even though I found Flash eating the poor little creature’s organs out of its open abdominal cavity (probably causing a lot of pain), I was reasonably certain that he wasn’t responsible for the injury. He had, in all likelihood, interrupted a coyote that had injured the lamb attempting to kill and abduct the baby.

So I was pretty sure I didn’t need to discipline the dog.

On a farm one gets used to a certain amount of gore. A live disembowelment is seriously gorey and still disturbing, of course, but a farmer necessarily develops enough tolerance to help an injured creature even when the situation is pretty gross. My gag reflex has calmed down considerably over the course of our decades of farming. We hate to see an animal suffer. But farmers who raise livestock are called to attend directly to the injuries and illnesses of their animals. We can’t always wait for a veterinarian. Ideally, the impulse to ease an animal’s suffering overcomes our aversions. 

I knew how to kill an animal with a knife, and generally kept one close at hand. It’s an infrequent necessity, but a critical one. And just a few experiences with that necessity will focus one’s mind on precision and decisiveness. To botch that job is to prolong a gruesome death, and that’s extremely disturbing. So we remember our mistakes – hopefully minor – and do better the next time.

From the time I left the back door until I dispatched the injured baby, probably less than two minutes passed. Considering the situation, that was maybe the best I could have hoped for.

A lamb carcass on the lawn isn’t an ideal outcome, but by my own standard for compassion exercised in the real world I felt like I had reduced the suffering to the best of my ability. Compassion was a small but critical part of that – the inspiration. To help, I would say I needed the right information and a practiced sense of resolve. And a sharp knife of course.

Humans are the only animals, it seems, that try to minimize suffering in the act of killing for food. We are predisposed, seemingly by our very natures, to want to limit pain. 

Cats often play with a dying mouse. Coyotes will begin devouring a sheep while it’s still alive. But most humans, hunters, farmers or nomads, idealize a humane process of killing.

Even our conscientious farm dogs show no compunctions toward the feelings of rabbits, skunks or raccoons, or an eviscerated lamb for that matter. Whatever form of compassion they might feel doesn’t extend to food.

I like to think our long practice at taking care of animals as compassionately as we can prepared me to do the right thing that day. If I analyze it, though, I’m left with no certainty:

• I can’t know for sure that the lamb was hurt by a predator and not a reckless sheepdog, who should have been disciplined to prevent other lambs from being hurt.
• I can’t know if the lamb would have suffered less if I left it to the dog.
• I can’t even know for certain whether, in raising our own livestock for food, we are reducing – or increasing – the total quantity of suffering in the world.

The life we live among our animals provides us with a daily practice of compassion, in all its complexity. We are practicing, not perfecting. We raise our animals from birth, attend to their needs and admire their beauty. Many, we know by name. We care for them and about them. We try to provide them with natural lives appropriate to their physical and psychological needs. And we kill and eat them. We try to end their lives by the most humane means available. Of course this strikes some of our vegan friends as hypocrisy.

We could, after all, live on a plant-based diet. I admire the conscientious commitment of people who do. But in our case that wouldn’t, necessarily, reduce suffering. No cattle or sheep would die for our vegan sustenance, true, but the acres of crops raised to otherwise supply our needs would strip the farmland of other life. Our pastures provide habitat for dozens of species. The soybean fields next door are systematically managed to eliminate almost every life form, except soybeans. 

Our pastures, by contrast, teem with abundance and biological diversity. 

If one measures cruelty in lives lost, then the vegetable farmer’s all-out assault on nature is far more cruel than raising a few cattle or sheep for meat.

I’m not advocating the carnivore diet, particularly. But I do think we should acknowledge the complexity of the system in which we live – and especially the sacrifices that are necessary to support each of our individual lives. There’s no way to avoid it: other beings must die in order for us to live. Some, we kill for food. Others are destroyed by plowing or agricultural chemicals. Or they die of starvation because we have taken their habitats. Our very presence is, in a way, an act of murder.

No living being survives except through the sacrifice of others. Each calorie we consume deprives some other creature of the same nourishment. Each leaf on every tree casts a shadow in which some other leaf on another tree may not flourish. 

As the planet’s most ubiquitous, consumptive and rapidly expanding inhabitant we have forced tremendous sacrifice on other living things. 

Humanity’s continual expansion is killing off whole species at a rate at least 100 times (and perhaps as great as 1,000 times) greater than the baseline rate of extinction that has existed in nature. We are, in a way, the worst pandemic in the planet’s history, for thousands of species.  The suffering that lies behind these staggering numbers is inestimable. We are responsible and we know it. 

We could reverse our expansion and give back some room for everything else. We know how.

Compassion is humanity’s birthright. Innocence certainly is not. We live at the expense of others.

And in that stark fact lies beautiful potential. In everything we do, we encounter myriad opportunities to extend mercy and exercise compassion. 

A decade ago I set out to write about compassion. In our increasingly connected world, I believed compassion was going to be very important if we wanted to preserve human creativity, health and prosperity. So I decided to write about that. 

I wasn’t up to it.

I discovered that I didn’t know much about compassion. And I was very disappointed to find that I really wasn’t very good at it.  

Every human being has an innate gift for compassion, me included, but I had never tried to work much with it. Confidence, irrational certainty and various civilized forms of aggression were the tools I picked up most often to address a problem of any kind. 

Until I began this project I hadn’t noticed that I was like that. I just figured I was a really compassionate person who was forced, by circumstance, to be kind of an asshole once in a while. People who knew me seemed to think that, too. 

Habitually, I believed that my intellect, my healthy habits and my virtuous views – in a word, my superiority – would provide some kind of safety. But in that arrogant cocoon I was cut off from others, especially those who were suffering. That separation was intentional. Not conscious, but intentional. I unconsciously worked to preserve my sense of security. I quietly avoided coming into direct contact with suffering people, especially if that encounter might reveal the obvious fact that I wasn’t safe at all, that I was very much like anyone else, vulnerable to all the human pain the world has to offer.

And in my various, illusory states of psychological refuge the muscles of my compassion were gradually atrophying.

To offer authentic compassion to others, we may first need to acknowledge our own vulnerability, and our experience of suffering. Our own suffering helps us build empathy for others, and empathy provides the musculature of compassion. We exercise those muscles by acknowledging our vulnerability and experiencing our own pain as fully as we can.

This is not to say we should seek to experience suffering. No need. We are human beings. Inevitably, suffering finds us. 

In August of 2013 our son Noah died. He was about a month shy of his 26th birthday.

He had struggled with his drug addiction for years. 

He died alone in an apartment we rented for him near our home, the culmination of years of addiction concluding in a suicidal drinking binge.

For most of us, I think, parenting is our most heartfelt responsibility and the most cherished task of our lives. Most people would probably say that the love they feel for their children is the most powerful emotion they have ever felt. We would, as it is so often said, do anything for our children. 

When our child succumbed to drug addiction and gradually descended into a hell of delusions and self-loathing, we naturally tried  to help in any, and every, way we could think of. And involuntarily, but with equal desperation, we searched our memories for a cause. 

Forever we ask ourselves, “What did I do wrong?” “What did we do wrong?” And more fundamentally, “How did this happen?”

I suppose any honest parent can remember thousands of mistakes they made, each misstep a possible cause of some psychic injury to a child. Certainly I can. When your child suffers from the illness of addiction you have a reason to compulsively sort through the full catalogue of those errors. I have. Of course there’s no direct line of cause and effect. We reexamine the record endlessly, and fruitlessly. 

When our child died we were left permanently without answers. We faced a few grim truths. We had loved him with all our hearts. We had invested all our hope in his recovery. And we had failed.

To fail one’s child can be, emotionally speaking, equivalent to failing as a human being.

The animal pain I felt when Noah died was, to me, shocking. Just the sense of loss was overwhelming. I realized that I would love him and miss him for the rest of my life, and that I might never love him less or miss him less than I did on that first terrible day. 

Through years of watching his disease progress we had, of course, had many reasons to worry for his life. We braced ourselves. We prepared for the worst. We visualized how we would cope. I can’t say any of that was very useful. There are some experiences that just can’t be prepared for.  

When I tell someone I had a child who died their most common response is, “I can’t imagine how that must feel.” That is a wise and accurate observation. You can’t. I couldn’t. I advise you not to try, because attempting to imagine that loss is painful and the visualizing won’t do any good. At least it didn’t do me any good.

When Noah died  I felt I knew, maybe for the first time, what it meant to have a broken heart.

In the dark canyons of my deepest grief I found I had been stripped of the armor I had worn to protect a sense of security in this uncertain and threatening world. I lost the sheltering illusion of my self-image as a good person and a good dad. I lost any sense of my family’s safety from suffering or bad fortune. I lost any sense that we were protected, successful or privileged. The worst could happen to us. 

Noah was a wonderful kid. He was a beautiful little boy with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes. Always physically affectionate, we called him “monkey baby” for the way he clung to us, emphatically, resolutely, lovingly.

He was a sensitive boy. From the time he could talk, you could see he was working hard to say things that would make us feel good. As a toddler he knew how I relished a hug and a kiss from him and his sister before I left for work and when I got home. So he made the hug and a kiss his sacred responsibility. Having missed me one morning when I left early he told his mother, crestfallen, “I can’t believe it! I didn’t kiss my dad!” I think of that particular story often because it says so much about who he was and would always be.

When he was about 10 his classmate’s father died. He insisted on attending the funeral. I was a little worried about that because Noah’s sensitivity made him vulnerable to painful situations and sometimes that caused him to act out. I didn’t know how he would handle it.

In fact he was poised, sympathetic and graceful. He stayed close to his classmate and her family. He asked quiet, appropriate questions and listened intently. He laid a consoling hand on a shoulder or gave a hug at, it seemed to me, precisely the right moments. He was brilliant. 

We came to rely on his grace and sensitivity in social situations. Noah knew how to be good to people. 

He also had a sophisticated, dead-pan sense of humor that belonged to someone much older and more worldly. Sometimes I would realize that one of his offhand comments had been, in fact, a jab so finely crafted that I didn’t feel it. The humor in his gentle criticism would dawn on me, finally and I would laugh about it days later, and for weeks after that. 

His friends loved him. Our friends loved him. We really loved him.

His sensitivity also had its dark side. At home he could fly into a rage for the smallest reason, or no reason at all. We all lived in dread of his next tirade. He hated uncertainty, insecurity and transition. Any morning we were to leave on a trip – even a vacation he very much wished to take – we could generally rely on him to procrastinate his packing until the last moment and then explode when he was reminded that we needed to leave in 30 minutes to catch a flight. His anger was volcanic. Furniture was broken. Holes were punched in walls.

But on the whole he was wonderful. He cruised through school with good grades and good friends. He played music, partially to please his mother. He played tennis, partially to please me. Right up through high school graduation he was delightful, successful, and apparently sober.

He once told me, during a healthy interval later in his life, that he had never felt truly free of anxiety until the first time he got high. For him, prescription painkillers – Vicodin, OxyContin, fentanyl –  were a revelation. He had always been in pain. When the pills caused that pain to recede he said he knew immediately that he wanted to feel better, that way, all the time.

In retrospect we can recognize his rapid descent into full-scale addiction. After his sophomore year in college he was perpetually ill. His symptoms were varied, and vague. He interrupted our family vacations to make emergency visits to clinics and pharmacies. We tried to provide better doctors, to find some clarity about his health, but he stubbornly maintained control over his treatment. We thought he was just exercising his independence, demonstrating his self-sufficiency. I should have recognized the signs. But of course I didn’t want to. His mother, my wife Carolyn, was more perceptive. Several times, she suggested the obvious. I stubbornly resisted. I wanted to maintain my illusions.

With some apparent effort, he held his life together. He studied finance and Chinese, and seemed to do pretty well. He had a wonderful girlfriend, whom we loved. They moved to Hawaii to start a life together. We felt he was launched.

A year later, though, he still didn’t have a stable job. Finally he was hired by a bank. Then he failed a drug test.

After years of overlooking his symptoms and rationalizing his inconsistencies, I heard that news with a growing sense of dread. His relationship fell apart. He collapsed, emotionally. He came home.

I’m very surprised, thinking about it now, that he only lived three more years. Those years seem, in retrospect, like a much, much longer time. He seemed to have hit bottom when he got home. He confessed his addiction. He went through an excruciating period of withdrawal. He refused conventional treatment but apparently stopped using drugs. He got a job and did well for a while. He worked for the company I ran. For business he traveled to China and Vietnam. He was intelligent and charming. His work was pretty successful. His contribution was appreciated.

Then, after about six good months, he started disappearing. He contrived reasons to be out of the office. Then he contrived reasons to work from another office in a nearby city, then from home. Sometimes he just didn’t show up for meetings. His voice mail was full and wouldn’t accept new messages. It took him days to respond to an email. His coworkers were kind, then confused, then exasperated. Finally, confused myself, I was forced to fire him. He was very angry, then he was remorseful. 

We took him to detox. We took him to rehab. He got kicked out of rehab. He went into and then abandoned a different rehab. He went in and out of treatment. He went everywhere with Gatorade bottles full of vodka. He wrecked our cars. He got arrested. He got in fights. He was drunk at my mother’s funeral. He called in the middle of the night, telling psychotic stories of violence and illness, hospitals and murders and his own various unverified diseases. He called in the daytime with lucid reasons we should buy him a car or pay his rent. He moved back in with us until his rages and psychoses scared us so badly that we asked him to leave. Then, shattered, we asked him to come back. Then, terrified of him again, we rented him another apartment. Then we stopped paying his rent, so he moved in with a “girlfriend” we never met. When he was abandoned by the girlfriend and evicted by the landlord, we rented him a new apartment. He had a new job, or was about to get a job, or was just waiting for a space at a treatment center – the one that was going to finally help him.

Physically and emotionally, he deteriorated. He was thin and gray. He seemed relatively sober when he came over to see us. He was sweet, and sad. 

Carolyn and I reached the obvious conclusion, finally, that we were subsidizing his self-destruction. I told him we wouldn’t support him any more, unless he was in treatment. We knew he needed months in a residential facility to treat the disease in his body and his mind.  He thanked me, told me he understood, and promised to check into a treatment center right away. I told him I could take him. He said he had a friend who wanted to drive him.

Then he went silent and unreachable. That was not unusual, and we fantasized that he might have actually gone into treatment. But we hadn’t gotten a bill from any treatment center. We hadn’t received a call. It was early in August, 2013. I decided to go and check on him. Then I thought better of that. Instead of going to his apartment myself I asked the police department to do a “welfare check.” I left my office and went home to be with Carolyn. 

The police detective showed up at our door two hours later with the news. Our boy was gone.

Grief can be like the ocean. Its surface is turbulent. Waves tumble us about. We struggle to catch a breath before we’re submerged again, then we’re inverted 10 feet down, the pressure excruciating. Then, inexplicably, a flash of light and a breath of air at the surface again.

Deep grief can be like the deep ocean. In the midnight zone, too deep for sunlight to penetrate, there’s no sign of the storm on the surface. It’s cold and dark. It can be very still. Not much is living there. One can feel the slightest current from something – or someone – swimming near in the darkness. 

In my abyss I felt newly connected to the suffering in the world. My own sadness was strong, so pervasive, so much a part of my moment-to-moment awareness that it didn’t feel practical or necessary to protect myself from the suffering of others anymore. I couldn’t disguise or anaesthetize my vulnerability. I cried, uncontrollably, in front of the television at home. I cried in business meetings. I cried in restaurants. I cried on airplanes. 

The currents of those passing in the darkness of my deepest grief became important to me. It was dark, but there were others there. I didn’t have the strength to push myself to the surface but I could follow the current as others passed, moving upward. I could sense a subtle eddy, a brief pressure buoying me up, fractionally, a few inches at a time. We are not alone down there. Far from it. But to benefit from others there, I had to become more sensitive to them and the almost imperceptible evidence of their buoyancy, as an example for my own.

My broken heart was damaged, for sure, but it was also more open than it had been. I grew more interested in the sadness and pain of other people, pain I realized I had been blocking all my life. 

Usually when I cried,  I cried because I remembered my specific loss. Sometimes, though I was brought to tears by other losses, experienced by other people, sometimes far away. I was emotionally vulnerable to the news. I was absurdly vulnerable to sentimental commercials. Even greeting cards could make my eyes well.

Eventually, of course, there was healing. The pain subsided. Old emotional comforts and habits showed up. I sensed myself subconsciously rebuilding the protections I once had against the sadness and pain in the world. 

And to my surprise and confusion, I wasn’t sure I wanted that to happen.

To say that the loss of a child is devastating is in part to relate the way it tears down the structures of our certainty and confidence. Fundamentally, you can’t be sure that your own nature – the way you were – wasn’t responsible for the disease and destruction of a person you loved. And so all your other certainties about your own value and virtues, if you had them, are swept away with this discovery: You can only be certain that you will never know what role you might have played in your child’s disease.

If you, God forbid, have lost a child, please also remember that you can never know that you WERE responsible at all, either. You may have been the absolutely best parent your child could have had, among all the human beings in the world. Addiction is a disease against which there is no reliable vaccine or protection. Maybe Noah’s addiction was aggravated by stressful experience. Maybe I could have saved him by preventing those experiences. Maybe not.

I think we must accept that we cannot know.

We must live in uncertainty.

If we are forced to live out our lives uncertain of whether we were a wonderful parent, or a failure,  then what, of any consequence, are we left with to be certain of? Precious little, I think. 

If you possess, as I do, hundreds of internal narratives about how you are healthy because of some fine personal quality; or safe because of that some other virtue; or good because you have accomplished this or that; those self-mythologies can become very hard to sustain under the pressure of a catastrophe. The truth becomes obvious. The simple fact is that no life is granted such certainty. Not only are we vulnerable, we may be culpable.

When our protective narratives rupture and begin to drain, punctured by trauma or grief, we have the opportunity to acknowledge a fundamental fact: the narratives are false. We are not superior. We are not safe. We are not even, necessarily, good.

Which means, of course, that we are like everyone. And we have the capacity, if we work at it, to give others our compassionate understanding from a place of actual knowing.

Losing a child is in many ways like an amputation. Carolyn and I lost an essential part of ourselves and we will never be the same. As my grief subsided I realized, at some point, that I was manufacturing a sort of emotional prosthesis. If I could never be the same, perhaps I could seem the same. I hobbled around on my emotional stump. I thought I seemed fine, at least for a while.

But then it occurred to me that I didn’t want to seem fine. I didn’t want to feign self-assurance. I wanted to maintain the connection I had felt in the depths of my grief to the grief of others, to all the grief. If my broken heart  or my amputated identity made me a little warmer, more understanding, friendlier to any degree, then I wanted to cultivate those qualities to whatever extent I could. 

Maybe if I could warm and open my heart a little,  that could be a small tribute to my son. Perhaps if I work at it I can allow him to help me be  a slightly better person. I could be a positive part of his legacy.

Of course this is not to say that I don’t wish, with every fiber of my being, that Noah was alive. I want him back. I wouldn’t have him suffer more. I wouldn’t have him inflict more suffering on others. But I want him back. Alive. Flesh and blood.

In his absence I have this broken heart. And maybe I am improved by it. I was not kind enough or patient enough or generous enough or sweet enough when he was here. Today, though I’m no epitome of any kind, I think I’m a bit more of those things. If Noah’s terrible sacrifices helped me grow a little, I guess I should honor that, to the best of my limited ability.