Where do we go when we die?

                                                      Gate gate paragate 

                                                      parasamgate bodhi svaha! 

                                                                            Heart Sutra

                                                               The world of dew

                                                               is the world of dew, and yet, and yet—

                                                                                                     Kobayashi Issa

 

Maggie, the older of the two milking cows, came to us when she was already a matriarch, eight or nine years old, mother of half a dozen calves by then. She was an angus-jersey cross, solid, stocky, jet black except for a fine white stripe on her rear left ankle just above the hoof. Her jersey ancestry showed only in her antelope eyes and the fact that she was horned. Her horns were white, incurving, and were often the only part of her that was visible when I went to find her before daylight for milking. She was bossy, and bullied Elsie, the younger, frailer second cow we got soon after; Maggie would stand in the gateway, refusing to let Elsie through to pasture or to the drinking trough, and several times knocked her down. 

She was stand-offish. Though she stood quietly to be milked, and let me lean my head into her flank and sing, she shook off any attempt to pat her or scratch her head around the horns with the same irritated shudder she’d use if a fly landed on her. The exception was if she was in trouble – she ran to me, wild-eyed, one day when she got a broken piece of blackberry cane stuck in her nostril, and let us pull it out. And once, when she had a bad infection in her udder that didn’t respond to my usual remedies, she stood and let me inject her, day after day, with the antibiotics that saved her life.

This year she was sixteen or seventeen and long retired from milking. Early in the month, as the days wound down towards the solstice, I saw that she was beginning to walk very slowly, and to stand, rather than lie down to chew her cud – she knew her death was near. She still ate the hay T brought her, but took a long time to make the trek downhill from the dry ground under the windbreak where the herd likes to bed, through the gully and up the slope to the water trough. One day she was with the others in the morning when they came to drink, but when they went back up to graze in the sun, she wasn’t among them. J found her near the trough, down and unable to get up. 

She called to us when she heard us. There was a tremor running through her and she was too weak to raise her head; she ground her teeth now and then. We sat with her through the afternoon of that cold day with sleet on the way. I sang her my wordless milking songs and stroked her neck and she didn’t shudder me off. I put my hands over her eyes and stroked them closed and that seemed to help – she even slept a little. Then night was coming. We couldn’t move her without hurting her, and we couldn’t stay with her through the rainy dark. A pair of eagles was circling already, and the ever-present ravens were close by, eager to do their work now or at first light, not caring if their food was alive or dead. There would be devils later. T went away and got the gun. He fired one shot through her head. She made a soft sound, almost of surprise it seemed, then after a few seconds, arched her back and kicked once or twice, not hard, and was gone. My heart is sore.

What’s alive wants to go on living. Was it our loss of nerve, to shorten her time like that, even if only by a few hours, rather than let her do it her own way? Wondering, I get sick with flu and lie in a fever ache, slipping in and out of chilly sweaty sleep from which, one day towards sunset, I’m woken by a tremendous noise that comes and goes over the house – it’s the black cockatoo flock, a hundred or more birds surging around and back, calling preferences about where to roost for the night – hilltop windbreak! dead tree! forest! young pines! banksias! Back and forth they wail and fly and chase and bicker, until the main flock settles in the big old pines on the hilltop, and smaller groups break off to find their places elsewhere. In the morning the groups call to one another and the day’s exchange begins again in a rain of chewed green cones and a litter of punky wood from rotted branches, mined for grubs. They call me back out into the world.

Gradually energy begins to return. I start to walk the road again and as I pass, I see the herd standing peaceably at the place where Maggie died, despite the blood smell that must still be strong there. Gone, gone, gone beyond – I feel the absent-presence of her body as it starts to disperse through the cells of feasting organisms, returning its riches to them and to the ground, and all of it awake. And yet, and yet –. When the poet Issa’s infant daughter died of smallpox, he set this human qualifier alongside his acknowledgement of the never born, never dying evanescence of the world of dew. We understand that change is the only constant, but in the crucible of our lives, the soulmaking fires of love and loss are as true and real as any experience of transcendence.

Low light glazes the world icy gold. Frost lingers on south-facing slopes till the middle of the day, but everything is getting ready for the new season. Buds on the wattles brighten. Honeyeaters forage for nesting materials. Blackbirds chase each other through the garden, and plovers are standing around in pairs, so it’s begun again for another year. From one week to the next, daphne is flowering and the waxy yellow buds on the wintersweet have opened. A single tree frog creaks a promise or question as rain comes and goes. Droplets pearl the grass and don’t evaporate.