Accidental Rancher: Community and Loss

I’ve written a lot about death over the years. It is an integral part of life in agriculture. Usually the death I’m writing about concerns the many animals under our care, but our community is dealing with a huge loss right now, and it is hard to imagine writing about anything else.

Lane was a father, son, husband, brother, rancher, and valued community member. I was his English teacher in high school, and I have to say, reading someone’s essays about English literature as a teenager is an unexpectedly good window into their personality. Lane impressed me from the first with his stoic, solemn nature and the deep pride and joy he took in his family, work, and community. Even back then, there was nothing I wouldn’t have trusted him with, and everyone who knew him felt the same. It’s hard to be human. Nobody does it perfectly, but Lane got as close as a person can. He was the best of us, and then some.

Before I moved here, I’d been to a lot of funerals for an average American my age. My grandparents had been older when my parents were born, as were my aunts and uncles, so I’d lost all my grandparents, two aunts, and an uncle before I was 18. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the number of funerals I attended when I moved to Perkins County. At first, I didn’t understand it: why were people dying so much? But everyone who lives here is someone’s cousin, or co-worker, or former student, or cherished friend. In a big city, you might walk past a thousand people and never see a familiar face. Here, no one is a stranger, so every loss is felt deeply, and yes, you end up attending a lot more funerals as a result.

And now we have to learn to live with the loss of Lane. If you walked into any building in our small town last week, you were likely to encounter tear-stained cheeks. No one was untouched by this tragedy, and everyone is tasked with confronting the hole that was ripped into our community–a hole that may be transformed by the passage of time but will never be fully mended. I believe that grief can crack you open, and that, as the songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote, “The cracks are how the light gets in…” I still hate that Lane’s kids won’t get to check cows with their dad on long summer evenings. And even though I believe that grief can stretch our hearts to hold more joy and more empathy if we let it, I still hate that Lane won’t get to bounce grandkids on his knees. He deserved that and so much more. We all did. We all deserved more time with Lane.

What can be done in the face of unrelenting, impossible loss? In the short term, we will weave a net of prayers, hotdishes, and hugs to hold his grieving family. In the longer term, we tell Lane’s growing kids stories about what he was like when he was their age, and we will marvel at how like him they are, and how much we still miss him. In the longest term, we will join him in leaving our bodies behind too.

We humans can not replace the irreplaceable, but we can build a bridge from what has been to what will be, even if it’s a bridge we walk with tears in our eyes. Meanwhile, I am so thankful to live in a place where everyone is so affected by a loss. I am thankful for the tears, and the laughter we find in the spaces between the tears. I am thankful for the pile of sock puppets on the kitchen counter my daughter and her cousin made to cheer up Lane’s kids. I am thankful for the random baby of another former student who fell asleep in my arms at the funeral. I wish all communities had this kind of support system because though it doesn’t take the pain away, it means we get to walk across the bridge together.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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