My animals have taught me as much about death and mortality as my hospice and assisted care and dementia volunteer and therapy work. Clearly, I am interested in death, I seem drawn to it. On a farm, that is a good thing, because there is a lot of it.

For much of my life I had pets, and for the past 15 years I’ve had farm animals. I have learned to approach death differently, like a farmer. I am not a farmer, but a writer with a farm, and so I live on the boundary of the pet world and the animal world. They are very different, and often at odds with one another.

Last week I wrote that the gray hen – we stopped naming our hens because so many things can kill them and do – was ill, and chickens are a bit like sheep, sick chickens rarely survive too long.  With our sheep, we call the large animal vet if there seems to be a temporal problem like an infection. If the sheep is older and gets sick, I either let nature take its course or kill them – by gun – if they seem to be in great pain.

A large animal vet bill costs at least a couple of hundred dollars, plus shots and pills and re-visits. Like most ordinary people with farms, we just can’t afford to call the vet every time an animal gets sick, and most times, there is little they can do. The donkeys are different. When Lulu or Fanny get sick, we call the vet immediately, they are hardly and long-living animals and when they are sick it is often serious.

Several people messaged me last week – very politely, I should say – and wondered why we didn’t call a vet for the gray hen. Farmers rarely call vets for chickens, and very few vets will see them or treat them. A chicken is worth about $20, depending on the breed and their egg laying capacity, and a vet visit would be about ten times that, and it just doesn’t make sense to take a chicken to the vet.

Maria is especially fond of the chickens, I like them but do not love them. It just stretches perspective for us to take extraordinary measures to keep them alive, they are quasi-pets but we mostly have them for the fresh and delicious eggs they give us every day.

Animals accept death much more graciously than humans, mostly because no animal but a human being is conscious of death or understands that is coming. As a result, animals are accepting. When I do have to shoot an animal – a chicken, a lamb, a rooster, a sheep – the flock or roost will be anxious and confused for a day or so, and then they simply forget it and move on.

I do not believe animals grieve in the human sense, a belief that is shocking and disturbing to humans who very much need to believe that animals grieve just like humans, for us, for them.

I’ve lived with animals for years now and lost dogs, cats and chickens, sheep and donkeys. Of all these animals, the only one I saw behave in any way representative of grieving was Lulu, when Jeanette and Jesus left to go Ken Norman’s farm, where they happily live.

Since there is little choice, the animals teach me to accept death and learn from it. Almost every animal on the farm except possibly for the donkeys,and including the dogs, is likely to die before I or Maria do. Farms are expensive and complicated to maintain.

To prepare for winter, we had to fix the slate roof, repair holes in the porch roof, buy six months of hay for $600, bring two tons of gravel into the pole barn and the pasture and level it ($600), buy more than $1,200 of firewood, and inoculate and vaccinate dogs and barn cats and donkeys and sheep, and brushhog the pasture (level it with a special tractor blade) for $300. We will also need a full tank of heating oil for the days when the cold overpowers the wood stoves. That’s $800 or $900.  We also spent about $700 for feed for the chickens and donkeys and sheep (they get feed when it’s very cold for energy.)

We are lucky to have good people working with us whose prices are fair and reasonable. In many places, these things are much more expensive, all of them. In the winter, we also have to pay a plow team when it snows, and service the cars and tires in preparation. Depending on the weather, that can cost hundreds of dollars.

So calling the vet is a major factor in planning the budget and  operating the farm. People with pets increasingly believe that their animals should be kept alive at all costs by any means, they see this as a measure of their love, and many can’t bear to lose their much-loved animals. I’ve never subscribed to that belief, neither have farmers and people who live with animals. Except for the wealthy, we just can’t afford it and it is not really what we want.

I will not agree to perform major surgery on my dogs for any reason, much as I love them. My dear Red, who was so sick a couple of months ago, racked up $3,000 vet bill in four days before his infection was found and treated. When Rose and Izzy were diagnosed with cancer, I asked that they be euthanized immediately, and they were. Other people feel differently, that is their choice. My vet and I have a good understanding.

I was not prepared to go much farther with Red, and Maria agreed with me. And I imagine anyone reading my blog knows how much I love Red and how much he means to me. I am nothing but grateful for every day with Red, I will never turn his life or mine with him into a misery.

I still wonder if we did the right thing by amputating Minnie’s leg several years ago, it cost $2,000 and she suffered terribly during her recovery. She seems comfortable now

I am no tough guy, but perspective is important to me. It is part of my life with dogs. They serve us, and are our partners, we do not surrender our lives to them. Up here, you just do not call the vet for a chicken.

The cost of more care for Red would have affected the entire farm, and our ability to care for all of the animals. The farm is a complex eco-system, everything is tied to the other. Dogs and other animals do not live as long as humans, and I try to avoid the human fate of keeping living things alive beyond reason or purpose at enormous cost.

Because we can, not because we should.

All of this has helped me understand my own fast-approaching mortality. Life is too short for me to lie, dissemble, or hide from my truth. I am proud to be authentic, as much as I am able to be.  I have seen enough of death,  animal and human, to grasp what it is like and how I might choose to do it, should I get the chance.

We will all die, them and us. The farm has shown me that death is a part of life, to be faced and accepted. It is not a shocking drama, to be avoided and dreaded. It is sad, but depending on how it is done, and how it comes, also inspiring and uplifting. We live and we die, that is who we are.

The gray hen is next up, barring something unforeseen. She was out with the other hens today, a good sign, but she no longer goes into the roost and is disoriented and confused, she spends the day on the back porch with Minnie while the other hens roam for food. Maria is much more hopeful than I am, she says she will recover. She will surely get the chance.

I have seen this many times before. If the other hens and bugs leave her alone, I’ll leave it to her to die a natural death.

If there is trouble, I will do my job and help her leave the world gracefully and painlessly.