I am wondering this morning about the possible ways we hold memory within ourselves—in the waters of our bodies and in the elusive airs of our souls.
Why do we gravitate toward certain activities, foods, smells, music, people and even animals?
I’m asking myself these questions because of a recent conversation with my mom after my first journal post The Goats. She has reminded me of the history of goats in our family, a history of farming and animals that had only skipped my generation until I began spending time with goats after the passing of my lovely daughter, Sky.
And now goat stories are flooding in and they are coming from every curve of my mind. How could these memories have escaped me even as I wrote the story for our forthcoming children’s book, Evan and the Skygoats?
My mother now shows me photos of our family and recalls her own stories with goats in Texas. She remembers being a child of 3 and 4 years old and bottle-feeding baby goats at the hearth of a small house on her family’s farm, just down a path from the main house where she and her family lived. She is pictured here at age 3 on the farm with her doll.
Her family had moved to this area of Texas in the mid-1940s so that her father could drink the sulfur water while recuperating from the removal of a kidney, a surgery from which the doctors predicted he wouldn’t live. Their farm animals included pigs, dogs, chickens, a cow, a bull named Buck and goats.
I enjoy my mother’s stories over our cups of tea and she laughs when she tells me that she and her siblings once got stuck in a tree where they’d climbed up a low-leaning branch to sit in the shade. Baby goats had followed them up the tree and didn’t know how to get back down until my grandmother came out to rescue them all.
My mother says the goats played with her and her siblings like children so it’s no surprise that we call young goats kids. And we wonder together how much the sweet and silly nature of these goats lifted the spirits of my grandfather as he healed from his surgery.
Their goats were angora like the one pictured here with my mom’s brother and father.
My mom also tells me that, at one time, her father’s parents had more than 200 goats. The family lived on a piece of land that had so much brush and briar that goats were the best animals to help clear the land, although my grandfather’s younger sister, my Great Aunt Sue, recalled during a phone call with my mom last week that sometimes the goats got stuck in the briars. Sue says she remembers often accompanying her father to help release the goats from their entanglements and that these were some of the most interesting times for her on the farm.
Another precious memory of my own has come to me after looking through an old box of photographs. It is my daughter, Sky, pictured here smiling happily with goats during a stop on one of our New Mexico road trips.
I stare at this photograph and now also recall that Sky’s love of goats began several years before this photo was taken and while she and I still lived in Santa Fe. We often saw a woman walking with goats along the Alameda River Walk while I was driving Sky to school. I don’t know how many times Sky asked if she could also have goats, promising to care for them and walk them daily.
So just how deeply were these goat memories embedded in me? And as I continue to heal from the passing of my daughter and to live with trauma and loss of memory, what part of me responded to these cherished remembrances when I first decided to visit goats?
For me, goats were the first step to finding a way to stay in this world without my beautiful daughter. There have been so many other elements that I’ve gathered to heal my broken heart and I am still often surprised at what they are. But goats were definitely the beginnings of my gravitational pull toward a new way of being here.
As I am hit time and again by excruciatingly painful thoughts of my own story or when the news of another parent losing a child is made known to me—I can be brought to my knees with a grief so debilitating that, while I am in it, it can seem impossible to emerge ever again. I now equate this transformation to wrapping myself into a warm, tear-soaked cocoon.
The name my mother gave me, Vanessa, is of Greek origin and means butterfly. I have easily been able to imagine myself a butterfly during my lifetime. However, in these last nine years of grief and healing, a butterfly that can sometimes fly magnificently only to return to its cocoon time and time again.
In one of Ophelia Cornet’s illustrations from our book Evan and the Skygoats, Ophelia presents a vivid portrait of a mom living with an overwhelming heartache and crying into her own pool of tears, while also appreciating colorful flowers. The mom emerges from a tree branch of blossoms and plums in much the same way I have imagined myself unfolding from my cocoon—seeing the colors of my own wings and the exquisite beauty of the world until it is time to retreat once again.
I have dealt with my heartache by sometimes reaching out to a friend or family member and sometimes by quietly embracing and then moving through my grief alone, most often in nature.
And yet my sorrow has connected me to communities of people dealing with extreme loss and opened my heart even more to the known and unknown stories of others. For this, I am grateful.
I suppose I’ll never know if my initial desire to be with goats was based in a forgotten memory. And I can’t say if being with goats might be as healing for any one else as it has been for me. What I have learned is how important it is to listen to oneself.
If you are a person grieving and trying to heal, I encourage you to be gentle with yourself and to listen to yourself and what feels right for your own personal healing. These are the first two points in my list of Love Thoughts for Someone Grieving found at the end of our children’s book Evan and the Skygoats.
Because, for you, reviving your lost memories of things you feel connected to, of places and things that comfort you deep inside, might be watching the waves of an ocean, planting a garden, midnight walking or digging a ditch. Just as, for me, it will always be delighting at the sweet and silly nature of goats.
Skykisses forever.
V.