CHAPTER 11

In Sickness and in Health

“THERE’S A BIG BLACK-AND-WHITE SPOTTED PIG ON OUR LAWN.” The Sunday morning phone call was resoundingly familiar. “Is it yours?”

Minutes before the phone rang, I had returned from feeding Christopher his breakfast in his pen. He didn’t break out much anymore. Howard said Chris reminded him of a major league baseball manager: “You know, those men who gravity is pulling toward a pear shape, but who still must dress in a young man’s uniform. When they head out of the dugout to talk to their pitcher, they come trotting out, maybe trying to match pace with a younger pitching coach—but once they hit the foul line, they break into a walk.”

Our pig was like that now. No longer did he shoot out of his pen like a snorting cannonball. He trotted out sometimes. More often he stepped out. And sometimes he had to be coaxed. Once out, he might wander, but seldom far. That he would be visiting these callers was extremely unlikely: Bud and Sarah Wilder lived over a mile away, over by the apple orchard, up a long, steep hill.

For once, I could pretty confidently reply that no, it must be some other pig.

In fact, it was. Howard and I rushed over to offer a pig assist and found on the Wilders’ lawn a beautiful, young Gloucestershire Old Spot, a rare but venerable western English breed with distinctive heavy, drooped ears. Her name was Annabelle, and she belonged to the Primianos, who lived just down the road from the Wilders. Annabelle ate grass happily, as if she was just passing time as she waited for the Primianos to come pick her up in their trailer.

Although I still considered Christopher the epitome of porcine beauty (and I even preferred his tall, furry ears to Annabelle’s pretty floppy ones), I envied Annabelle her youth. Christopher was now an elder statesman. At age ten, he had passed what Walker’s Mammals had said was the average length of a pig’s life. We had never learned for sure how long a pig could live, but Chris had certainly outlived all his littermates by nine and a half years.

With the graces of porcine seniority also came some of the ailments of old age. Though his diet had lessened the stress on his joints, now he had real arthritis. Chuck had us treating it with a pelleted, molasses-flavored horse version of the dietary supplement for joint health, glucosamine, and with the equine painkiller phenylbutazone, which we gave him with his meals twice a day. Because the bute could upset his stomach, we also gave him antacids—in huge quantities. On his rare expeditions to the discount chain store in Keene, Howard would pick up twenty packages of the stuff. (“You’d think the clerk at the cash register would ask, ‘Hey, are you OK?’” he once reflected. But no; this was a chain store and Keene was the big city.) Each morning and evening, I would stuff all Christopher’s medications into a pastry from Fiddleheads—and if we were out of pastries, I would make peanut butter and drug sandwiches.

Christopher had also developed what we called porcine pattern baldness. It wasn’t on his head, but the bald spot occupied an increasing amount of real estate between his neck and his shoulders. Chuck took skin scrapings to see if it was some sort of mite or disease, but it was not. It was the same sort of skin problem that older people tend to get.

In fact, pigs are so like us that we are prey to many of the same ailments. When Chris was twelve, he suffered what is known in people as a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke. I was able to recognize it immediately, because only weeks before, the same thing had happened to Tess.

One June morning, as we were just waking up, she’d fallen over. At first I thought it was her arthritis. By then Tess was fourteen, and between her age and the damage from her youthful collision with the snowplow, some mornings she was stiff and would sometimes limp or trip. But then I saw her eyes—she was dazed, as if drunk. I phoned Chuck at home, where we were always welcome to call. He said to immediately give her three baby aspirins. Later she came in for blood work to make sure that no organs had been damaged; they were not. When we came home, we were so terrified and exhausted by the ordeal that we slept through the rest of the day. But the next morning, ever cheerful, she was playing with her ball.

The same thing happened to Christopher that same summer—except on a larger scale. One Sunday morning, he didn’t want to get up. When I finally urged him to his feet, his huge head was cocked eerily to the side. One pupil was large, the other small, and he swayed on his trotters so badly I feared he would fall. When I couldn’t reach Chuck, Liz came rushing over. We calculated the proper dose of aspirin for a seven-hundred-pound pig from what Chuck had prescribed for a thirty-pound dog and hid the pile of aspirin in chocolate chip cookies. Chris had dramatically improved by the next morning, just like Tess.

We knew how lucky we were. Our animals were now roughly the same biological age as our parents. Howard’s mom and dad had both been through cancer scares but were now fine. My mother had high blood pressure and other circulatory problems, but she was still active, enjoying church, the sewing circle, and ladies’ functions, living on her own, presiding over the five-bedroom house in Alexandria. We were acutely aware that age has its hazards—but that old age can also be rich, vibrant, and long. We had Liz’s mother, Lorna, as our example.

At age ninety-seven, she had finally moved in with Liz and Steve. She could still drive, and unlike many of the elderly residents of our town, she never hit anything; but her joints hurt sometimes, and walking the flight of stairs to her bedroom at the big old Cambridge house was getting to be a chore. Lorna published her last book at age one hundred; Liz and Steve rented a tent and held a huge publication party in the backyard, and borrowed a lion cub and an adolescent tiger from a private zoo to mix with the guests, who had come from as far away as Australia to attend the celebration. Lorna entertained a fairly constant stream of visitors and admirers thereafter—until the night a few years later when she spoke her last, loving words. “Bless you,” she said to Liz. And then she closed her eyes and died peacefully at home, surrounded by those she loved, just a few weeks short of her 104th birthday.

Although they were aging, our animals were in relatively fine fettle. Tess still charmed visitors with her athleticism and wit. She still had more energy than anyone we knew. She still leaped to catch the Frisbee. She still anticipated our every move. No matter what time of day, and absent any visual clues that we could discern, Tess knew when we were going to the top part of the barn for a rake or shovel, and got there ahead of us. She knew, long before we made the turn toward the bottom floor of the barn, when we were going to see Chris and the chickens instead. She still did everything a person could ask of her, usually before we even uttered our wishes aloud.

But then, one day, distracted by an interesting smell, Tess dropped her Frisbee in the tall grass. Usually when this happened, all Howard had to do was remind her, in a normal conversational voice and without pointing, where her toy was, and she would go pick it up. This time she stared at him blankly. Then we realized that Tess was deaf—and probably had been for months.

Christopher continued to amass appreciative acolytes for Pig Spa. He had acquired new devotees when the Miller-Rodat family moved from Los Angeles and bought a house in town. Mutual friends introduced us to Mollie and Bob because Bob Rodat had written the script to one of my favorite films, Fly Away Home, about orphaned geese whose adoptive parent, a pilot, flies along with them on their first migration; later Bob wrote The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan, and many others. Howard’s and my claim to fame? We had a giant pig. We quickly made a date for Chris to meet Mollie and Bob’s sons. Jack was seven and Ned four.

Chris made a huge impression. Jack wowed his first-grade class with the August 25 entry from his “Summer Fun Journal”: “Today,” he wrote, “we went to feed our friend Christopher Hogwood. The same day Christopher escaped. He ran around the yard. He knocked things over. He dug a huge hole in the backyard. When we gave him his food we poured it on his head.” Almost as an afterthought Jack added a last line: “He is a pig.”

Soon, Jack and Ned were saving their banana peels and corncobs, their leftover pancakes, cupcakes, and Danishes; because the family lived part-time in another home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they had to freeze it. “We wouldn’t buy stuff for ourselves because the freezer was filled with stuff for the pig,” Mollie told us. “Our ice cream smelled like corncobs and old pancakes—but we didn’t care. We knew how much Christopher would appreciate it.” When they’d come up to Hancock, often each boy would bring a friend or two with them, and together we’d do Pig Spa. “It was part of the Hancock tour,” Mollie said: “Go see the Elephant Rock. Go to Spoonwood Pond. Do the rope swing on the lake. And go see Christopher.”

One day after Pig Spa, Christopher lay in such peaceful bliss that Jack thought to join him. Very gently, and with great respect, Jack climbed on top of him. He lay with his head on Chris’s shoulder. Christopher’s skin felt like cardboard and his bristles were spiky, but Jack was enchanted. He could hear the pig’s breathing. He could feel the beating of his huge heart. “He was really gentle and really nice,” Jack said. “It felt really, really good.” Next, the boys switched positions and Ned lay down on Christopher.

Remarkably, Christopher didn’t object at all. Had he been the least bit uncomfortable, he wouldn’t have been shy about showing it. Even Bob, who is far more in tune with people than with animals and who had initially been quite fearful for his kids around this huge beast, could see: “He clearly enjoyed Jack and Ned lying on top of him,” Bob said. “He didn’t want it to end.”

Mollie snapped a picture, and that became our holiday pig card that year.

Time had been good to us: our animals were older but still vigorous. Howard was happily at work on a new book about our oldest landmarks, trees and rocks, and our allegiance to the natural markers that tie us to the land. I had spent part of the fall in French Guiana chasing after quarter-pound goliath bird-eater spiders for a book for kids about tarantulas. Afterward, sometimes I would enjoy happy dreams of tarantulas crawling on me, reliving the feel of their clawlike tarsi on my skin.

Just before I’d left on that expedition, though, I’d made a far more momentous trip: one to Virginia, to see my mother. On and off for the previous two years, I’d traveled with Gary to Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos in search of a mysterious golden bear unknown to science—which we found, among many other adventures. I dedicated the resulting book to my mother, and we celebrated at a local bookstore by a reading and signing attended by all her friends. At that moment, I knew that whatever else had happened between us, she was proud of me. I stayed over at her house for the first time since my father had died.

It seemed a good way to close out the year: everyone I loved was well, and all was right with the world.

Our Christmas card that year bore the message, “Peace.”

AND THEN, ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN MARCH, MY MOTHER began to die.

We’d known something was wrong for only a couple of months. She’d gotten the bad news on Martin Luther King Jr. Day but didn’t phone me. She waited for my usual Sunday after-church call. She went in to her doctor at Fort Belvoir with a stomachache, she said, and came out with pancreatic cancer. The doctors gave her a year.

So began another flurry of flying to and from Virginia. Still, Howard was unwelcome. He stayed in Hancock, working on his next book, and took care of our aging animals. I arranged for some relatively gentle chemo to slow the disease’s progress, hired nurses and housekeepers, and cooked and froze piles of collard greens, cornbread, and fried fish.

But the disease kept racing ahead of us. That particular Wednesday was just four days shy of a scheduled move to an elegant new assisted-living facility we had selected, just a few miles from her house. Surprisingly, my mother looked forward to the move; she’d have the best of both worlds. We’d keep the house, and when I’d come back to Virginia, we’d stay there together, where I could take care of her.

We planned on plenty of time together in the months ahead. I could not make her approve of my life, but I could learn more about hers. She could not bring herself to love the man I had married, but I could accept the love she gave me, and love her fully in return. There would be good days, many of them, the doctors told us—and we would spend them talking together, reminiscing, looking through photo albums.

While my father was alive, he dominated our conversations, for both my mother and I adored him and hung on his every word. Now, for the first time in my life, I would learn the details of my mother’s youth in Arkansas: how she had learned to shoot a gun and fly a plane, how she was recruited from Arkansas Tech to work for the FBI. I’d learn about the early days of her courtship and marriage to my father. We would go through everything carefully, lovingly—the memories, the jewelry, the heirlooms—and in so doing, at the end of her life, I would finally come to know my elegant, enigmatic mother. We would pack each gem of her life away as gently as the hand-crafted glass ornaments my parents had bought in Germany for year after year of our Christmas trees, and gracefully, gently, say our good-byes.

But we never did.

That Wednesday, when I phoned my mother, as I’d been doing daily since I learned of the cancer, she didn’t answer. I got the home nurse, who said they were going to the doctor. Fifteen minutes later, I phoned the doctor, who said they were going to the hospital. Next I phoned the hospital, and they said she was going to die.

I booked the next flight to D.C. I asked Liz to drive me to the airport. I was in the air at seven, at my mother’s bedside by ten.

She was on morphine for the pain, but still clear-minded. After about half an hour, she insisted I go back to the house and go to sleep. I was afraid I was keeping her up, draining her energy. I checked with the nurses. “She’ll be fine for the night,” they said.

But that prediction did not hold true of things back home.

The phone rang at 4 a.m. It was Howard. “Tess is having a stroke!” he said. She had soiled herself, fallen over, vomited, and now couldn’t stand. She was panting and agitated. “What should I do?”

I’D BEEN PLAGUED BY NIGHTMARES LIKE THIS WHILE RESEARCHINGSearch for the Golden Moon Bear in Southeast Asia. I’d dream Tess or Chris was sick and I couldn’t get to them, and I would wake up screaming.

Gary assured me there was a physical cause for my nightmares. Vivid dreams and even hallucinations were known side effects of the antimalarial drug we were taking. But I thought the real reason was one of the common ailments that shamans in this region are called upon to treat: a dangerous condition known as soul wandering.

According to the hill tribes of northern Thailand—many of them migrants and refugees from another land—the soul is prone to wander, easily enticed away, and apt to flee in fear. Lost souls can fall prey to malevolent spirits, weretigers, and vampires. So the different hill tribes have devised many ways to recapture the wandering or lost soul, and shamans are specially trained in the art of soul calling. The Lahu and Hmong say that even a newborn’s soul might flee from loud noises. For this reason, mothers give birth in utter silence, and then embroider their babies’ clothes with soul-restraining designs: spiderwebs are one favorite, pigpens another.

Loud noises weren’t my problem—although at one point, when we had visited Cambodia, Gary and I did hear a land mine explode from an area where we had just been walking, and it gave us a start. My soul was deeply disturbed by the incongruence of an Edenic-looking tropical rain forest beset with unexploded ordnance, banditry, insurgency, and a sickening trade using wild animals’ body parts for medicinal elixirs and tonics. Everywhere, on our trail to scientific discovery, we found horror and sorrow. In Cambodia, 1 in 236 people are amputees. In Laos, we were constantly warned against the dangers of unexploded ordnance from a war in which more bombs were rained on that small country than on Germany in World War II. In Thailand, we even met an elephant who was an amputee. She had stepped on a land mine while her mahout was using her for illegal logging in Burma. My dreams, I thought, were evidence that my soul was desperately, though unsuccessfully, trying to escape the nightmares that these people and animals live daily.

When we visited a Lahu village in northern Thailand, only Gary and I knew about the dreams I’d been having, and yet the shaman seemed to sense them. He offered to perform a healing ceremony. While we sat on woven mats on the floor of the stilt house where he lived, he fetched a bowl of rice, a set of candles, some paper, and a ball of string. He did the same thing to both of us in turn. Holding a thread taut, he wiped one of our palms with it thrice before circling one wrist with it five times, closing the circle firmly with knots.

He was tying our souls to our bodies.

“You travel around, around everywhere,” the shaman said to me through our translator, “but in the end, you will come back. Your spirit will always come back.”

A calm settled over me at that moment as I felt my soul restored. I realized I was meant to witness both suffering and hope on this journey—and that the strength I was given to do so was derived from a soul firmly bound to home.

AT FOUR THAT MORNING, WITH MY MOTHER ON HER DEATHBED and Tess helpless in New Hampshire, I didn’t think things could get worse. My heart was torn in two. There are people who would be appalled at the thought of a daughter fearing for the life of a dog in the face of the death of her own mother. But as I sat by my mother’s side the next few days in the hospital, my thoughts were as much with Tess as with my mother.

How could this be? Leaving aside the issue of species, I had known Tess for only twelve years. I had known my mother for forty-five. My mother had given me my life. But I had not chosen the life she had wanted for me—and this was a sin she found very difficult to forgive. Early in life, my mother had learned to make sure she got what she wanted, and it worked: the daughter of an iceman and a postmistress from dusty Lexa went to college, learned to fly a plane, landed a glamorous job in Washington, and married a dashing war hero. I had been the first big disappointment of her life. Though she loved me, her love was conditional—and for most of my life, I met very few of her conditions.

But I was Tess’s person. We were a unit. We were family. Because I loved her with almost drunken abandon, and because she loved me so completely and deeply, I believed I might love Tess back to life. I knew I could not do this for my mother. Her person was my father, and he had already passed on to a place she was eager to go. Yet I knew at that moment where I needed to be: in the hospital in Virginia, by my mother’s side, where perhaps there was still hope of another kind of healing.

MY MOTHER WAS TIRED, BUT GLAD FOR COMPANY THAT NEXT DAY. I slipped out only when other visitors came to see her. I was deeply moved to see how many there were: women from the neighborhood, friends from church, old Army friends, bridge players, members of the Villamay Ladies’ Club, women from the sewing circle. At these times I would visit the hall pay phone and call Chuck to check on Tess.

Chuck told me Tess had not had a stroke. Her disorder was called canine peripheral vestibular syndrome. No one knows what causes it, but for whatever reason, the animal is seized with a vertigo so powerful it cannot stand, walk, or eat, because its world is spinning—sometimes for weeks. The trick, Chuck said, was to find a way to get food into her and to keep her from succumbing to some other disease while the vestibular problem dissipated—or her brilliant border collie brain found a way to compensate.

The timing could not have been worse. Howard had to fly to Pittsburgh that afternoon to give a speech on Friday. Because of Tess’s separation anxiety, for the last twelve years we’d made sure she never spent a single night apart from at least one of us except at Evelyn’s, where she had lived before coming to us. We had always been with her for every procedure at the vet’s, never leaving her for a minute. Now she would have to endure the scariest night of her life alone, locked in a cage in a veterinary hospital, the world swirling inexplicably around her.

Tess was terrified, but my mother was neither sad nor frightened. Dying did not bother her at all. We had spoken of this a little in the weeks before. For her, death was the portal to my father. She was eager to see him in heaven. Only one thing bothered her: she was worried, incredibly, that my father might not be there.

“Of course he is!” I cried, appalled. Who deserved heaven if not my father? “If my father’s not there,” I said, “heaven is full of idiots, and I’m not going.”

My outburst did not calm my mother. Her worry was this: although my father’s religion was listed on his dog tags as Roman Catholic, she was not sure, she told me, that he really believed in Jesus. Heaven, she feared, excluded those who did not—condemning my Hindu friends in West Bengal, my Buddhist friends in Southeast Asia, most of my scientific colleagues (who were atheist or agnostic), Liz (a believer in Gaia), Gretchen (an animist), Selinda (an atheist), my in-laws, and my husband.

At that moment I deeply regretted ever having told my mother about a phone call I had received before she got sick. A cousin I’d never known I had—a daughter of my father’s vanished brother, who had died before my birth—had read a review of one of my books and found my phone number on the Internet. At first I was unsure that we were related at all. But as she told me details of my father’s family history, I knew everything she said was true—as well as wildly different from what I had earlier been told.

My father’s ancestry was not Scottish and English, as I had believed. My father’s grandfather, an opera star, was from Italy. His name had been Montegriffo. His son, my grandfather, born in this country with blond hair and blue eyes, had changed it to Montgomery. Brilliant, ambitious, and blessed with total auditory recall, when he graduated from law school my grandfather had been courted by many law firms. But Italians were not then slated to become lawyers in America. What did Italians do? I remembered a little ditty my father would sometimes utter in my childhood, along with snippets of Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll: “Guinea, Guinea goo / Shine my shoe.” I didn’t realize until many years later that guinea was slang for Italian, nor that this little rhyme described why my brilliant grandfather kept his heritage—and my father’s—hidden for the rest of their lives.

My father’s mother was also a lawyer—a fact that I had been proud of growing up. That was all I had known of her, that and the single six-inch-tall photo that sat in its oval golden frame on a desk in a spare bedroom. She was an elegant and pretty brunette, wearing pearls and lace and a feathered hat. I had always been told her name was Augusta Black. Her name, my cousin told me, was, in fact, Augusta Schwartz. I recognized the word: it was Yiddish for “black.” My cousin told me that my grandmother’s parents had emigrated to the United States from Austria, fleeing religious persecution. She was Jewish. Her law degree had been financed by B’nai B’rith. Of course when she married my grandfather, she had acquired his rewritten, Americanized name, and all outward evidence of her heritage disappeared. But that didn’t change Jewish law—nor the tradition that any children born to a Jewish mother, no matter who the father, are Jewish, too.

When I had told my mother these things, there had been a long silence. I realized I never should have mentioned this. It was miracle enough that my mother and I could love each other at all, after everything that had happened; nothing would ever make her accept my husband. I certainly did not wish to undermine her love of hers. My mother confirmed that yes, the woman who had called me was indeed my cousin—but she must have gotten her story wrong. She changed the subject, and we never brought it up again.

Only after my mother’s death did I learn, from an old family friend in whom my father had once confided, how fiercely my father had guarded his secret: while my father lived, my mother had never known that her husband, like mine, was Jewish.

THE DOCTORS WERE FRANK: THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO for my mother but turn up the morphine. So I slept beside her each night, holding her hand. Once she brought my hand to her mouth and kissed it. After this, she no longer spoke. She no longer needed to say anything. I spoke very little: “I love you, Mother. I’m here, Mother.” That was all. And it was enough.

During those days, I came to know some of the eclectic friends who had peopled her weekly letters, folks I had only met briefly. Of course I already knew some friends from when I’d lived in Virginia in junior high: the neighbors next door, whose son and daughter I used to babysit for twenty-five cents an hour. The folks whose backyard abutted ours, whose daughter had shown me the local creek and how to find box turtles there. My mother also had many friends from the military, especially from the Army’s Transportation Corps. But in the years since my father died, my mother had made new, young friends as well: Scott Marchard, originally from my mother’s home state of Arkansas, a dapper florist in his forties with a single earring, sat next to my mother in church. In the hospital, the nurses assumed he was her son. Silver Crossman, a fit, witty, single woman a little older than me, with a beloved puppy named Summer. For years, my mother had called Silver “daughter number two.” In her isolated widowhood, my mother, like me, had surrounded herself with an alternative family.

Meanwhile, when I was in Virginia, my alternative family did for me what relatives are supposed to do: they took care of my loved ones in my absence. When Howard was in Pittsburgh, Gretchen and Liz visited Tess in the animal hospital. Liz went to the house first and picked up my barn coat. She placed it beside Tess in her hospital cage so she could inhale my scent. Immediately, Liz told me, Tess’s ears relaxed, her face assumed a peaceful expression, she uttered a sigh, and she shut her eyes.

Jarvis and Bobbie and our new tenant looked after Christopher and the hens. And when Howard came back to find a March thaw flooding the chicken coop with snowmelt, Selinda’s husband, Ken, came with a sump pump—Howard couldn’t leave Tess alone in the house long enough to buy one. To tempt Tess to eat, Selinda brought her homemade meatballs; Gretchen brought ground raw venison.

Back in the hospital room, as my mother’s life faded, her friends came and went: The pastors from the Methodist church. A retired WAVE nurse from Bethesda—she had met my father long before he knew my mother, when he was testifying at the war crimes trials in Japan. On Sunday morning, Silver and Scott came by. And that was when she died—surrounded by friends, free of pain and fear. I was holding her hand.

EACH CHRISTMAS SINCE MY FATHER DIED, MY MOTHER USED TO invite me to come “home” for the holiday in Virginia. Of course she never invited Howard. So I never came.

Christmas meant nothing to Howard, but it was important to me. We had a holiday ritual. Chris would have a special breakfast. I’d make hot popcorn for the hens. Tess would come with us as we drove to our friends’ houses to exchange gifts and visit: sometimes to Liz and Steve’s, sometimes to Eleanor’s, sometimes to Gretchen’s. Always, though, I wanted to begin Christmas Day much as Jesus had—in a barn.

But the Christmas after my mother died was different.

That morning, after I’d given Hogwood his holiday slops, I was bringing the Ladies a bowl of hot popcorn when I found a hen dead on the coop floor. Her head was wedged down a hole in a corner. Whoever had killed her had dug its way in. I bent over to pick her up by her feet—and found that someone else had a hold of the other end of the chicken!

I pulled her carcass free. And then, out of the hole in the corner popped a tiny, pure white head. It stared at me with fearless black eyes. It was an ermine.

Ermine is the name by which we call both of our tiny New Hampshire weasel species when they’re dressed in their white winter coats. I had never seen one before. They are only a few inches long, and exactly the color of snow.

Without backing down, the ermine looked at me, square in the eye, for perhaps thirty seconds. I had never seen a gaze so exquisitely fierce, so intense, so filled with the moment. Ermines may weigh as little as five ounces, less than a handful of coins, yet they are as fearless as God. They stop at nothing to capture their prey: they snake down tunnels, they hunt beneath the snow, they will even leap into the air to catch birds as they take flight. With their tiny hearts pounding 360 times a minute, ermines must eat five to ten meals a day. They are fierce because they have to be. This is part of what makes ermines what they are. Ferocity is their dharma—as pure, and as perfect, as their dazzling white winter coat.

The ermine had just killed someone I loved. Yet I could not have felt more amazed, or more blessed, if an angel had materialized in front of me.

My sorrow vanished. Holding the still-warm body of my hen in my arms, I felt, in that moment, the lightness of a heart relieved of the burden of anger—and the freedom that comes with forgiveness.