I killed a duck the other day playing golf.
The eighth at my local course tees off over water, a large dam that has the twin attributes of swallowing balls and attracting waterfowl.
The ducks were dabbing at the grass verge just ahead of the tee markers. I should have shooed them off I guess, but I took my shot, third up in our little group.
I duffed it, though to be honest backing me to duff a drive is the percentage play, duff suggests a rare error. Straight, long, arcing drives are my rare error.
This one went hard and low, bringing a puff of feathers about six metres from the tee. The duck fell to the water’s edge, gasping, heaving. I raced down, no idea what to do, dreading having to put it out of its misery if that’s what was needed. I picked the bird up, smoothing its wings gently against the rise and fall of the chest, and lifted it back up to the grass. Its beak cracked open, the upward eye rolled at me open but somehow glazed, empty. Then head lolled and the neck lost all its tension, folding flaccid against my fingers.
We sighed, together it seemed, the duck on leaving life, me in the sudden pang of this terrible thing that I had done. The little body weighed quietly on my hands. My heart sank for it.
It had been a week to the day since the vet had called, and we’d gathered round to say goodbye to our brave old dog. She’d been on a quick decline after months of steady illness, and xrays had revealed a large growth ...
She slipped calmly away as our tears welled, and there was that familiar, potent sense of irreversibility as the second fatal injection followed the sleep inducing first. An act that can’t be undone, a concrete sense of a brought ending. It’s a rare thing in life, the sudden and total absence of possibility, the rigidity of this ultimate course, of the decision you have made, to gently ease another from life.
Cats, dogs, horses, we’ve made that final call for them all over the years, and the weight of it seems to sit in the decision, not the mechanics that follow. That’s the human part, and it seems important to acknowledge the gravity of that choosing. To sit with it.
As I held the dying duck I felt the full charge of something that feels deeply true: that every death brings us back to all the other deaths we’ve known. They join in some space of deep and empty darkness. Death creates that well of feeling, something beyond our normal sense of emotional control. I think that’s grief, the visceral impulse to an overwhelming sadness, and it’s a space that stays with you. Each new brush with dying returns us to that same state of being bereft; somehow hollowed.
The little duck was my brother, my father, the other animals that have shared space and life with us. There will be more; life’s great certainty.
Oh Jonathan...
So very very sorry for your losses
May the memory of a beloved spaniels weighty velvet ears always soothe your heart
What a beautiful reflection on death - thank you. A little bird died in my hand recently - I had rescued it from the hot bitumen road and I thought in giving it water, it would prevail. It didn't. And when it died, this little random bird, I found myself weeping. Perhaps like you, its death was all the deaths I have known and will know.