Thinking About a Lost Friend Today

Last year during this week, while winding up a Horse & Rider magazine meeting in Texas, I was fighting a losing battle on two fronts. Try as I might, I couldn't give the business of business my full attention--because back home, one of our horses was dying. And there wasn't anything I could do about it.

I couldn't reach out to stroke his gray Arabian neck, couldn't tell him over and over what a perfect horse he was and how much joy he'd brought us, couldn't layer on extra blankets or take any other measures to give him some last-hours comfort. I could touch base with Ed and the vet during meeting breaks, and I could try to shove my sense of utter helplessness into a corner of my mind while discussing things like cover stories and circulation efforts. Beyond that--I just had to gut it out with my grief.

LE Najah died, by the vet's hand, before I made it home. I was on a long layover at the Portland airport--close enough to home to feel ALMOST there, but still too far to be anything but useless--when he went. Najah had been a seemingly healthy 25-year-old gelding the morning I'd left home. Within three days, acute kidney failure took him from sweet-faced barn resident to a memory.

I never got to say goodbye. The fresh pasture grave was already filled in by the time I lugged suitcase and briefcase in from the car.

Today, as the sun fails to penetrate a white winter fog, I'm just thinking about Najah, and looking through my snapshots of him (here, he's being Big Uncle to one of our foals). I'm wishing things had turned out differently.

But sometimes, they just don't.