A few months ago, I made a fool of myself. Outside of my professional work, you can find me hiding away from civilization on our little hobby farm where we raise chickens, pygmy goats and pigs. Most folks who aren’t familiar with the farming background find this endeavour to be amusing at best and I even have times when I scratch my head, wondering why I put so much work into this way of life. At the end of the day, the agricultural lifestyle is one of the most rewarding ways to put food on the table (literally). But to be honest, it can also teach you some pretty difficult lessons.
As I am now able to reflect with hindsight, I am able to laugh. But three months ago, this was my own little nightmare. Here is what happened….
In late summer, I brought my pigs to the local butcher. It can be a difficult process raising the wee little piglets into large beasts that you will eventually see on your plate as bacon. But that wasn’t even the hardest part. The most difficult part was finding out that I grossly misjudged the weight of the pigs that I raised. As I had done this before, I had simply assumed that the amount of food I fed the pigs and the time that I housed them would equate to similar results of previous years.
But I was wrong. Wrong by about 50 percent.
As the butcher read out the weights of the pigs that I had brought to him, I fell into a state of shock. I then found myself cycling through Kubler-Ross’ 5 Stages of Grief.
At first, I was in denial. These could not be my pigs! There is no way they were that small! Those must be someone else’s pigs!
Then I fell into anger. How dare they mix up my order! They must have done me wrong and I deserve retribution or at least an extra hundred pounds to make up for this mistake!
Then came the bargaining… Maybe if I just go down to the butcher and see the pigs before they are turned into bacon, I can convince the butcher that those pigs aren’t my pigs and I’ll be able to match the ear tags to a bigger pig! (I told you I made a fool of myself).
Then came the depression. I began to feel sorry for myself…. All of those days sweating in the barn, mending the fences, all for nothing! I vowed that I would never again raise hogs. Okay, I say that every time I’m done with them.
And after all of the moaning and groaning, I took responsibility for the fact that I was the one who misjudged the sizes and that I really should have weighed them or had a second opinion of when a hog is ready to go to market. Ah acceptance… a side road that you find yourself on after taking several u-turns and hitting a few dead ends...
When it came time to pick up the finished product, my customers were happy with their orders. Of course, I was disappointed in myself and my cost/return ratio wasn’t near where it should have been but coming to accept the reality of my own loss and the fact that there was nothing that I could do to change the outcome was the healthiest stance that I could have had given the situation I had gone through.
If I could take anything valuable from this farmer's nightmare, it’s the old saying that you can’t count your chickens before they hatch; and that acceptance really is the only path through the difficult and dreary cloud of grief.
We often think that the grieving process is contained to losing somebody that we love, when in our lives, grief shows up in all sorts of unpredictable situations. We miss an opportunity. We aren’t chosen after an interview. We long for something in life that never comes to be. The possibilities of where grief can show up is literally endless; yet each experience has one common ingredient of truly integrating it in a healthy way—and that is the ongoing process (and not singular event) of acceptance.
It can take a little while to get there. And in order to finally accept what happened, we might have to go around kicking the dust, complaining that it won’t rain and bargaining with a God who ultimately will never give us what we want for reasons beyond our own wisdom or control.
If I can be thankful for anything in this experience, it is that at some point we can begin to integrate the experience and find out that we will be okay on the other side. Acceptance is rarely about finding that life worked out better than you had ever asked for or imagined, and more about looking at what is in front of you and choosing to be content with what is.
I just don’t think I’ll ever do pigs again… that is until next spring.
Until Next Time,