Ever since she was a little girl, my mom wanted to own a horse ranch with a white board fence. Life, of course, doesn’t work out the way we imagine it will when we’re young — that’s a truth I’ve been struggling with myself lately — but she did manage to get an approximation of her dream, at least. There’ve always been horses around the Bennion Compound, even before I came along. When I was a kid, she dabbled a little with breeding her mares. (I learned the facts of life by watching three foals enter the world, and one, sadly, that didn’t quite make it.) And yes, she even got her white board fence, across the front of a hay pasture she and Dad bought from one of the neighbors. It wasn’t Southfork by any means, but it was pretty good for our circumstances.

At its largest point, our little herd numbered five head, three of which were papered Arabians. But that was long ago, and time and entropy have taken their toll. This morning, my parents had to make the difficult decision to have one of Mom’s two remaining horses put down. Her registered name was Misty Dawn, a derivation of her mother’s name — Desert Mist, or more familiarly, Misty — and her sire’s, Dantu (that’s pronounced Dawn-Too, for the record). But we’ve always just called her Dawn, naturally.

Dawn was somewhat fragile right from the beginning. As a foal, she was allergic to her mother’s milk, and needed to be bottle fed. Subsequently, she’s had a number of odd ailments over the years, the most alarming — and disgusting — of which was a condition my mom dubbed “the snots.” As best as anyone could tell, this was also an allergic reaction; it struck her only in the warmer weather, when plants were in bloom, and it seems like it always came on after we’d seen her hanging around a particular part of the pasture, suggesting there’s something in that area that didn’t agree with her. Basically, this reaction or infection or whatever it was caused the glands in her neck to swell and partially block her throat. This naturally caused her to have difficulty breathing, but the worse effect was that she couldn’t swallow; anything she ate or drank got re-routed back through her sinuses and out her nose. The irritated tissues then started producing mucus, either because of the allergy itself or as a protective measure against the foreign substances sluicing through sensitive places, and… well, as I said, it was pretty disgusting.

Dawn’s first bout with the snots happened several years ago, and I think we came close to losing her then. As big as horses are, they tend to drop weight very quickly when they can’t eat, and she became emaciated and malnourished after only a couple of days. The vet was stumped — the only explanation he could think of was cancer — but he gambled on treating the condition as an allergy and shot her full of steroids. That did the trick; her glands went down, the snot went away, and she started breathing, drinking, and eating normally. My parents breathed a sigh of relief, and life went on.

The horse had a couple more mild episodes of this… whatever it was… but never as bad as that initial one until about a month ago, when the snots returned with a vengeance. Again, the vet tried steroids, but this time they were less effective, and Dawn’s respite was brutally short.

Last night, I passed through the barn on my way out to my parents’ house, and from the sound of Dawn’s breathing, I honestly didn’t think she was going to see another sunrise. It was like an exaggerated cartoon-character snore combined with rusty machinery — simply awful. She was backlighted, only a big equine silhouette, but I could see her head was hanging much lower than is normal for horses. And I could see a shadow of thick goop running from her muzzle in a steady stream. I ran to the house to tell Mom; she already knew, and was resigned to whatever she was going to find come morning. On my way back to my own house, I stopped to say my goodbyes. Like I said, I didn’t expect Dawn to survive the night.

She did survive til morning, but only barely, I suspect. The snots were worse than they had ever been. Every breath was a struggle, and she was already losing weight again. I was at work when Mom and Dad had the discussion about what to do. I don’t know if Mom had to be talked into it, or if she saw the writing on the wall. Either way, Dad told me she wasn’t around when the vet injected the chemicals that stopped Dawn’s breathing for good. Mom had been there at the beginning of this horse’s life 27 years earlier — and yes, that is a long life for a horse, although we once had one that lived longer — but she couldn’t bear to watch as that life ended.

And now there’s only one member of our little herd left, Dawn’s brother Sonny (officially registered as Sunfire, if I recall correctly), who is two years younger. We nearly lost him, too, about 15 years ago; that’s one hell of a story I may tell some day. He’s never been alone. There have been other horses around him his entire life. And my parents and I are concerned about how he’s going to react to solitude.

Mom is understandably upset, bursting easily into tears and feeling guilty for not spending more time with her horses over the past few years. The truth is, they’ve been little more than big dogs for about two decades now. I can’t remember the last time any of us rode, and in fact Sonny and Dawn were never even broken. But that’s yet another long story.

Dad is upset, as well, surprisingly since he rarely has anything good to say about horses in general. But he can see how this loss has hurt his wife, and he’s not inhuman. I know him well enough to know he felt compassion and regret as he watched Dawn die.

As for me, I feel bad for Mom and for Sonny. I never had much attachment to Dawn — she was frankly something of a bitch, with little of the curiosity or sparkle of her brother — but her death has affected me nonetheless. It’s one more loss, one more incremental step toward the total dissolution of the world I grew up with. The world I used to think would always be here. I look around the Compound and I see decay everywhere: in the dust gathered in the corners of an increasingly lifeless barn, in the rust on my dad’s collected bits of junk, in the trees I used to climb that are now filled with dead wood. In my parents, who are suddenly growing old before my very eyes. And in my growing sense of disappointment and regret about my own life.

I’m going to be 40 years old in about two months. I’ve never wanted to be one of those tiresome bores who has a meltdown when they reach some arbitrary age that society claims is a landmark… but I can feel it coming. I miss the young man I used to be, and the world he used to live in. And I can’t help but mourn the loss of both.

Hang in there, Loyal Readers. It’s going to get bumpy around here for a while…