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| Ginger Chicken |
Our Ginger chicken was sick for a while. I isolated her from the other girls. I gave her 2 full courses of antibiotics. She seemed to get better, only to have a relapse a couple days later after the second round of medicine.
I checked the girls before bed that night to see them all tucked in. Ginger gave me her "I'm-sleeping-&-your-flashlight-is-bothering-me" squawk. Good.
Her death was inevitable. The fellow at the farm bureau said it would happen.
And so it did. I went down in the morning to wake up my not-so-early-rising chickens. I waked into the greenhouse to peek at Ginger. She looked so peaceful. Her head was gently resting on her back, as how most birds sleep. She didn't move, at all, when I uncovered her box. That was it. I would have just covered the box back up & waited for Hubby to come & help me, but Girly was right beside me. She asked the lifeless chicken to wake-up, then pleaded & finally tried to "help" her to get up.
I tried to explain that, "Honey, Gingy is dead. She fell asleep & didn't wake up." I could see the confusion on my baby's face. "Come on, Gingy, time to get up! Gingy, Get up!" over & over. I tried different ways of telling her that Ginger wasn't going to wake up, she was gone.
This was our first dealings with death that we had to try & explain to Girly. We had goldfish that died & got flushed. We never had to divulge their where-abouts of those fish because Nemo proved to Girly that, "All drains lead to the ocean." Nemo was just fine once he was reunited with Marlin, so why wouldn't all of our fish?
My grandparents & other members of our family have died since Girly has been born, but we have never taken her to any of the funerals. We just weren't quite sure what she would do to see someone she knew & loved lying motionless. Would she try to rouse them from their eternal slumber? Would she think that she could fall asleep & not wake back up? Would she have nightmares about others not getting out of their beds anymore?
We finally settled on telling her that, "Gingy is in chicken heaven." Girly would ask repeatedly throughout the day for the next 2 weeks, "Where is my Gingy?!" That was the answer we continued to give her. She would run down to the greenhouse & coop hoping that we were just playing tricks & hiding the chicken from her. She honestly did not know what happened to the chicken. Died is/was not in her vocabulary.
I was at a loss for my daughter. I couldn't ease her pain or comfort her. I felt useless to her as a mother. I could only try to repeat that Gingy was in chicken heaven. Those were 2 very wretched weeks. I'll end it with that, you don't want to hear the terrible details.
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| Boyo's Easter watercolor painting. |
Sometimes when loved ones die, we ask God, "Why?" Sometimes we ask Him, "Where are they?" because we honestly don't know if they are in heaven with him, or in Hell.
"For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." - 1 Thessalonians 5:2
We don't when God will tell us to depart from this Earth. All we can do is prepare our souls by asking to be forgiven of all our sins & that Jesus would be our Lord & Savior.
"Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." - Romans 10:9
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." - 1 John 1:9
We can tell our friends, families & even strangers about God's love for them so that we don't have to ask, "Where are they?" We should be bold enough to tell others of our assurances of our heavenly home after we depart from this home that way they don't have to wonder where we are. They will know that if they have Jesus' salvation that they will see us again & that it will be forever this time, whether they like it or not!
I ended up getting some chicks this spring. Girly named 1 Ginger.
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| The new Ginger. |
