I like animals more than people. If ground penetrating radar zoomed in on the far back corner of the paddock on my semi-rural property on the fringe of Brisbane, it would reveal a scatter of bones: goat, horse, dog, duck, guinea pig and cat. If time travel were a thing, I’d take you back to my childhood home in London and another graveyard, except the favoured companions then were tortoises and tropical fish.

I have danced to grief’s obligatory tune plenty of times across too many decades. I’m a veteran. Grief is the umbral side to love. I’ve lost parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, best friends, a marriage, exciting jobs, as well as a roll call of alternative furred and feathered family members. I’ve mourned them all. My recent loss of a horse called Elvis is intensely painful and his death has ripped open old wounds and poignant memories. At my age, I’m bogged down by a soupy bereavement of too many missed souls.

Elvis’s hooves are hard to fill. The shimmering green pasture embroidered with yellow and purple flowery weeds looks inviting. Yet, this yielding land studded with majestic eucalypts especially reconditioned for Elvis hums hollow, an empty stage forever waiting for the lead actor. His absence is as dissonant and striking as his presence used to be. He dictated a daily rhythm; I had structure, purpose, a haven when human relationships were fraught, an antidote to work, the excuse to be outside, and a much-needed respite from brain work.

Remembering is painful, yet I don’t want to forget how he lifted his head when I called: hurling 500 kilos of bristling muscle forward, sprinting to his lung’s capacity. I wanted to retrain him; he’d been scratched from racing because of a bowed tendon, but no-one could dislodge the race from his soul. Spirited and a show-off, he ran to win, and he wanted control. I’d stand at the fence, arms by my side. Elvis would canter over, nuzzle my head, and ruffle my curls.

Grief is personal yet universal, a sentiment explored through plenty of literature. Emily Dickinson’s meditation on the subject is telling:

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing eyes –

I wonder if It weighs like Mine

Or has an easier size.

Grief is infinitely variable: exiledom, spent youth, wastage of talent. There’s a hierarchy: some griefs are noble, many tragic, others viewed as trifling.

Mourning an animal is not an equivalent to the death of a child or a beloved spouse. How can Elvis’s death equate to the murder of someone’s relative, the massacre of Ukrainian citizens, genocide, ecocide, matricide, famine, floods? Is it self-indulgent to cry, to miss him so much? But another self points a finger because in doubting the strength of my feelings I’m betraying a special friend.

Grief plays its victims. This time it has drained my energy, made me hide, propelled me down meaningless paths, shattered concentration. On an even keel, I suddenly succumbed to tears. I took risks. Got grumpy, drove faster, bought things. Struggled with ongoing projects. I got migraines, vertigo, lower back pain. My brain, months later, rolls intrusive reels of footage. I hang out the washing and he’s standing proudly by the gate in front of a tub of overflowing orange and red nasturtiums, the white blaze that ran crooked to his nose gleaming in bright light.

A pointy regret plagues me. Why didn’t I keep him on our farm? Yes, without medical intervention, he would have died: his breathing restricted, swallowing difficult. Veterinarian opinions were divided but I opted to believe the optimistic professional who told me that with specialist care in an equine hospital he had a chance. A chance that, after much deliberation, I took. I’m told I would have been equally tormented if I’d kept him with me and given him palliative care. Ah, but then I could have walked him in the warming sun, sat with him while he dozed under his favourite tree in stippled light? His last days peaceful on the land he loved?

This recollection particularly hurts. The truck arrived to take Elvis to the hospital. Elvis leaned into me, pressed his chin against my neck, his breath on my skin. We stalled, stood together, suspended in time. The wiry young driver waited, puzzled and impatient to make a start. As the horse mover’s engine rattled and squeaked, I called out, ‘See you tomorrow, Elvis.’ When he stamped, whinnied, scraped his hoof on the floor, I heard the heavy sigh of the vehicle’s brakes, and saw myself hammering on the driver’s door, ‘Let him out. Now.’

Emotional hurt due to an animal’s death is too often met with scepticism because the object of the grief is judged by others as slight. Only the grieving knows the deceased’s worth. Despair from the loss of a dog, a cat or a horse can be too easily dismissed. Yet, a psychiatrist told me she thought the love between a human and an animal is the purest, most generous relationship.

And animals are people to me. Elvis was my confidante, my alter ego. In the throes of a tantrum, he looked scary as he charged up and down a fence-line, head nudging the sky. I felt blessed when I approached and his mania melted away. I treasured his trust in me. I miss him following me around, miss his sheer size which shrank or grew governed by his mood or whether he was close or far away. I miss his voice, his pleadings. I even miss his arrogance. If another horse came towards me, Elvis bared his teeth, kicked out.

Our relationship with animals is fraught and complex. We experiment on them, sentence them to hard labour, take their lives to manufacture food, leather or fur, and kill them for fun. We pressgang horses and dogs, lions, dolphins and orcas and other species for entertainment in the gambling industries, zoos, water-themed parks, circuses, and films. And yet despite the continued cruelty and exploitation, there’s a deepening awareness of animals’ familial bonds. They are sentient beings and have loved ones and grieve as we do. The physical abuses inflicted on lesser order animals are compounded by the removal of their loved ones or the horror of seeing them killed. When Lily, one of Elvis’s chums, came to a necessarily orchestrated end (she had advanced cancer), Elvis screamed all day.

Similarly, while society increasingly accepts the strong attachments humans forge with creatures and how the loss of them is devastating, this growing acknowledgement of inter-species connection questions why some animals and not others are destined for the dinner plate.

Cultural values come into play; while dogs and cats in the western world are beloved companions, they are sometimes consumed in the east. While cows in India are ribboned, festooned with dangling bells and vivid decoration, at liberty to wander urban streets as religious icons, in the west cows are crammed in suffocating feedlots, condemned to the horrors of live export and bereft calves are isolated in the gloom of small shelters merely to turn their flesh into veal. These confusing contradictions enrage animal lovers and veganism and vegetarianism is gaining credence.

I’m resilient, but a dreamer. I had imagined Elvis, a 23-year-old gelding with a stallion’s heart, was invincible. I thought he’d outlast me. Arriving to see him after his first night at an equine hospital, I was shocked. Far from being in a stable next to other horses and allowed to graze as I was promised, he was isolated on one end of a concreted car park in a dark, tiny windowed stable with no outdoor access. Bio-suited professionals tended to him. He had tested positive to Strangles, a highly infectious disease, even though he’d been inoculated against it. His head drooped; his lips sagged. Heavily sedated, his skin felt too hot. I rubbed him down with blended lavender oil and tepid water to cool his skin and deter mosquitoes. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d betrayed him. All afternoon, I played Sting, The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, King Priest, Mahler, and Paul Robeson on my iPhone. I sang along. Brushed his coat to the rhythm and groove of my musical choices. When the equine nurse arrived to tell me visiting hours were up, she was encouraged.

‘His ears are up. He’s definitely happier.’

The vet crowed, ‘The drugs are working. A good sign.’

Next morning, I was told I couldn’t access Elvis before the vet had spoken to me. My legs turned to jelly, my heart pumped in my throat. Shaky, teary, my mind went into a spin. The vet attempted to explain something as we walked to his stable, but my mind darted here and there. I caught the odd word: ‘Dangerous. It’s neurological.’ Then, she stopped. Turned to me. ‘You. Need. To. Listen.’

I did.

‘He’s been spinning on the spot. We suspect a lesion in the brain. He’s lost his balance. You have a decision to make.’

***

Knowing I was there at the end will always comfort me. Beforehand, I was asked if I wanted a portion of his mane and tail. Inside, I screamed no. What would be the point? Now, I’m grateful I muttered yes. I’m also glad I grabbed a handful of fresh pick. By then he had been stabled for two days. He’d been eating easily swallowed bucket mix. But in his last moments, grassy tentacles trailed his lips. My left arm ringed his neck, I rubbed his belly round and round. Told him I loved him. Sang.

“He never took his eye off you,” the vet said.

***

A musical colleague told me she was sorry to hear about Elvis crossing the rainbow bridge. How I detest those words. Unwisely, I told her I felt raw.

‘But he died three weeks ago!’

A well-meaning friend commiserated. Her concern? I’d lost my therapy animal.

Others were pragmatic, ‘You’ll have other horses.’

The specialist who treated Elvis was impressive, but her counsel offended after I recited a potted history: ‘All this drama over one horse.’

We all have grief maps. I needed people to know. Elvis was the subject of a book I wrote. He had fans. I posted on the socials. Condolences popped up for days. One or two of the names I remembered from a magical book launch in Bangalow’s Heritage House in New South Wales. As I spoke about why I had written a memoir starring a racehorse, a pumped-up glam Elvis was paraded in the garden below for all to see.

***

For a week, I was alone, caring for my other horses, my dog Freda glued to my side. I walked, Netflixed, slept, read the tributes. Wracked by self-blame and a niggling ‘if only’ riff I couldn’t voice. A tribute from a friend helped. She understood. ‘You loved him at a cellular level, as every animal deserves to be loved. And he returned it. What a gift.’

Sixteen years ago, Elvis, as skeletal as he was proud, entered my life. Nudging me awake after I relocated from Melbourne to Brisbane. I toppled into unknown worlds: horse whisperers, landowners, chiros, farriers and dedicated preachers of sustainable pasture. As Elvis fattened – his tail thicker, mane longer, his hooves no longer cardboard thin, teeth filed, spine and neck kneaded into health – he devoured my time. I was refreshed. Enchanted.

Sceptics didn’t hide their scorn. Elvis was perverse, fragile, unpredictable, and non-compliant unless treated with the utmost respect. Suspicious, smoochy, spooky, he refused to be ridden. A decision he backed up, if he glimpsed a saddle, with white-rimmed eyes, bunched hips and he’d speed, his hooves spitting dirt in a round yard. Observers stepped back from the rails alarmed. I enjoyed his shenanigans because he acted out how I often felt inside. Impassioned piano music buzzed in my fingers and paralleled his moves.

An intuitive friend found us similar (not altogether flattering), but I agree there was an affinity as if our souls intersected. Once, on the other side of the world in London, I woke up at 3 am and knew something was wrong. I rang the agistment manager in Queensland, ‘Please check on Elvis,’ I pleaded. She told me she’d seen him ten minutes before I rang and he was fine. But I insisted. She found him lying on dirt, his hock an island in a moat of blood.

Accident prone, his health was touchy and wallet intensive: he gashed his forehead fighting another alpha horse, cellulitis flared in his back leg, he endured an eye ulcer. His regular bouts of colic pushed his vet and I into friendship. He expected me to right all wrongs: rainy weather, bothersome insects, boredom, hunger, illness and, rescue him when he had an accident. The most serious was when I’d tied him to a hitching rail and a truck thundered down our quiet road. Elvis reared and slammed down on the rail’s edge ripping his flesh open from under his chin to the bottom of his chest. The flesh curtained. In between the hanging folds, I glimpsed the jugular vein and muscles all miraculously intact.

I took Elvis’s capacity for recovery for granted until just before last Christmas. I was distracted by festivities when my daughter noticed Elvis had a yellowy nasal discharge. He had lost weight, too. When three courses of antibiotics failed, a vet conducted an endoscopy. He found calculus in his guttural pouch, a benign tumour close to his larynx.

***

Now I take comfort from those snippets of tail I almost refused. When I look at the coarse strands I see him flicking flies away, cooling himself on a steamy day; I see his tail all but sweeping the ground, threaded with spidery roots, elevated like his heart rate in the presence of a snake; and I think about whether I’ll make jewellery out of it, or put a sliver in a locket, or bury it when I plant a tree in his honour. I’ve begun to talk about him nearly a year later, but only to my partner, children and fellow horse lovers.

The imagination is fired by reading about horse legends liked Phar Lap and Seabiscuit and I’m pleased I trumpeted about Elvis’s lesser talent but larger-than-life personality in a book. But the truth is that thoroughbreds generally do have colourful, loveable personalities which makes it all the more tragic that these trusting, fear-and-flight animals experience the terrifying conditions of abattoirs, and that many on the brink of death are abused in unscrupulous meatworks.

His life was valued, unlike the thousands upon thousands of two-year-old thoroughbreds who are trained to gallop beyond their lungs’ capacity and before their joints have fused. When – not if – the majority break down, these unfortunates are culled despite a groundswell of public outrage. Even the prize-winners, pampered in front of the media can meet the same fate.

Loss gets harder not easier as the years roll by because the need to give and receive love is greater and, as life simplifies, the capacity to value significant relationships past and present grows. The grief is profound yet grounds my existence. I’m grateful for the intense rapport I shared, while accepting I’ve little chance of forming a deep bond with such a spirited, challenging animal ever again. But knowing I have done comforts me and I’ll always feel proud and privileged because of it.

Bio

An author and arts writer, Gillian Wills' memoir, ‘Elvis and Me,' Finch, was released in 2016.