It was early on the last morning of the year when my husband touched my shoulder, gentle but firm. Light filtered in around the still-drawn curtains. “Honey, I have to tell you something,” he said, in a tone that immediately shook me awake. I looked at him and knew—something was very wrong. His expression was grim. “Tina died,” he said, and his voice cracked.
“Oh no,” I said, flinging back the covers and scrambling to get out of bed. My foot got caught and I had to stop, half-entangled in the sheets, not quite as awake as I had thought. For a moment I felt confused, as the thoughts swam and then pieced themselves together again in my head. Tina Turner, my children’s favorite chicken, the one with the wild poof of white “hair” head feathers, was dead.
I felt guilty, remembering how the night before I had wound blue painters tape around the remaining feathers on her head, trying to protect her growing baldness from further bullying. The other chickens had been pecking her bloody for weeks. We had tried everything, from smearing her head with balm to isolating her in a dog crate in the garage, where she became depressed and lethargic without her flock.
The tape was a final, desperate attempt to protect her wound and give the missing feathers a chance to grow back. Could the tape somehow have killed her? Had she become entangled, or choked, or gotten caught on something? Or had the other chickens finally pecked her to death? I looked at him again, hoping for absolution for all of us.
“How?”
“A hawk,” he answered, and I exhaled, relieved.
“Show me,” I said, grabbing my socks.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s … not nice.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I need to see.”
I am good at denial; I knew that I would need to see for myself or risk spending the winter second-guessing his assessment. “Dead” is not something you want to wonder later if you were wrong about. As if hurrying would help, I rushed outside.
Snow had fallen the day before, and my footsteps crunched on the icy driveway. My husband had witnessed the gruesome scene when he went outside to bring the chickens fresh water. The hawk flew off when he approached, leaving a mess of feathers and bloodied snow. There was no questioning the accuracy of his assessment once I got out there: Her neck was broken, her body heavy and slack. He touched my shoulder again. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Always a special case
Tina, the lone white-crested Polish in our flock of Reds and Wyandottes, had always been different. We got her as a freebie from the hatchery, a “gift” we had often regretted accepting. Tina always needed special handling. She arrived half-dead, too weak to hold her head up or make a sound. I taught her to drink that first morning, dipping her beak into the water dish over and over, pulling her back from the brink with electrolyte-infused water and a lot of fussing. She was smaller than the rest of the chickens and looked funny, growing a poof of white feathers on her head; it fell like a wild ’80s hairstyle, which earned her the name Tina Turner. Even as a baby she never quite fit in, running after the other chicks like the kid in grade school who didn’t quite understand she was being excluded on purpose. But she was bold, too, perhaps a consequence of her social isolation, and was often the first chicken to try something new, while the rest of them huddled together in the safety of the flock. She was high maintenance, needing separate places to scratch and eat, insisting on being put to bed every night in a separate henhouse so as to avoid their constant bullying. We spent a lot of time talking about how to make her life better, from planning to build a separate enclosure for her to wondering how to fashion a little leather helmet to keep her head protected. She was dorky and weird, and it was never quite clear if she simply couldn’t see around her fantastic crown of feathers, or if she was, as chickens go, a little stupid. Of course, she was everyone’s favorite.
When we told them, the kids were heartbroken. While not pets, the chickens are animals the kids have cared for every day since they were chicks, the first beings whose daily care they are invested in besides their own. My mother, unintimidated by the frozen ground, insisted we give Tina a proper sendoff. And that is how we ended up spending New Year’s Eve gathered around the compost pile, holding a memorial service for our family’s first lost chicken. We have always celebrated the lives of our family’s beloved animals, and though she was livestock, Tina was no exception. The kids spent the day making drawings to remember her. I sang at the ceremony, and my mother read a Buddhist prayer. My son read a reflection he had written, perfectly capturing Tina as the “perky, stand-outey, and serious” bird she was.
Mourning the end of a life
In case the fact that my family held a chicken memorial service doesn’t make our situation clear, we are not real farmers. Real farmers do not make chicken helmets or raise their birds in the garage. Real farmers would have culled that weak, diseased little chick the day she hatched. But Tina didn’t need us to be real farmers. She needed us to be exactly what we are: a family with a hobby flock and the best intentions, just sentimental and knowledgeable enough to give her a life, and to mourn when it ended.
