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was down and he was hardly conscious of me. We went out into the grassy pasture where he had wandered at large every day of the spring. I knelt down in front of my horse’s lowered head, and I told him what a wonderful horse he was, perfect from top to toe every minute. Then Mike gave him the two big shots of barbiturates that would cause him to arrest.
    Arrest what?
    His heart.
    It didn’t take more than a second or two. Mike held the lead rope. The collapse of a horse is always earth-shaking. His haunches drop backward, his head flies up, his knees buckle, he falls to the side. We flocked around him, petting and talking to him, but he was gone already.
    After everyone left, my boyfriend and I covered him with blankets and went in the house.
    I slept fitfully, unable to grasp the suddenness and enormity of the death of my dear friend and constant companion. Each time I woke up, I dreaded going out there at daybreak — what would he look like? How would the mare be acting? What would I do next with a thirteen-hundred-pound body?
    When it was finally time to get up, my boyfriend got up with me, and we went out. The mare was in her stall, quiet. I fed her. Then we approached the mound. Fermentation from the impacted food had already begun — under the blanket, my horse’s belly was beginning visibly to swell.
    I folded back the cover, expecting something horrible, but Mr. T.’s eyes were closed — a kindness my boyfriend had done me the night before. I can’t express how important this was. It was not that I had ever seen his eyes closed before. I had not — he was too alert to sleep in my presence. Rather, it was that, looking familiarly asleep, he looked uniquely at peace.
    We sat down next to his head and stroked and petted him and talked. I admired, once again, his well-shaped ears, his beautiful head and throatlatch, his open nostrils, his silky coat, his textbook front legs that raced fifty-two times, in addition to every other sort of equine athletic activity, and were as clean at twenty years old as the day he was born. I admired his big, round, hard feet.
    But we didn’t just talk to him and about him. We relaxed next to him, stroking and petting, and talking about other things, too. We felt the coolness of his flesh, and it was pleasant, not gruesome. We stayed with him long enough to recognize that he was not there, that this body was like a car he had driven and now had gotten out of. The mare watched us, but she, too, was calm.
    Later, when I spoke to the manager of my other mares and foals, she told me that when a foal dies, you always leave it with the mare for a while — long enough for her to realize fully that it is not going to get up again, and to come to terms with that. I thought then that this is true of people, too. We have to experience the absence of life in order to accept it.
    My friends know that I adored Mr. T. to a boring and sometimes embarrassing degree. I would kvell at the drop of a riding helmet about his every quirk and personal quality. He was a good, sturdy, handsome horse, and a stakes winner, but not a horse of unusual accomplishment or exceptional beauty. He was never unkind and never unwilling — those were his special qualities. Nevertheless, I watched him and doted over him and appreciated him day after day for almost six years.
    The result is a surprising one. I miss him less, rather than more. Having loved him in detail (for example, the feel of his right hind leg stepping under me, then his left hind, then his right hind again… for example, the sight of his ears pricking as he caught sight of me over his stall door… for example, the sight of him strolling across his paddock...for example, the feel in my hands of him taking hold and coming under as we approached a fence … for example, the sound of his nicker), I have thousands of clear images of him right with me. I think I miss him less than I thought I would because I