In this essay, I write from the days surrounding my father’s death and our first quiet Christmas at Lavender Hill Farm. What I expected to be rest turned into a confrontation with how my body and mind responded after months of caregiving, loss, and responsibility, and with an old folk practice that gave language to something I didn’t yet know how to name.

Sin Eating weaves together farm work, folklore, and a Christmas Eve medical scare with one of our mares. I reflect on the impulse to take responsibility for loss, to keep internal ledgers, and to hold what feels unbearable in the hope that something else might be spared. The piece moves between grief in the human body and illness in an animal body, asking where responsibility begins, where it ends, and what happens when we try to carry too much.

This is an essay about embodied grief, stewardship, inherited wisdom, and leadership fatigue. It’s about how attention and simple acts can become containers in moments of crisis, and how some forms of knowing arrive without explanation—through touch, repetition, and attention.

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