The development of this tissue is essential for the efficient healing of a wound, but the process can get out of control. Proud flesh is exuberant granulation tissue. We scrape away until we once again are living.You can make your field as horse-friendly as possible, but somehow a horse will go out of its way to find a way of hurting itself – and the presence of ‘proud flesh’ is an indication that something has gone wrong during the healing process. Proud flesh is most likely to be found from the knee down on the front legs and from the hocks down on the hind legs. Now, my mother carries her grief-on the sidewalk, on the treadmill, as she rests. She walks more than eight miles every day. There are no nerves in proud flesh, so the horse doesn’t feel the cut. In order to heal, the tissue must be cut again and again, until it is living. Proud flesh can sometimes eclipse the original wound. The vet takes a scalpel to the pink between the horse’s ears, spilling blood onto the dirt. Now, I have nightmares where my mouth is filled with flesh and I have to cut to tongue, to form words. I used to have nightmares where my mouth was filled with mulch and I had to scoop it out in order to speak. Like the ground being opened to home a body. Like a mouth opening, swallowing, silent. When someone dies, all your grief opens inside you. I’ve hugged my mother once in ten months. My worry is the pile of clothes teeming in the corner of my bedroom. My worry is the scab I reopen with my anxious fingers. I worry that my worry is too heavy for my partner. I can no longer remember those thoughts of joy. My mother told me to think about things that brought me joy so that I could fall asleep. I said I wished it would happen the other way around so that I would never have to feel the absence of her. She explained to me that mothers are supposed to die before their children. A wildness I admired.Īt bedtime as a child, I once asked my mother which of us would die first. Christmas, it’s just another day, he said when he told my mother he wouldn’t be joining us. My family wasn’t sitting together when my half-brother died. I admit: I was grappling with gratitude more than grief.
#PROUD FLESH SKIN#
I understood the meaning of skin and bones. As I looked at her eyes, hands, blue-rivered and jagged, I did not see my grandmother-I saw what was left of my own mother in her. The last time I saw her, the air was thick with death. My mother had been visiting her multiple times a day in her assisted living facility. My grandmother died the week before we all started staying home because of the pandemic. A bag of saline empties one drop at a time. Imagine the moment before a skipping rock sinks. Two years ago, my mother lay in the hospital with eleven broken bones. My mother’s stories fill an absence of our own stories.
Once, I was making kale for dinner and I found a caterpillar on a leaf, and he said he’d eat the caterpillar but not the kale. My half-brother is dying and we hold this knowledge quietly. Proud flesh is when granulation tissue fills space in a wound instead of healing. Once, we had a horse who split his head open on a beam and grew proud flesh.
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