Back when our girls were growing up, we parents had to find a strategy to distract them from guys as long as possible. Fortunately, they discovered horses, and Karen and I had a reprieve. The three older girls worked hard and saved their pennies until finally, they bought a horse. Of course, all they could afford was a very old horse. Here is my recollection of its demise:

The inescapable fact of midlife is periodically underscored by an event. Yesterday, we discovered Cody, our old horse, dead in the creek. Cody had been teetering on the brink for quite a while, so, while we were a little sad, we were mostly relieved.

But then we were faced with an unpleasant reality: You can't leave old Cody in the creek. He needs a proper burial. How in the world do you get him out of the creek and up the embankment to the nearby equine burial grounds? At first, I didn't have an answer. A winch? Some levers? Some Rube Goldberg contraption? Then I spied my son Seth and his friends ambling thru the woods. "Hey, come help move Cody!" I yelled.

There is a big gap between the macho image that guys cultivate around women and their own fumbling reality. When Seth and his friends saw Cody, legs and neck all splayed out in the creek bed, their response was, "Oooh. Yuck!"

I cajoled them like a football coach. "C'mon, it's messy work, but someone's got to do it. Cody can't be left here unmourned and fouling the creek. Every man grab a leg and I'll grab the tail!" Much nervous laughter ensued as we drug Cody out of the water. When it came time to move the head, there was no delicate way to do it, so we just grabbed the ears and lifted.

After much straining and grunting, inch by inch, we drug him up the hill, at the end heaving his haunches over the lip of the embankment, and falling back in exhaustion, laughing at the macabre proceedings and our own dysfunction as grave diggers. But we did get shovels and, finding it difficult to dig a proper hole or even scavenge much dirt there in the forest, we kind of formed a burial mound around him.

You always hear the cowboys in the Westerns talking about "Giving him a decent burial." I don't know that our little ceremony rose to that level, but at least we hid Cody from view. Hardly a somber occasion though.

Yes, middle age has arrived, but it's better than the alternative.