The Grief Aging Equestrians Were Never Given Language For

You have been in horses long enough to know that something is shifting. Maybe it is the way your horse moves now compared to three years ago. Maybe it is your own body asking for more recovery time, more deliberate attention, more honest conversations with yourself about risk. Maybe it is the ambitions you are quietly revising without quite admitting you are revising them. Maybe it is all of it at once, arriving simultaneously, with no clear event to organize around and no social script for what you are carrying.Nobody warned you that this particular grief would be this heavy. Nobody told you it would arrive this quietly, in increments, inside a relationship that is still ongoing. Nobody gave you a framework for grieving something that has not ended yet but is already changing everything.In this episode of Strides to Solutions, Esther Adams does exactly that. Five named frameworks for what aging equestrians actually experience: the Living Loss Model, Identity Grief, Present-State Anchoring, the Caregiver Ethical Load, and the Cumulative Resilience that only comes from having loved horses long enough to have lost some of them. Drawn from the research in her new book, The Horse Shaped Hole: Navigating Equestrian Grief, this episode is for the rider who is still showing up to the barn every day while quietly carrying something she has never quite been able to name.Until now. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com