A Cherished Life

Rammie arrived in our lives because one person, unsteady on the other end of a phone line, refused to give up. “Please don’t judge me,” they said. They had tried almost everywhere to find help for the sheep whose life they had saved as a lamb, but their remote location had narrowed the options to something unthinkable: “We can shoot ‘im.”

Their voice carried more than grief. It carried shame too. And in the middle of that loneliness was a blind, bottle-reared ram with a heart as vast as his body and a burden no one should have had to bear.

Rammie Baa Baa, when we met him, was big in size, but gentle in spirit. He stole our hearts the way the best souls do, without even trying. His approach was always soft, while his gaze was clouded but kind. And the trust he so willingly gave always felt like a precious gift.

We will never forget the first time we truly saw what he had been living with for so long. A massive, infected scrotum, some 40 kilos, dragging on his body and his days. And yet Rammie never carried this as a burden.

Not once.

If anything, he showed us what it looks like to keep choosing kindness even when life has given you every excuse not to.

The surgery that followed asked much of him and of veterinary science too. And both proved that the impossible is only so until we try.

Rammie Baa Baa withstood the scrotum, the blindness, the grass seeds that had riddled his skin like spiky little spears, and later the creeping losses that time brings to every beloved being.

Still, he never surrendered his gentleness. Or his love of carrots.

And goodness, he never surrendered his flair for giving us a fright either. Rammie had a knack for lying flat out as if he’d slipped quietly away, our hearts stopping mid-beat as we hurried towards him, only for him to rise again as though nothing at all had happened.

Perhaps it was a trick he learned from old Smokey. Either way, he kept us humble. And in a strange kind of grace, he reminded us not to take a single ordinary moment for granted.

He would come running at the hint of a human, his head tilted in his signature way, taking in the world not with his eyes but with his ears and his heart. And he made friends with us all—how could he not?

But most of all, he made better humans of us, too.

Yesterday, as we said our final goodbye and offered him one last carrot, we told him it was from Denise. That kind heart who never gave up on him, or on kindness, all those years ago.

Dearest Rammie Baa Baa, life will not be the same without you. Thank you for everything you brought to our world. We trust, with all we are, that we brought even half of that to yours.

You were, and will always be, a cherished life.

Godspeed, magnificent one. Godspeed.