Sunday, February 12, 2006
Losing A Pet
No, I didn’t lose a pet recently, thank goodness but I’ve been reading some message boards where people have and every time someone talks about losing their pet, I’m flooded with memories of some of my pets that I had a tight bond with.
The first time I had an “official” pet was when I was in 5th grade. There were animals in our lives but these were my first pets. It was around my birthday and we were on some sort of vacation in a camp ground when we came upon some people with dwarf rabbits. I wanted one of those rabbits so badly but I did not get one. I begged and pleaded but I did not get one. I was unhappy for the rest of the vacation and I could not stop talking about the rabbits.
The day that we were to leave, the father figure approached with a cardboard box. It was my birthday and this was my birthday present. It seems he snuck around and got two of the bunnies from the family at the campground and they were now mine. It was a complete and total surprise. When we got home, the first thing the father figure did was set out to build them the ultimate in rabbit condominiums and day and night he was in the garage, sawing, hammering and cutting wood.
A few days later he hauled out the most impressive rabbit hutch that I’ve ever seen in my life. This thing was huge and had four apartments. Each apartment had a “hidden” bedroom that the rabbits had to climb up a ramp to enter. They were completely hidden from view as the ramp and the “door” were on the side. He had built a door that I could lift up to take out the metal tray that held the sawdust for cleaning purposes but other than when I did that, the rabbits had a private bedroom in their apartments.
We had a huge backyard and I would set up the picnic benches across the sidewalk entrance between the hedges and the entrance from our smaller driveway between another hedge and the small garage. Then my rabbits could run and run and run and eat grass and play in the bushes and have a great time. Because one was male and one was female, the parental units decided to let them breed just one time. Eventually the girl bunny was a soon to be mom and we took great care of her, reading and buying books about dwarf rabbits and feeding her the proper diet.
The girl bunny was all white with gray ears, gray feet, gray tail and red eyes. She was a delicate thing and her fur was extraordinarily soft. She was incredibly sweet and gentle. I adored her. The male rabbit had black ears, black feet, black tail and red eyes. He and I bonded intensely. When I wanted to put them back in their apartments after a good run in the backyard, the girl rabbit would be content to go back to her room and having some water or something to eat. The boy rabbit wanted to be with me. I would pick him up and he would climb up to my shoulder and sit there, viewing the surroundings. I would carry him over to the swing, sit down and stretch my legs to the bench across me and put him at my feet. He would sit there for a moment and then come bounding across my legs and leap to my shoulder. This became our little game. We would sit in silence for a long time, just enjoying each other’s company.
One day we had a particularly bad storm full of thunder and lightning. I walked up the driveway on the way home from school and did not see the back of the rabbit condo. I started to panic. I threw everything down and ran to the back yard to find the rabbit condo had been knocked over. This was a powerful gust of wind that did this because the father figure had planned ahead for situations like this. He had dug a large stake in to the ground behind the rabbit condo and had fixed the condo to the stake so that it would be extremely sturdy and would not get knocked down.
I freaked out completely because the condo was now on its face, the front was on the ground and I could not get to my rabbits. Eventually both parents were home and we got the condo back up to find the girl bunny was dead. She had been injured during this incident or possibly had died of fright. I grabbed the boy rabbit and sat with him for hours, crying over the loss of the girl.
Time went on and one day, again on my birthday, I went out to feed and water the boy rabbit. It was early in the morning, the light was just barely poking through so I was not able to see very clearly at the condo. I started to go about the business of taking care of the boy rabbit when I heard some noise coming from the compartment above his. I jumped back a bit, startled and found myself staring into the brown eyes of another dwarf rabbit.
I was elated. She was sitting by the door and I was in the process of opening the door to get to know her when I saw something out of the corner of my eye coming from the apartment right next to hers. My jaw dropped. ANOTHER dwarf bunny! This one was a baby so he was extra tiny. I took care of all three of them and held them and petted them. I then raced in to the house to scream my thank yous with delight.
The little baby boy got sick and we let him stay in a cage in the house but he just never got better. Unfortunately he didn’t have a lot of time on this earth. The new girl bunny had managed to get her feet wet despite how careful we were not to allow that to happen. We had read that this was a bad thing for rabbits so we took care to make sure their feet stayed dry. She died about two weeks later.
I was back down to the boy bunny. At that time in my life, I just couldn’t take any more loss and I devoted my time to my one pet. Eventually I graduated high school and was off to the military. After my AIT, I came home and was thrilled to find boy bunny still alive. But I knew. I knew that this one week visit before I went off to Germany was the last time I would ever see him.
I spent hours each day with him, he still remembered our swing game and we sat in silence just enjoying each other’s company. I was sad because I knew I would never see him again but I was comforted in knowing that I knew this and could cherish every last moment I had with him.
And it’s like he knew too. He lived for 7 + years and had stuck around long enough for me to make one last visit. Three weeks after I got to Germany, he died. I was heartbroken that I couldn’t be there with him and I was angry, misplaced of course, that the other family members didn’t give him quality time that last three weeks. I knew they didn’t sit with him for hours on end on that swing. I knew that they didn’t spend much more time with him than feeding him and making sure his apartment was clean and that his water was not frozen. I’m sure they petted him and said ‘hi’ but I knew they didn’t take him out to hold for extended periods of time.
Eventually I stopped being angry at them. I was angry that my rabbit had died even though I knew he would. I was angry that I couldn’t be there when he died. That wasn’t anyone’s fault. There are times to this day that thinking about him can make me tear up.
The next strong bond I had with a pet was with a little rat named Lucy. I was dating a guy who wanted a rat for a pet and while I had met rats in my past and wasn’t really scared of them, at first Lucy scared me. She was hyper and she would jump up whenever you put your hand in her cage. At first I thought she was trying to bite me but what was really going on is that Lucy was a little extrovert and wanted to be held. With much coaxing from my then boyfriend, I picked her up and from that moment on, the bond started to grow.
She loved to be held and carried around but she refused to stay on my shoulder or in a pocket. She insisted that I hold and carry her in the palms of my hands. I would carry her around all over the place, showing her the sites of downtown Seattle. Hell, I took her to the beach with me one day. She and another rat for some reason LOVED to go for car rides so I picked them up, carried them to the car and set off. I had no real destination in mind and found myself at the beach two hours later.
When I would put Lucy on the bed to run around, she always ran over to me to cuddle. She would lick me and try to climb up me to get to my face. I would pick her up and she would lick my face and tried to lick my teeth. She always tried to sleep in my bed with me and at first I wouldn’t I let her. I was always afraid I would squish her. Eventually I found out that she always stayed near the top of my head and nested in my hair so for 2 years she was my little sleeping buddy.
The cat you see in the header, the namesake of this journal, loved that rat. Serenity would sit on the bed with her paws out in front of her and Lucy would bound up to Serenity, no fear at all, and nestle between her paws and chest. Serenity would then groom Lucy and they would doze together. Hell, even the dog liked Lucy. I had trained the dog to know that she was beneath the rats on the totem pole and the dog would watch Lucy play. She would try to play but did it so delicately so as not to hurt her and watching a 75 pound dog play with a tiny little rat so gently was one of the coolest damn things I’ve ever witnessed in my life.
Lucy eventually got sick and I knew her death was coming. By this time I had started going out with someone else and he had called to ask me to come over. I was afraid to leave Lucy because I had a strong feeling this was the night. I brought her with me and we kept watch over her in to the night.
Then Lucy did something that I’d never had another animal do to me ever. (Serenity did it to me after I broke my ankle but before Lucy, this had never happened.) She stared right in to my soul. She stared hard and it was so deep in to my soul that while words were not passed, noises weren’t even passed between us, I knew exactly what she was saying. She was about to die and she was scared. I got extremely upset and we flung the yellow pages on to the bed to find the nearest all night vet. We called up and I explained, tearfully, what was going on and they told me to bring her in. I started to race down the hall with her to the car. The guy I was going out with had to go back in to the apartment for something so I stopped in the stairwell. I had Lucy in her favorite place, riding in the palm of my hands. I looked in to her eyes. They went wild with fear for a moment and then............she was gone.
I had completely forgotten that there was a world around me. I forgot that I was in a concrete stairwell that echoed and that there were tenants who were sleeping as it was late at night. I forgot about everyone and everything. I was in that moment absolutely alone with my friend lying still in my hands. I started yelling her name. I started gently poking her. I tried to breathe on her hard hoping it would somehow miraculously be a miracle bit of rat cpr. I started bawling. In the stairwell. In a building I didn’t live in. At 2 in the morning. Holding a dead rat.
We still went to the emergency vet because I couldn’t even think clearly. I couldn’t even think of what to do next. And I drove. Not so good. We got there and I was too hysterical to say a word. The vets were kind enough to loan me an exam room to sit in and be by myself with my rat for awhile. I sat in there for hours. Not once did they grow impatient with me and tell me it was time to let go. They allowed me to sit there and cry and cry and cry and cry. Even the guy I went out with was extremely patient and understanding. He had met Lucy. He thought she was the greatest. Eventually I got up and knew that it was time to hand her little body over to the vet.
They asked me if I wanted her cremated and get her remains. DUH! The guy I was going out with ponied up the cash because I hadn’t even thought to bring anything with me besides my car keys and Lucy. I handed her over and spent the next three days crying. I didn’t go in to work the day after but did the days after that. But that didn’t stop me from constantly thinking about her and feeling the tears stream down my cheeks. I was driving my own car for a living and I can’t even imagine what it must have looked like to see someone in their car just burst in to tears for no apparent reason whatsoever.
I had another job working in a bar and while Lucy was alive, the DJ always played a song that reminded me of her while I worked. I went to work the bar after Lucy died and the DJ, not knowing any of this, played that song. I completely broke down again. People wanted to know why I was so upset but what could I tell them? “I’m fucking devasted because my rat just died.” Not many people seem to understand that.
Some people understand. Some people bond so strongly with their pets that the grief lasts much longer than the average person can comprehend. Part of what makes it so hard on me is that I was taught, while growing up, that when people died, they went off to a place called heaven. People had souls. I was taught that when animals died, they just died. Animals have no souls is what they told me. I fight both of these teachings to this day, still confused about what I believe in due to mixed messages and so many other beliefs that I don’t know what to think anymore. I would love for there truly to be a Rainbow Bridge but my desire for that and what was pounded in to my head as a kid are at war with each other. I don’t have problems when people die. I don’t like it but I don’t get upset. While I may not believe in the Christian faith, I cannot help but think that maybe, just maybe there really is an afterlife. With animals...I just don’t know.
When the cat who graces the top of this site passes on, it will kill me. It will take me a very long time to get over it. It will be at that time that I will once again seek the people who get it. Not a lot of those in this world from my experience but I know there are some and those people are the ones who will carry me through as I have carried them through.
Oddly enough, I’ve never met them.
