He had been slowing down little by little every day, to the point where his whiskers didn't even whirr when the cage door opened to see if the Raisin Fairy had arrived. He had even gotten too slow and drowsy to react if you reached in to pat him. I stroked his head yesterday and he didn't even feel the same -- his fur wasn't soft like it used to be, but kind of woolly. And his eyes stayed squeezed shut, not like in the past, when his little black ball bearing eyes would POINK out from time to time, always taking stock of his surroundings, before succumbing to the urge to squint into drowsiness and revel in the joy of someone stroking his head.
We've known for a couple of days that he wasn't really "in there" any more, and we could see his spark ebbing away into longer and longer sleep cycles, but it was still a shock when we realized he was really, finally gone.
It seems almost obscene to fall apart to this extent over a little ball of fur, but we've honked our way through a box of kleenex already and Keighley is a basket case.
We were prepared for this inevitability, knowing that this could and probably would happen on this trip, so I brought a box just in case so we could bury him *in* it and still bring him home to bury in the back yard. (The box from my favorite Steve Madden shoes -- pink crocodile slides with silver grommets and buckles.) In the box with him: a Ritz cracker, a sunflower seed, a kleenex blanket, and a note from Keighley, lots of his bedding around him, duct tape to hold the whole thing shut, and a double-bagging of recycled Wal-Mart bags, really the perfect 21st century version of the Egyptian tradition of burying the dead with a collection of the sacred and the profane.
Meanwhile, of course, life goes on with its little gut-kicking ironies: while Wes was rinsing out the cage, trying to deal with what just happened, still in shock, two kids next door piped up with, Hey! Is that a hamster cage?? and when I went to order some dinner from the cafe, the nice guy running the grill wanted to know how my day was going and I said it had been fine, but our hamster had just died, and this kid standing next to me said, My dog is like a hamster! and indicates to me about how big the dog is, and launches into a description of his miniature Chihuahua. What do you do? Laugh? Cry?
My apologies to my poor father in law, who got Keighley's phone call and thought when she said BUTTER had died that she said her MOTHER had died. (I'm fine, really.)
I'm attaching two pictures of the Little Dude in better times. These are pictures Keighley took on a different RV trip to the Outer Banks, when you could still reach into his cage, grab him, and put him in one of your pockets where he would turn around and around and around until he had his butt *just so* and then he'd rumble up to the pocket opening to peek out at you. I dug through the bag the digital camera is in to see if I still had the disk with those pictures and was rewarded with bittersweet luck -- it kills me!! -- look at that face! Is that the coolest hamster or what?
Laugh? Cry? I'm doing both.
