August 5, 2000 ~ A Quiet Passing

A few weeks back, I was taking care of twenty rats for one of the professors here while she was away in Ireland and Italy. Most of the rats are really skitzy and wild, but there was one that was really sweet, and curious, and calm, who loved to be scratched and sit on shoulders and such. She had pretty, banded, brown fur and brown eyes, with a light underbelly. She was also sick with a bad respiratory illness, and so I took her home with me to give her vitamins and antibiotics. She was very, very sweet.

This morning we woke up, and she was laying at an awkward angle in her cage, and when she saw us moving about she tried to move (she was always begging to get out as soon as she saw us move) but she fell over and looked really sick. Her breathing was very irregular and her face looked very puffy. I started to pick her up to help her, but noticed that she was bleeding badly, so I gently laid her back down. Her tongue was swollen and had completely filled her mouth. She quickly lost consciousness, and did nothing but twitch for the next hour. Sometimes her breathing would stop and then start again, and I was never sure if she would live through the next minute.

It was awful, and gruesome, and ugly, and I didn't know what to do. I had only been caring for her for a few weeks, so I wasn't terribly attached to her, but I still hate to see any living thing suffer and die. Today I was going to pick some wild clover for her. I felt guilty, even though there was nothing to feel guilty about.

A day before she had been hyper and happy. Now she was nearly dead.

It was over very quickly. I don't think she ever regained consciousness. I found out that it was probably kidney failure provoked by old age. Exact same symptoms, and she did seem to be very old.

Morgan and I took her body out to the woods next to Dogwood pasture and buried her beneath an old fir tree.

We never got a chance to name her (though I'm thinking her name was Ginger), take a picture of her, or really even get to know her personality well, but I am at least comforted that we made the last few weeks of her life exciting and more livable. Before she had been living in a small wire cage from which she was never taken out to play or run around. We gave her a taste of freedom she had never known in that little wire cage, and also some breathing room away from all those other wild rats. I hope that matters for something.

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