The Po Show

Nutmeg R.I.P.

It's been a week since Nutmeg, Tessa's nursery school class guinea pig, died. He had been staying with us for a week, and last Thursday morning I found him dead in his cage when I woke up in the morning.

No autopsy was performed, but probable cause of death was that he was almost 6 years old and had been a class guinea pig. That's got to be a pretty rough life, getting shuffled from house to house constantly (some child took him home almost every weekend during the school year) and being handled by a rotation of four year olds. He always went with explicit instructions on how to care for him and how he was to be handled (after a previous class guinea pig had been picked up by the leg by a little boy and injured so badly he had to be put to sleep), but still.

He had been ill at intervals during the year, and had lost a bunch of his teeth recently, so it wasn't a huge surprise when he passed. But WHY OH WHY did it have to happen at my house, to my children? Everyone always jokes when they bring home the class pet, that nothing is worse than having the pet die while in your care. That joking is for a reason, whistling past the graveyard. Because the reality is really awful! Of course losing your own pet is a greater tragedy, and certainly we were MUCH less attached to Nutmeg that we would have been to a pet we had raised and loved for a decade or more as part of our family. But I was seized with a sense of panic over having failed miserably at caring for a communal living thing, having killed a pet that was not mine. Of course it was not my or our fault that Nutmeg died, but I was stricken at having to tell the teachers that Nutmeg had expired on my watch. It's terrible, but one of my first thoughts was "Damn it, Nutmeg! Couldn't you have waited till Saturday????"

Even worse of course was telling Tessa and Matthew. This was their first introduction to death. When I realized that Nutmeg was dead, I was absolutely thrown into a panic attack. I had to keep the kids from knowing, at least for the morning. Matthew had to go to his second day of summer workshop (which I had been so anxious about him starting, as it was his first real classroom experience with no support services). Tessa had to go to the dentist to have a filling replaced. Neither of those things would happen if they were distraught about Nutmeg. So I kept the towel on the cage and frenetically bustled about getting us ready as usual, my heart hammering. I took Matthew to school, Tessa to the dentist, then grocery shopping. We stopped at home briefly (she wanted to lift up the towel and say hi to Nutmeg, but I told her he was still resting so we should leave him alone. "Wow, Nutmeg sure is sleeping a lot today!," she replied). We picked up Matthew, went to McDonalds for lunch, then to ToysRUs so they could spend some of the money they'd made at our yard sale. Yes, I was totally buttering them up without them knowing it.

Then we came home, and I sat them down in the livingroom, and told them that when I had woken up this morning, Nutmeg was dead. They cried, and wanted to see him, and cried and cried and cried some more. Later in the afternoon we took his body and all his stuff to Tessa's teacher's house, so she could take care of it all.

Tessa is still talking about Nutmeg, of course, at various intervals. Today she worried that we had given him carrots that were too large for him to eat, and had poisoned him somehow. I had to assure her again that nothing we did had made Nutmeg die. That he was just old, and tired, and had had a good life. And that he had died in his sleep, which is the best way to die, because he wasn't in any pain. That he had just gone to sleep, and never woke up, and would dream forever. We've been over this about a million times in the last week.

Tessa was doing a painting project the other day at her craft table, when she suddenly started singing:

"Nutmeg DIIIIIIIIED
While we were having him..."

I couldn't help it; I burst out laughing. The tragic operatic nature of her impromptu song was just too much for me. She got indignant, understandably, and told me that it was not funny, it was very serious. She has been wishing on every dandelion she finds that all animals and people would not die, but would live forever. It's a hard lesson for a barely five year old.

Nutmeg had acted a little strangely the day before he died. He didn't seem to want to eat, and he burrowed in his wood shavings. I think he knew he was dying, and he was preparing himself. When I went to put his towel over his cage that night, he had crawled under his food dispenser. I thought that was kind of odd. He looked up at me as I put the towel over his cage, as I said good night to him. He was still there in the morning, in the exact same position, and I knew as soon as I looked at him that he was dead. I prodded him anyway, and his little furry body was stiff and still.

I found myself really upset throughout the day, and not just for the kids. We'd had Nutmeg for the week around Thanksgiving vacation last year, and of course a pattern quickly was established in which I became the one who took care of him. He figured this out immediately, and I was the one he would squeak to first thing in the morning. The night before he died, I took him out of his cage and cleaned it, and then I petted his little head for awhile. He really was sweet. And as Tessa keeps saying, he was the closest thing we'd ever had to a pet.

After he died, I emptied out the water bottles I'd put into the freezer to keep him cool during the day, and I flashed on the memory of my mother coming home after my dad died, going to the refrigerator, and throwing away all the vegetables she'd bought to make veggie juice for him.

It's so hard being the nurturer, the mom, the one who takes care of others. It's the best thing in the world, of course, but it can be the hardest thing too, to be the one who puts the towel over the cage and sees the living guinea pig for the last time, and is the one who finds the body in the morning.

Rest in peace, Nutmeg.