Adam's Cool Website

On Guinea Pigs and Grief

When you're a parent of small kids, having pets means hard conversations, and hard days.

Peppa, shortly after she and George first came home with us.

When I die, bury me anywhere but Commerce City, Colorado. Driving through from the highway, the town is an endless sweep of concrete and corrugated steel, warehouses, outlets, and construction yards, dominated by Suncor’s smoke-belching refinery. And tucked in the somewhere in there somewhere, in the middle of all that industry, is a graveyard for pets.

It was small, a residential-size patch of dead winter grass lined with snaggletoothed headstones and split by a gravel driveway with a small house at the end. As I parked the car, a worker appeared in the door and motioned for Rhys and me to follow as she walked toward the crematorium flanking the cemetery. I grabbed the double-bagged cardboard box from my front seat and we trailed after her.

Inside, a checkout counter flanked the cremation chamber. On the walls, yellowed newspaper clippings about the business intermingled with urns emblazoned See You At The Rainbow Bridge. The cashier ran us through our options and jotted down my answers–group cremation, scatter the ashes on site–on a hand-written receipt. When she was done, I handed over my credit card to pay the $30 fee.

“How's your day going?" she asked, as we waited for the card to run.

“It could be better," I answered. She nodded.

Badly, I wanted to say. My day is going badly. Look at me: I'm gripping a four-year-old’s hand in one of my hands and a guinea pig's corpse in the other. It's 5:30 p.m. and I'm standing in a pet cemetery between a used car dealership and a truck yard. This is as bad as a Monday can go.

I had found George dead in his cage that morning, stretched out on his side, eyes open and glassy. Peppa, our other guinea pig, sniffed and snuffled around him; when I opened the door to check him, she rushed over and laid her head over his still shoulders. His body was stiff and cold under my fingers. I left him in the cage with her, sat down on the couch, and tried to figure out what I was going to say to my son.

This is a deal you make when you get your kid a pet: You bring a smaller life into their life, drill respect, responsibility, and maybe love for it into them, and then it dies. If seeing death so close to you is a rite of passage for children, trying to guide them through it is an inevitability for parents. Rhys had been near death before, when his grandmother had passed away, but he had been too young to understand. And besides, a pet’s death is different somehow, a speedrun of a lifecycle you watch beginning to end.

On the playground after school let out, I tried to explain to Rhys what had happened. George got sick and he’s not going to get better; George is broken and we’re not going to be able to fix him; We have to say goodbye to George, and he won’t be able to come back. None of my explanations landed. He asked a few questions: Why did George die? (He was sick.) Why was George sick? (I didn’t know.)

I booked an appointment that evening at a crematorium about 15 minutes away. While Rhys ate his afternoon snack and watched YouTube, I went downstairs to check on Peppa and found her curled up in the corner of the cage, where George’s now-removed body had been.

More sober-minded people say that pets can’t feel love or grief. I disagree. It’s not that I believe animals are deeper than we think, it's that those feelings are vastly simpler than we in our chauvinism believe. In a harsh world, you have something warm and soft and purring for a while. Then it’s gone, and the cold and the quiet floods into the negative space it left behind. My son couldn’t understand death either, but that night when he woke up in the dark and saw I wasn’t there he cried for me, until I came and sat on the side of his bed and stroked his hair until he fell asleep. Loneliness isn't a concept you wrestle with in your conscious mind, it's a sensation that twists your heart and your gut.

Two days later, I went to feed Peppa and found her hiding in the corner of her enclosure, her food untouched. When I reached in to pick her up, she squeaked sharply. I hustled her to the vet, who told me that her stomach was distended and filled with gas. It happens sometimes, he said, when one of these guinea pigs loses a companion. The stress throws everything out of whack. An x-ray, some pain medication, and a few hours in an incubator later, Peppa was home, sluggish but still alive.

I think Peppa’s doing better now, two weeks on. While she doesn’t talk as much, she still burbles sometimes when Rhys and I take her out to spend the day with us, tucked into a pile of fleeces in a box. I’ve been bringing her snacks and chewies, which I suppose is the rodent equivalent of showing up with a casserole. She’s still eating, and nibbles at whatever new doohickey I hang in her cage. But when she doesn’t hear me coming, I often find her laying in the corner, George’s blanket over her head.