On The Loss of A Pet

My pet rat died this morning. I buried her near her sister. Then I took down her cage, threw away all of her linens, and scrubbed the area around where she and her sister had lived for the past 2 years. I got them just a couple of weeks after I moved into my first house without a roommate. I had been living with my ex and his boyfriend and the stress of that was eventually too much for me to handle.

I had gone to the pet store wanting a little black fluff ball named Kitty. She was a declawed 10-year-old long haired black cat. Kitty was in quarantine because of an infection and someone else had adopted her. My cat Bella was around the same age and also declawed. She had been a barn cat and the people who had her before me thought that would stop her scratching the furniture. Instead it made her defensive. I wanted to make sure to only get a cat in her predicament because the cats my ex and I had gotten had attacked her frequently once they realized she didn’t have claws to fight back.

Before I left the animal shelter, I noticed that they had rats. This was a rare sight in the several dozen times I’d been to the shelter, I’d seen rabbits and an occasional guinea pig, but never rats. I talked to my boyfriend, who had previously been the pet parent to three rats, and he offered to let me use his cage and supplies if I wanted them. I picked out the two who seemed to like me the best and brought them home.

We had good times. Bella liked them alright and didn’t seem to want to eat them. They were so cute! I let them go on tiny adventures and even bought them balls to run around in, although Athena thought these balls were for visiting the cat, and so she’d chase the cat around the house.

The cat I had gone to the shelter for when I got the ratties was returned to the shelter in October. So, Kitty now called Kenzie came home too and rounded out my little pet menagerie. Kenzie and Athena were fast friends and while I worried some about it, I couldn’t keep an eye on them all the time, but sometimes I would catch them touching noses through the cage. Interestingly, if I were to hold Athena, they would touch noses like that and then Kenzie would run and hide. Apparently, rats are far less scary when they are kept behind bars.

Last October, I woke up one morning to find Artemis lethargic. Online I found some suggestion that she might be electrolyte deficient, so I left her some apple sauce and went to work. When I got home, she had probably been dead for a couple hours. After Artemis died, I paid extra attention to Athena. Rats are social animals, so often times they will get very lonely when their companion dies. Athena and I would play, and then I would have massive welts on my hands and arms. It turns out that while I let them run around on the floor mostly when there were 2 of them, with just Athena, I carried her around more, which made it abundantly clear that I am more allergic to rats than probably any other animal, and I’m allergic to most animals.

Yesterday when I woke up, Athena was acting like Artemis did on her last day, and I assumed she wouldn’t make it through my work day. I left her whatever I could to make her comfortable, which was made more difficult by her insistence on biting me. These weren’t hard bites, just little nips to let me know I wasn’t welcome in her space. When I got home and she seemed to be doing better, I was elated. I gave her some of her favorite blueberry treats and some more applesauce. This morning she was gone.

The trouble with having pets, particularly short lifespan pets like rats, is that when you get emotionally attached, it is hard to get past their deaths. I mourned Artemis after she passed more than I’ve mourned Athena, perhaps because I had more time to prepare. I knew the signs and knew that we were coming up on our 2-year mark together, which tends to be the upper end of a rat’s lifespan.

I didn’t want to write today. I wrote yesterday, even though I was feeling terrible, but now that Athena has actually died, I just wanted to escape, but somehow, writing about how Athena came to be a part of my pet family seemed like a far better way to approach grief than hiding away from my writing.