Death and Guinea Pigs

Newsletter 2024-02-26

We lost a guinea pig. That’s not true. I know exactly where he is: in a bag inside another bag in the trash can behind the house. It’s not the tomb of the pharaohs, but it will do, at least until Wednesday, when the garbage truck shows up. Then his final resting place will be a landfill in parts unknown. It’s nothing less than what I expect my kids to do with my remains someday. There’s no reason to pay for regular trash service AND a funeral. In life and in death, two-for-one is always the best way to go.

Jupiter’s burial site is in no way a reflection of how we felt about him. He was a good guinea pig, insofar as that’s possible. Guinea pigs just sort of exist. It’s hard to rate them on a good to bad scale. He ate, slept, and skittered around his cage in intense bursts for no reason at all. He seldom bit. He was always cute. He never committed any overt acts of evil that I noticed, but that might have been more a matter of circumstance than will. It’s hard to do crimes when you weigh two pounds and lack opposable thumbs. He was a gentle potato, whether he wanted to be or not. He only peed on people if they deserved it or if he really, really had to go. It wasn’t his fault. His cage had two giant water bottles, and rodents aren’t known for bladder control. I’d like to see you potty train a guinea pig. I’ll never know if he thought he was being kind to us. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, and I have often discussed how his guinea pig brain might have interpreted the humans around him. To a smarter tiny being, we might have seemed like giant, inscrutable gods, but I don’t think Jupiter’s interpretation extended that far. I suspect he lacked object permanence for the world outside his cage. When we weren’t holding him, we ceased to exist, and when we were holding him, he wished only that we would go away. Millions of years of evolution taught him to scurry between rocks in the Andes Mountains while avoiding predatory birds swooping down from above. Nothing prepared him to be cuddled by a gaggle of children in a warm house in the middle of Indiana. He never said thank you, but he didn’t ask to be released either. He lived a simple life, and he lived it well. He will be missed.

He liked to chew on cardboard. He liked to thump around at night when everyone was trying to sleep. He liked to poop. Oh, how he liked to poop. Every day, he pumped out his body weight in tiny, oblong turds. That’s what happens when your diet is one hundred percent fiber. The Timothy hay came out as fast as it went in. That was a reality check for my kids, who had been so excited when we first got the guinea pigs. Then love transitioned into work, which is the course all relationships ultimately follow. Still, they took good care of Jupiter up until his unexpected end Saturday morning. When my wife Lola found him in his cage, he was on a pile of fresh Timothy hay in a cage with plenty of food and water. Whatever killed him, it wasn’t a lack of resources. And it wasn’t a lack of love.

Jupiter did not like to be picked up. He did not like to have his nails trimmed. He did not like to wear hats. He did not like to be set on the ground outside his cage. Whenever the kids would put him on the floor while they were cleaning out his pen, he would stand perfectly still like all the people in the room were T-rexes who could only see motion. He never tried to run away. Where else would he go? He lived in an expansive, climate controlled box where food and water magically appeared, someone else cleaned up all his messes, and real predators stayed away. He might not have understood his strange world, but he thrived in it. Before we got the guinea pigs, I’d read online that some of them are true escape artists. Not ours. He was perfectly content within the confines of his open-top corrugated plastic utopia. Maybe he instinctively knew that, with all these large masses moving around the house, he would always be safer inside those boundaries. Maybe he didn’t know anything at all. I can’t claim rodents are fully self-aware. I can’t claim humans are, either.

When the unthinkable happened, I was with my eight-year-old, Waffle, at a First Communion retreat at the church a few blocks from home. She and her classmates were supposed to learn how to receive the holy sacrament, but it wasn’t going well. The kids at the retreat used the wrong hand or bowed at the wrong time or didn’t bow at all. The priest was on the verge of pulling out a marker board to draw out the steps like a football play. Afterwards, we went to the adjoining multi-purpose room to listen to a volunteer read about the resurrection. That’s when I got the text. Two, actually, in quick succession, both from my wife, Lola. “ I think one of the guinea pigs is dead.” A moment later: “Yeah… he’s dead.” I asked if she needed me to come home to take care of it. Sometimes fatherhood means saving your youngest daughter’s soul; other times, it means throwing away a dead rat. Lola told me to stay where I was. There was nothing I could do. Cleanup could wait.

I held off on telling Waffle until after the retreat when we were on our way home. She took the news well. Her first comment was that, with one out of two guinea pigs gone, there would be half as much poop to clean up. She wasn’t wrong. The rest of the kids already knew. Betsy was the first to find out. Lola made the discovery when she walked into Betsy’s room to talk to her while Betsy was still lounging in her loft bed. Usually, the guinea pigs ran and hid inside their cage whenever anyone walked into the room. This time, Jupiter lay sleeping on his side out in the open. Lola poked him. He wasn’t sleeping. Our eleven-year-old, Mae, found out a few minutes later when she got out of the shower. She took the news the hardest. She complained the most when she had to clean out the guinea pig cage, but she truly loved Jupiter. The loudest kids have the biggest hearts.

I don’t know what killed Jupiter. There were no obvious signs of trauma or suspicious prints left at the scene. We didn’t perform an autopsy or hire an investigator. If guinea pigs have their own branch of law enforcement, they weren’t summoned. I’m assuming he died of natural causes, whatever that means for a guinea pig. A truly natural death would have been getting eaten in two bites by a hungry puma. Not many animals anywhere in the wild have the luxury of dying of old age. When they lose a step, something else takes care of them in the worst possible way. According to the internet, guinea pigs can live to the ripe old age of eight. Jupiter was only three. If he had a congenital heart defect or an aggressive cancer, we had no idea. He kept any suffering to himself. He was stoic in the proud tradition of Marcus Aurelius. He acted normally until he didn’t act at all.

Jupiter is survived by his brother, Pixel. His alleged brother, anyway. We got the pair from one of Betsy’s friends who didn’t pay enough attention to them. The friend claimed the two were related, which is what she was told by the pet store or guinea pig mill or wherever domestic guinea pigs come from. They could have been two random guinea pigs of approximately the same age tossed together from different litters and we would have had no idea. We didn’t do a DNA test to reconstruct their family trees. The two looked nothing alike, beyond both being vaguely potato shaped. Their colors and fur texture were worlds apart. Pixel didn’t seem to react at all to Jupiter’s death, not that I would expect anything else. I’m not sure how guinea pigs show grief. The only emotion I ever observed either of them express was abject terror, which is what they felt any time we touched them and they remembered we existed. It’s possible Pixel didn’t have any grief to show. Perhaps he tired of having a roommate he could never escape. If Jupiter’s death was the result of foul play, Pixel had the motive and opportunity. The truth is out there, but I’ll never know it. I’ll let St. Peter sort it out at the guinea pig pearly gates.

Pixel, the day after his “brother’s” death, not looking suspicious at all.

If this was a ploy by Pixel to get more alone time, it backfired. Betsy has already requested that, when I’m home alone during the day, I frequently pick up Pixel and cuddle with him so he doesn’t get lonely. That’s going to ruin his life and mine at the same time. I don’t want to be constantly covered in guinea pig hair. That furry oval sheds a shocking amount for something so small. I can make an entire new guinea pig just from what I pull out of the washing machine after we clean the pet bedding each week. Guinea pigs are social creatures who aren’t supposed to be left alone, but I don’t like the alternative. We’re done getting new pets. Our animal population will gradually dwindle down to zero through natural attrition. If we got another guinea pig to keep this one company, that one would be younger and would outlive Pixel. Then, when Pixel died, we’d have to get yet another guinea pig to befriend the other new one, thereby keeping us stuck in the guinea pig cycle forever. The only other possibility is for both animals to die at the same time, which would be suspicious on all counts. Guinea pigs aren’t known for murder suicides. The kids seem okay with not replacing Jupiter. Since he died, no one has mentioned getting a new pet of any species. Perhaps the girls finally recognized that no matter how much you love something, eventually you get tired of scooping its poop. Hopefully they remember that lesson when considering whether they want to have kids of their own some day. Diapers are the worst.

Jupiter wasn’t the animal I expected to pass away next. That honor went to my sixteen-year-old dog, Niko. Unlike Jupiter, whose messes were neatly contained in a cage, Niko continues to pee and poop all over my house. I put him out in the yard every time I walk by him, but it doesn’t make a difference. He comes back inside to use his favorite bathroom, which is now and forever shall be the dining room carpet. He’s a menace to the cleanliness of my house, but he has nothing to fear from me, and he knows it. I’m confident he’ll outlast the other guinea pig and both real pigs and possibly me. Actually, not me. If the only criteria for living longer is being an inconvenience to those around me, I’ll last forever, too. The more people who wish me dead, the closer to immortality I come. Starting a writing career on the internet was the right move.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James