the life and death of coco.

The last two years of this blog have been peppered with stories about Jenna's mother hamster, CoCo. Who could forget? She ate her babies. She had more babies. She didn't eat those babies. She ran away. She stayed away. She lived under the stove. She came back.


The past six months in her new cage have been peaceful and uneventful ones for CoCo as we finally foiled her escape tactics. No more finding her in the laundry. No more kitchen capers.

Tonight after sorting Halloween candy, once jenna was asleep, I was posting the pictures in the post below when george said, "Are you sure coco's still alive?"

I said, "I think so--I gave them food and water two days ago. The boys' food dishes and water bottles were empty, but I didn't check her because she still had a full dish of foo...... oh shit."

"I've been smelling something all day--I figured it was the cages."

Downstairs I went. I hadn't quite reached the living room when he said, "Oh yeah. She's dead."

When I walked into the room, George was spraying air freshener. He was doing a mock commercial: "This air freshener works so well you won't even know there's a dead animal in the house!"

The rest was pretty much:

Me saying, "Well what are we going to do with it--Jenna's asleep."

Him saying, "It's garbage night."

Me saying, "Good, I'll dig a hole and fill it in, you bag her up. I'll show Jenna the grave--she doesn't have to know CoCo's not in it."

George saying, "I don't know--that' kind of weird. We can tell her it was garbage night--or we can save it for her, but a fake grave? That's just strange."

Me saying, "Save it for her?! I don't want her to smell that thing!"

Him saying, "We could double bag it. Ziplocks.

By now he's taken the cage out front, and he has to go get soy milk and cat food at Kroger--which is where he was headed when the discovery was made--because the cats are hungry and we're out of cat food.

Insert your own joke.

We did.

In the end we decided to bury the actual CoCo in a box in a shallow grave that I'll show jenna in the morning. I have a little statue with the word "peaceful" on it she can put there too.

I was saving it for the four boxes of dog ashes we still haven't sprinkled in our 22 years together. But I guess the dogs will have to wait. They're used to it.

CoCo lived an interesting two years and made our living room (and kitchen, and laundry room) a little a more fun for having her there.

RIP CoCo.