Existential End-of-Life Housekeeping
For 48 hours last weekend I was a (proverbial) wet nurse to a newborn house mouse.
How the HELL he ended up in one of the dog beds — to the utter shock of my husband when he walked by — is anyone’s guess. (I type this while glaring sideways at our Boxer puppy who loves to carry random objects around in his mouth.)
While I’m a sucker for all creatures great and small, even I was put-out by the responsibility presented at 10pm the night before a family dinner celebrating my mom’s own shocking moment: reaching her 87th birthday. Somehow tending to a baby rodent, whose unopened eyes suggested he was one week old and needed feeding every two hours, did not seem like the most restful way to emotionally prepare for an extended family outing.
But in the end, Remy (named for the rat in Ratatouille) captured everyone’s hearts. My son and my visiting sister and college-aged niece all took turns feeding him the diluted kitten milk I bought at our local pet store, cheering him on as he crawled wobbly-legged across our hands. Even my husband, who had been stalwart in banning Remy from accompanying us on an upcoming family vacation, relented when the little guy’s moxie kept him alive through the second day.
After clocking two dozen dropper feedings it felt like I’d spent a week being a successful Mouse Mom surrogate. I stopped warning my son that Remy was likely to die anytime soon, and instead started nursing daydreams about having a tame mouse wandering around the house. (This would undoubtedly ensure very few visitors, even more so than the presence of our boisterous bully breed dogs.) As a result I let my guard down and was no longer prepared for finding Remy — who had gamely crawled into my hand for a midnight feeding — stiff as an emory board by 3am.
While I didn’t cry, I was VERY aware of a tsunami of psychological guilt that filled my psyche as I reviewed every interaction and decision to understand exactly what I had done to CAUSE the death of my tiny charge. Which, having just recorded the Grandma Cameo for my latest podcast, gave me only an infinitesimal, nanoscopic, minuscule sliver of comprehension about what my parents experienced finding their first child dead in his crib when he was two weeks old.
My mom has talked about Mark, whose birthday is two days before her own, more in the past few weeks than she ever did in my 48 years. And while my sister and I always incorporated him into our family story (“if my brother had lived he would be12 years older than me”) it seems new to my mother to formally create a space for him in our lives, and in her legacy. So when mom and I worked on her obituary (my irreverent “present” for her actual birthday, drafted while sitting in a car, in the rain, eating Shake Shack, with my husband and son listening in uncomfortably) I made sure we made Mark more than a footnote. And in honor of another passive wish she expressed, I am now working to determine if we are allowed to inter Mom’s ashes on her parents’ plot, where we would also try to “relocate” the baby.
As for Remy, he is buried in my backyard underneath the Japanese Maple gifted by my deceased parent figures. My son laid two blossoms from a trumpet vine on the fresh dirt, and plans to create a sign for the site that will read (and I quote): “R.I.P. Remy. Squeak squeak.”