As far as Syd was concerned, nothing was too good for Juny and with money from her own pocket, she bought Juny a roomy cage with a ramp, plenty of toys, and nutritious little treats. And Juny, who was no dope, quickly learned on which side her bread was buttered and whistled merrily whenever Syd walked in the room.
But I don't think Juny saw merely a meal ticket in Syd; she seemed to genuinely like Syd and would dash to the edge of the cage to press her face against the bars even if the only reward was a loving finger stroke up the length of that long, missile nose. And Syd took a hands-on approach in caring for Juny, so there was plenty of time outside the cage and plenty of time in Syd's lap or nestled in Syd's gentle hands.
The other day, I was at work and got the kind of call parents dread, the kind where you know it's one of your kids and all you hear is sobbing on the other end. It was Syd trying to tell me that Juny was dying.
In the car my mind flashed back three years to when Syd and her brother, Jon were in the park with their pet rabbit and a dog snatched it off Syd's lap and killed it right there in front of both kids. It took all of us days to even begin to move past that, and even now it's upsetting to think about. I wondered if Syd was flashing back, too.
At a red light I consulted my phone and got the address for the closest emergency animal hospital. I called Syd en route and told her to wrap Juny in a towel and get ready to come to the car. When I saw Syd, my heart broke. She was chalk white, her eyes were swollen and she was holding a tiny bundle close to her heart.
As soon as Syd was in the car and buckled in, I peeled out of there and once I felt I could avert my eyes from traffic, I looked over and saw Juny, lying in the towel, her face poking out, her nose pale. I reached over and brushed my finger along her cheek.
"What is going on with you, Juny? What are you trying to prove?" As I spoke these words to this so sick guinea pig, I kept my voice very soft because I had this idiotic feeling that she could understand and would think I really was blaming her for putting us to all this trouble and making us feel so awful. And then, of course, I started to bawl.
"Mom, please don't cry," Syd said, her huge, teary, saucer eyes staring hard at me. "I'm going to lose it if you cry. Please stop." So I focused on the road and tried to do as she asked. I didn't do it very well.
"I wonder what happened," I said, reaching over again, to stroke the little face.
"Maybe I didn't clean her cage often enough," my daughter said, and shame at the very idea of it hung in her voice. "When I saw her, I took her out of the cage and held her and kept saying, 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.'"
"No, Syd. You took very good care of her. It wasn't anything like that."
And then, as it usually does when one comforts children with dead or dying pets, the question of an afterlife came up. But I was the one who needed reassurance.
"I think Juny's headed someplace nice, don't you?" I asked.
Syd's answer was emphatic. "The Rainbow Bridge." She said this as if God Himself consulted her before commissioning it.
"The what?"
"The Rainbow Bridge," she repeated. "It's a bridge where all the pets go when they die and then they wait for their owners there. When their owners die, they meet at the bridge and cross over together into Heaven."
"Oh, Syd, that sounds like a really great place," I said. "I'm sure that's where Juny's headed."
We arrived at the hospital, rushed Juny in and were immediately whisked to a room. I was handed a form to fill out while Syd sat, distraught in a chair and Juny lay motionless on the exam table, still wrapped in the towel.
The vet scooted quickly into the room, bent over Juny and laid a stethoscope against the little rib cage. "What happened?" she asked and since she seemed to be asking Juny, neither Syd nor I answered. We didn't know anyway, so we wouldn't have been much help. Then the vet straightened up and said, "I think she's gone."
"You don't need to fill out the rest of that form," the vet tech said, and I felt very sad thinking I no longer had to fill out the form. Suddenly, and more than anything, I who hate forms wanted to fill it out because filling out a form implied that Juny still had a chance.
"Would you like us to dispose of her?" asked the tech.
"I don't know. What do people usually do?" I asked.
"Well, some people take them home and bury them," she replied. "Or we can have her cremated then give you back her ashes."
"How much would that cost?" I asked the tech who went away to look up the price. While she was out of the room, I walked to Juny and gently pulled back the towel.
'How could a newly dead guinea pig look so different from her living self?' I pondered. Some kind of spark was gone, some spark beyond mere motion or breath. Even her fur seemed duller and her body flatter.
I'm sure there are dozens of physiological reasons for all of that and that one would have to be a giant optimist or a pure idiot to find reassurance in Juny's new corporeal state. I'm hoping that in this case, it was optimism, but know that in others, I have been a pure idiot.
So I'm not saying I took Juny's physical transformation as proof that a spirit once inhabited that little form, but I still felt reassured. I stroked the little face some more as if stroking it could give Juny comfort. But Juny was probably already hightailing it to the Rainbow Bridge and couldn't care less if I was stroking her face.
The tech came back consulting a paper on her clipboard. She was searching for the price category covering Junies weighing less than 12 ounces.
"That would be $100," she said, glancing up at me.
One-hundred dollars? The sum rang in my head. One-hundred dollars to cremate one little guinea pig; a guinea pig that was small even as guinea pigs go? A guinea pig that only cost $40 when she was alive?
"Okay, that's what we'll do," I said, handing her my debit card. But really, one-hundred dollars?
"Mom," Syd whispered, "that's too expensive. I don't mind burying her." But I couldn't expect her to bury Juny and I sure didn't want to do it. And we'd have to get permission from the apartment managers and then buy or borrow a shovel. I just didn't have it in me to do all that.
"It's okay, Syd. This way you'll always have her with you." The tech left the room then came back, loaded down with little boxes.
"These are your choices for storing the ashes," she said.
With the exception of a little coffin-shaped box, each tiny container looked suspiciously like a cookie tin from our local dollar store. It crossed my mind to offer up my own cookie tin if it would save me $90, but I chose the high ground and kept my mouth shut.
"Which one do you want, Syd?" I asked.
"That one," said my daughter, pointing to one I had somehow overlooked. It was actually a lovely little metal box and Syd did well to have chosen it.
"Oh, that's a nice one," commented the tech. "That's the Rainbow Bridge design. I like that one, too."
If the Rainbow Bridge was famous enough that there was even an "urn" named after it, maybe God really had commissioned it.
"The cremation people will come here for her on Monday and you can pick her up again on Thursday."
Pick her up again on Thursday. The tech said it as though we were just sending Juny out to be groomed and she'd be back on Thursday all spruced up.
"I don't know, Mom," she said. "I think I need to wait a while; not just for myself but out of respect for Juny."
And so it was that we came to wait for three whole days. When you're used to having something in your life that you can scoop up and love on a whim, there's a hole left when it's gone. Syd picked out a Netherland dwarf rabbit. So far she has yet to name him officially, but his working moniker is Prince Charming. He is rather dashing, so maybe that's the name she'll keep.
So, as Prince Charming settles in, we still remember Juny. If I'd thought she felt well enough to listen during that drive to the vet, I'd have given her a heads up about our other "pals with paws" who'd gone before her, and some advice for when she met them at the Rainbow Bridge.
I'd have said, "Bill and Clawdia are good cats, but Bill will think himself too cool to show any interest in you at first, and Clawdia gets lost easily, so don't let her wander far from the bridge. Thumper is the rabbit who had that unfortunate run-in with a husky, so I doubt he'll be hanging out near the dogs. Then again, he probably has some kind of double jeopardy protection in the afterlife and can't get hurt again, but who could blame him if he steers clear? And please tell him we're sorry he got stuck with such an unoriginal name, but he already had that name when we adopted him."
Some might think it silly to take the death of a guinea pig so seriously or to write about it with such gravity. And to those people I say it's probably been too long since you last held such a tiny creature in your hands or heard it whistle when you walked into the room.
