oh rats, matters of life & death

Meet Beach future Olympic Gymnast, Veterinarian, & Supreme Court Justice.  Right now she 7 years old watching PBS kids nursing a head injury.  In a few minutes we will go to the pet store to buy a Beta Fish because the rat died.  We don’t why the rat died.  But she got the fish to replace the rat; she got the rat because her sister moved out; her sister moved out giving her the rat because the guinea pig died, we don’t why the guinea pig died; she got the guinea pig because the birds died, we know why they died!  At some point a snake died.  And we lost a scorpion, but don’t cry for that one we are sure it is safe & sound in the house somewhere.

Half of all chicks hatching will die tragically before their first birthday…that’s probably not true but let me tell you hatching baby chicks & raising them is like pulling your last coffee filter out of the trash to reuse it- a good idea before you actually try doing it.

So things die on a farm, shit happens.  Eggs don’t hatch. Cats suddenly start walking funny.  Snakes stop moving, someone poses them in a coil under a rock & says it’s molting until the kid figures it out.  Ducks get smashed in the road in the rain.  Skunks get it in the head, perhaps a drive by, after all it is a rough neighborhood.  Life and death moves on. 

I tell my kids I have no idea what will happen when something dies, other than it will smell bad.

Colby tells them something different every time, there is a God or a higher power one day, the next reincarnation, then meta-physics.  It is sort of like telling them we will be there in 15 minutes no matter how near or far away we are from the destination. It works for him because they stop bugging him about it.

Beach believes in everything and nothing all at once.  She buried the Rat with a well devised complex tomb, a tube for communication, a match box car for transport, food, and money just incase.  Rat on his way to the After Life Las Vegas in style!   

 So, it’s fish time and I tell her it will die.  She answers ‘no shit, everything dies eventually.’