In Our Hands
My bedroom smelled of ammonia, diarrhea, infection, fear–like a body decomposing while it’s still alive. My pet rat was dying of cancer. She was dying too slowly, and I didn’t know what to do with her.
Julie was a red-eyed, hairless, albino rat, and at two and a half years old, already nearing the natural end of her life. The vet had mentioned euthanasia a month before, after popping an earlier ulcer on her stomach. But only if the ulcer returned. Which it did. Red and hot and yellow in the center, it jiggled like an egg when she walked, ready to ooze. Which must’ve hurt, because Julie stopped walking and took to dragging herself around by her hands. Her sister rat, Bianca, converted their bedroom (an empty case of beer) into a tomb, plugging the walls with woodchips and barring the door with newspaper. For several days they laid there together, in the beer-tomb, stewing in a pile of shredded paper towels. How long would Julie hold on for? Another day? A week? A week had already passed. For a rat, that’s half a human year.
I hoped she would die here, at home. All my pets had died at home until then, and it seemed wrong, somehow, to decide the ending of her life. Like it would interrupt a larger, more holistic cycle, some sort of sacred clock. More than that, taking her to be euthanized would break the only filament of trust Julie and I had built: that I would leave her alone. She’d survived the first month of her life in a pet shop by fighting off pythons, and though I cared for her for over two years, she’d still fight me off whenever I came close, clawing at my hands and squirming wildly out of my grip. So I stopped coming close. And I did my best to remain invisible, feeding her bits of grilled chicken slipped into her cage, and cleaning her room while she investigated my own. She was more like a neurotic roommate than my pet.
So I waited. And while I waited, her body decayed. Somebody once said, you either worry it’s too soon to euthanize a pet, or you know you’ve waited too long. I had waited too long. One morning, I called her vet, dug a shoe-sized grave behind my apartment, and fried her one final egg. No salt.
*
At Stow Animal Hospital, an assistant led us down to the basement, the Treatment Room, where we met the only exotic vet in northeast Ohio–an unsuspecting man in middle-age with a shaved head, pale eyes, and a shaved face. He fist bumped me hello, then hovered over to a sink at the far edge of the room where he washed his hands again. It was the only furniture in the room, that sink, aside from a chest-high, stainless steel table in the center. The floor and ceiling were concrete. The walls were white and without décor. It was the perfect place to kill something, and maybe the worst place to be killed. I stood beside the steps, feeling grateful that Julie, who was born blind, could not see any of it.
As he scrubbed his hands, the vet outlined the euthanasia process for me. Julie would be numbed with anesthetic, fall unconscious, then he’d pump .3 milliliters of sodium pentobarbital into her abdomen cavity, instantaneously stopping her heart. The whole thing should only take ten minutes. “You can stay here during the procedure,” he said. “Or you can wait up upstairs.”
I bristled. I would stay. Of course I would stay.
*
Growing up in rural Ohio, the pets I knew were half-wild animals who died half-wild deaths: trapped in vats of oil, smushed by cars, sliced in mower blades, overtaken by parasites, or killed by larger, more capable animals. One day, when I was real little, I remember watching a kitten writhe on the hot asphalt driveway. He flipped over to his back, revealing a fluffy white stomach covered in tiny, brown worms. We kept small pets indoors – rabbits, reptiles, fish – but they fared no better. Mr. Johnson the rabbit baked in a cage after my mom accidentally left him in the sun all day. Others ran away or else died mysteriously overnight: Nagini the python, Darnell the cat, Joey the painted turtle. Death was always in our face, and always out of our control.
The only pet who survived our family more than a few years was Mario, an old Alaskan Malamute. I was in high school when he passed, and though I knew lots of animals who’d died, a few relatives, and one close friend, I had never witnessed the dying process before. I saw it set into that dog gradually, over a year or more. Saw it in his eyes, in the stiffening of his hips, in the late shed of his winter coat. One day in April, his hips finally gave out, and he got thin, stopped eating and drinking, and took to staring into the woods for many hours a day. My parents considered euthanasia, but he didn’t seem to be in any obvious pain, and Dad said he would never use the gun on a dog.
So we waited. He spent his days tied to his favorite tree, and I spent mine sitting with him, just talking, crying, rubbing his belly and reminiscing. He couldn’t stand up to poop, so sometimes it’d just leak out on his hind legs, and I’d hose him down with warm water. This embarrassed him, and I’d fry us hamburgers to make up for it.
One day, at two pm, he howled. He hadn’t howled for weeks, and I knew then that he was saying goodbye. I went over and sat with him for a while, said some words, scratched his ears. Then I left. When I returned later, there was only a heap of flaccid skin and fur covered in black flies. My brothers, Dad, and I dug a hole right there and buried him with his food bowl, pillow, and leash. We told stories about him while we dug. It was Good Friday.
It was awful, waiting for that dog to die. And yet it was immensely spiritual–the end of a process beyond human invention. I’d never felt closer to life, nor believed more fervently in its sacredness, than seeing it leave someone I loved.
With Julie, I worried that euthanasia would interrupt that intimacy. That by concentrating her suffering into one moment, a moment I decided, this higher process of connective change wouldn’t just be expedited; it’d be eliminated. Would it be it better to die terrified, then numb, in the hands of a scientist? Or in some degree of pain at home, with those who love you? Better for who? I believed in something, watching that old dog die, and I wanted to believe in it again, here in the cold quiet of this basement.
*
The vet fished Julie out from the cage. She flailed and squeaked and went to escape, but he clamped down on her with one gloved hand and carried her into another room, initiating part one of the procedure: numbing.
Julie had spent most of her life avoiding pain. No matter how much grilled chicken, zucchini, and yogurt I fed her, no matter how many days went by curled up in aspen woodchips and three-ply toilet paper, whenever she heard footsteps she’d sprint for cover. Once a few seconds passed, she would peep her head out, weaving back and forth like a boxer getting ready to dodge an incoming punch, though it was only me delivering a Cheerio. It was as if she still fleeing from snakes in the pet shop.
I had obtained Bianca from a local breeder along with another rat; that one turned out to be a male. Rats can crank out babies at five weeks of age, twenty at a time, six times a year. With just two rats, you can have 1,250 in a single year. In three years, you could have 500 million rats. I only wanted two. I gave the male back to the breeder and asked for a female, but the breeder had none. A local pet shop down the street had several.
The pet shop was a red brick building with windows like old-time dive suit masks. The inside smelled of cat pee. A kind old couple ran the store, and they kept the rats in a huge Plexiglass tub in the back. Admittedly, the old man told me, they were just food for the snakes. He said it was his least favorite part of owning a pet shop, feeding those “serpents.”
We approached the tub. There were several dozen rats no bigger than my finger. Most of them were lounging in the back, gyrating on top of one another in a huge pile like white, furry earthworms. I put my face to the tub and immediately one rat darted below a tent of newspaper. She was albino, hairless, pink skin with red, vampiric eyes, and three times as big as all the others. She looked like a huge, shaved testicle. I pointed to her.
“That one,” the man said, “Oh, she’s a doozy. Been here about a month. Blind as a bat too. Yep. Blind.” He glanced at the ball pythons behind us and chuckled. “Neither Bonnie nor Clyde can catch her.”
He stopped chuckling when he realized that I wanted her. I really should pick a different one, he said, a less wild rat, a nicer rat. “Hate to say it,” he said anyway, “but she’s hopeless.”
My decision was made. He exposed Julie from below the newspaper and grabbed her long, yellow tail. She squealed and went to bite, but he clamped her head between his finger and thumb, then dropped her into a small cardboard box. She cost less than a Big Mac.
*
The vet returned three minutes later, holding Julie in a brown hand-towel. “Soon, she won’t be able to feel a thing,” the vet said. “But she may start to produce some, vocalizations. These are responses of the nervous system, nothing more.”
I pinned her on the table and kneeled down to eye level. She peered out from her towel with those red, fiery eyes of hers, entirely uninformed of the visual world and completely overwhelmed by it. I know you just want to go home, old girl. I know this is scary. You’re doing so well. You’re being so brave.
She laid in the towel for ten seconds or so, struggling against my grip. Then the anesthesia kicked in. She let out a huge yawn, flashing four, carrot-colored teeth, then blinked, blinked again, stretched her legs, and let out another yawn before lying her head down on my palm. I opened the towel. She rolled over on her back, revealing her stomach. She looked so much like a fun-sized pig in that moment–so pink and shrunken, her tummy rising and falling. I petted her satellite-shaped ears and her chin whiskers, petted her stomach well above the ulcer. She squeaked softly and kicked at the sky. I realized then in two years, this was the longest I’d ever held her.
*
My rats lived in the royal palace of rat cages–a two-story, fifty pound, stainless steel cage furnished with four little cardboard bedrooms, rope, paper towel rolls, two hammocks, stocked food pellets and water with fresh food delivered daily. Every night they tore it all to pieces. I’d wake up to a cage full of weird, little rat construction projects: newspaper tents; pieces of old shirts shredded and turned into bedding; houses flipped upside down; sticks chewed in half; woodchips shoveled out of the cage and onto the carpet; and two little rodents twisted together, like a pretzel, sound asleep. Later on, they’d refuse to eat any vegetables at all, and would hurl slices of cucumber or carrot through the bars of the cage as if to say, We know you have chicken.
Julie and Bianca wrestled, slept, ate, chased, built, destroyed, and played together. But whenever I came around, Julie hid. She hid as if there was still something terrible slithering her way. And there was; it was me.
I tried to train Julie how I’d trained Bianca: first, by introducing my presence from voice to fingers to hands, then rewarding her with Cheerios after she did what I asked her to do (respond to her name, poop in the corner, etc.). Bianca and I had spiraled into a positive feedback loop to the point where she was riding around the house in my sweatshirt and would come to me when called. Julie, on the other hand, was not buying any of it. When I went to pick her up, you’d think I’d tazed her. She’d screech and hop a few inches in the air before darting for cover. All training sessions ended the same, with Julie biting my fingers or wrestling her way out of my hand only to fall on the floor and dive beneath the bed, where I’d hunt her down over the course of an hour or two. After several weeks, I was only getting more frustrated, and Julie more afraid.
One night, I read about a last-ditch training strategy on “Rattit,” a Reddit thread for rat lovers. The idea is that you sit with the animal in someplace they can’t escape, like a bathtub, and eventually they get too tired to be afraid, and give in. It seemed invasive. It was invasive. But there was nothing left to lose, I figured, so I scooped up Julie into an old t-shirt, released her in the empty tub, and sat down across from her. She bolted out of the shirt and tried to scramble up the walls but couldn’t get a grip. She screamed and slid back down. She screamed again and leaped and scampered back up and fell back down and leaped up and screamed and fell and squealed and jumped and jumped again. After a minute or so, she laid down, tucking her head beneath her hands, shaking violently, huddled as far away from me as she could get. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. It struck me that I was hurting someone I should’ve been caring for.
After the bathtub incident, I realized that I had, once again, unconsciously approached an animal as merely something that needed to obey me. All the training techniques I’d come across rested on the premise that I, the trainer, am the one with the knowledge to convey to her, the pet. Her role is to listen. The boundaries she set were merely acts of disobedience, or symptoms of traumas which needed to be broken down with food bribes or medieval tactics. I expected her, demanded her, to listen to me. But at no point had I listened to her.
What if I just gave up? I thought. No training. No telling. No bribing. Just laissez-faire pet care, let her do whatever she wants. If she didn’t want to be touched, I wouldn’t touch her. If she didn’t want to be held, I wouldn’t hold her. Maybe she could relax if I stopped demanding her to.
I redesigned my room and their lives around this objective. Instead of taking her and Bianca out of the cage at night, I opened it for them to leave if they wanted. Instead of sectioning off parts of my room with cardboard to prevent them from getting below the bed or chewing on wires, I rat-proofed the room by taking out the TV, and taping holes in the window screens. They would be free range rats.
Under this new leadership, Bianca immediately took to pillaging my spider plant which she previously did not have access too. Julie still hid inside her cage. But after a few days, she began to follow Bianca out at night. They’d climb down the cage onto the carpet, and Bianca would scurry off into my backpack, or the closet, and Julie would freeze, before sprinting back home. Each day, she explored a little further. Within a week, she’d mapped out the entire room. In two weeks, she and Bianca were wrestling in the middle of the floor.
One night, she dipped behind a pillow and didn’t come out for some time. She had since developed a fondness for tunneling into my mattress, and I lifted the pillow to interrupt any progress she might’ve been making. We came within a couple inches of each other’s face. Julie sprang back, squealed, and darted toward the cage. But she did something then that I did not expect. She turned back around. Still shaking, she walked up to my nose, licked it, sneezed, then stood on her hind legs to test whether my hair could be yanked from my head. I felt the tension in her body, the fear. But I felt something else in her now. Something more.
A few days later, I saw her dancing. I tell you she was dancing because that’s what it looked like. I had just given her and Bianca a fingerful of strawberry yogurt, and in her sugar high she stole a thick wool sock of mine and paraded it across the room, running in big figure eights. Then she started hopping. She hopped and squeaked strangely, a sound I had never heard from her before. She was laughing. She was flying. She was, for maybe the first time in her short life, finally free of fear.
A lifetime of tension left her body in less than a month. Not all of it, certainly, but enough for her to express feelings beyond terror. At the time, I thought that all I done was to get of the way. Let go of control. But I began to see that it was not enough to get out of the way; I had to go her way. I had to listen. If anything, I decided the logistics of her life with more intention, interfered with more care. And if that care led to her having a good life, why should it prevent her from having a good death?
*
The vet walked back in the room carrying a needle the length of my hand. His assistant scooped Julie up and spread her little arms and legs apart like a person about to be quartered. She was limp now, unconscious. The vet lifted the needle and mouthed a countdown.
Three. Two. One.
He plunged the needle into her stomach. And Julie’s eyes shot open.
She flung her head back and let out the most guttural squeal, the wildest, most desperate sound I ever heard. Her leg muscles convulsed. Her jaw flapped like she was being electrocuted. It sounded like she was burning alive. Then her body went limp again and she collapsed into the assistant’s hands.
Later that day, I read that if pentobarbital is injected into the abdomen muscle and not the cavity, if the needle misses by just one micrometer, the animal will experience unfathomable pain. I think this happened. And I think the vet knew it, because when he spoke again his voice was shaking.
“In ten to twenty seconds, she will be passing on,” he said, handing her over to me.
Then he walked slowly toward the exit.
But he stopped, turned around, and said something I did not expect. “She was a good rat,” he declared.
She was a good rat. Her pink, fleshy body turned pale, and her red eyes began to dim like coals in a dying fire. The ulcer quit pulsing, and the tension in her spine dribbled out.
She was leaving us. Getting free. Julie was finally getting free.
*
There would be no more touching, no fear, no pain for Julie, and I felt both crushed and relieved to feel the new limpness of her body. That it came after a final burst of pain seemed unreal. I didn’t know if I’d made the right decision, or if there ever is a right decision; I still don’t know. I just felt grateful to hold her body while her spirit left, and I hoped that in her state of numbed belligerency, after this last stint of pain, she might have felt the same.
I worried that euthanasia would distance a pet from their place and people just when they need them the most, that it’s just another act of human control and avoidance of pain–that God does not visit the vet. For this reason I wanted Julie to die naturally, at home. But why would she care about a “natural” death when the natural conclusion to her life, if I had never interfered, would have been in the stomach of a burgeoning python? And what could be less natural than abandoning care of a domesticated animal? It wasn’t that the decision to euthanize Julie upset some natural cycle as much as it upset my understanding of a natural cycle: that human interference interrupts a higher, sacred order–that a death decided is not the same as a death discovered, in the same way that a forest planted by people is not the same as one that grew of its own accord.
But I had always interfered, and if Julie wasn’t blind she would’ve seen me delivering blueberries via chopsticks, playing rain sounds to try and soothe her mania, building runway ramps out of pillows for her to enter and exit her cage so she didn’t fall. I was a total helicopter dad, not some sort of rich, distant uncle. At my most optimistic, I try to believe what every pet owner must believe: that part of her wanted me to interfere here, at the end. It is all a believing. She was a tortured rat who nobody believed in. But I saw her dancing. I saw her flying in the middle of my bedroom floor that night, flying with the sacred. It was just for a moment, but there were lots of moments when she felt free. And as her head fell limp in my palm, I believed that this was one of them.
*
At home, I showed Julie’s stiffened corpse to Bianca. Rats, like people, need closure. For a few long seconds, it seemed that Bianca tried to wake Julie up, tearing at her flappy ears and pouncing on her chest. Which was heartbreaking, of course, but also alarming: rats are known to eat their dead companions to detract attention from predators. So I took Julie back and buried her in the backyard, below a big white oak.
Six months later, I’d bury Bianca there too. I buried them inside paper towel rolls stuffed with woodchips and newspaper clippings. I buried them beside one another, between the roots. I buried them with my hands.
SAM SHARP grew up outside of a small town in Ohio. He recently earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Wyoming with a concurrent degree in Environment & Natural Resources. You can read more of his work in Western Confluence Magazine, The Trek, Midwest Weird, and elsewhere.
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