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Family Secrets Never Die
A decade after I killed the family pet, my kids didn’t care that it happened — they cared that I didn’t tell them
When we were married, my now ex-husband used to call me the Grim Reaper. At the time — say, 2010 — it was meant at least partially as some kind of ribbing about the fact that I worked in hospice. It also referred to the role I often played as the person who is called by friends and family members when anyone is given a terrible diagnosis or is dying. Including pets.
When my ex-husband’s disabled aunt had a sick cat, and others in the family were out of town, I was asked to retrieve the cat from her apartment and transport it to the vet. I was to be the “contact person” to make decisions about treatment, including possible euthanization. As I drove away from Aunt Bea’s retirement home, with the cat panting painfully in the carrier, I thought to myself, This cat is going to die on me. I’m going to be the one to have to deal with this dead cat. It was a resentful thought. I grew weary of bearing the weight of these things just because people perceived that I “could handle it.”
Yet the Grim Reaper moniker only gathered additional steam.
At the time our family included a mom (me), a dad, a son, a daughter, two cats, a dog, and a leopard gecko. The leopard gecko was perhaps not the most thoroughly vetted family member. My son really wanted a reptile for his seventh birthday and I couldn’t stomach a snake, so this seemed like the most viable alternative. Mealworms and crickets, aside from their gag-inducing smell, didn’t seem as horrifying to me as feeding a mouse (dead or alive) to a predator.
We indulged the desire for a reptile and my son was happy. Spot, the leopard gecko, lived with us for a couple of years.
In September, just after the two-year anniversary of Spot joining us, mealworms lay anemically on the floor of his aquarium. Spot’s color began fading. He moved much less rigorously, if at all. I watched this for several weeks. A month. Spot wasn’t thriving. I would dare to say that Spot seemed miserable. Or, as we might say in my line of work, “Spot had no quality of life.”
