death of a gerbil

This weekend there was a death in apartment 140. It all started Saturday evening. Sherri and I returned late from an evening out. I was in my bathroom washing my face when I heard Sherri start to call my name. I ran out of my room to see Sherri searching through the gerbil cage in her room. One of the gerbils was missing she said. My first though was that it was dead somewhere in the bedding. They were getting kinda old and that one had always been a little sickly. Sherri was panicked, so I donned a zip lock bag as a glove and started digging through the bedding for the gerbil. We emptied that cage and still no sigh of little Geegee (that spelling is improvised). Could he really have climbed out? And if he did that meant he was somewhere loose in the apartment. Shit. So we started looking everywhere. In cabinets. Under the bed. EVERYWHERE. Then I started looking again through the bookcase the cage sat on. I opened the very bottom door and looked behind some papers and there he was. Curled up into a little ball and shaking. But still alive.

I scooped him up and put him into the cage. He drank a little water but would not touch the food. The other gerbil immediately came over and started licking him and trying to cover him in bedding. The next morning he was still alive but not much better. Then at some point mid afternoon Sherri checked on him again and he had died. I guess the fall, plus the fact that he was with out food and water for a while, was too much for him. The poor little thing looked so cute. But then came the hard part. What do you do with a dead gerbil when you live in an apartment building in the middle of a city? We decided he had to be buried. There was no way I was going to throw him away in the trash. So after awhile we found a place in the flower beds outside our apartment building. We dug a little hole and cover it with a rock. I'm not gonna lie it was really sketchy. People kept driving by looking at us; at one point a cop drove by and I though about the story we would have to tell him if he stopped and asked us what we were doing. But we finished the burial in peace. So now every time I leave the apartment I drive by his little gerbil grave. Sad.