In Respect for Charlie: A Tribute to Dead Pets

In Respect for Charlie: A Tribute to Dead Pets

Most everyone has experienced the death of a beloved family

pet. These times are met with an attitude of seriousness, and utter

solemnity.

Death is not a funny thing, and any soul should be mourned the same. In the

many times my pets have passed on, be they dogs, cats, or golden junebugs, we have always buried them in an honorable and memorable way. Sometimes, though, things don't go as planned. This is the case of my adored animals Charlotte, Excelsior, and GoldfishX.

Tupperware is a wonderful thing; so useful. Into this wondrous

contraption, was interred Charlotte, our hermaphrodite hamster. Charlotte's, well, Charlie's..,no.. Charlotte. I think it was.. well, anyway, the hamster's sex was a bit of an enigma. The pet lived a couple of years in my sister's care, and played in the warm sunlight that filtered through the shiny tubes, ducts, and pipes of his/her cage.

English: Inside the Walmart (still branded as Wal-...

A protest in Utah against Wal-Mart

Anne Kristine Osland

On the day that whatever-it-was died, something snapped in my sister's brain. As we walked down the hill of our backyard, I noticed the gleam of plastic in Laura's hand, different from the usual cardboard box coffin that's usually used in our family's ritual burials. She was planning on entombing Charlotte/Charlie in the ground in expensive plastic Tupperware. Mother would be enflamed if she knew. But Laura was hiding the container, and the hamster, where mom would never find either.

I guess I'm morbid. Maybe I think too much, or I'm extravagant. Is

giving a beetle a burial service a little eccentric? All things great and small

deserve a little piece of immortality. Excelsior, as Anne and I named him, was a gorgeous golden junebug that had been living in Anne's basement. Living on stale air and carpet lint, Excelsior lived a...