Requiem for a Hamster

by C. P. Klapper



In our move back east, our rented dwelling more closely matched the size of our family so that what had once been “The Klapper Inn for Friends and Relations Needing to Get Back on Their Feet” had now to limit itself to smaller tenants as “The Klapper Retirement Home for School Pets”. Thus it was that Zippety the Hamster, after years of faithful service to preschoolers at the ABZ Academy, took up residence in our home.

My then five year old son, Tipher, took the keenest interest in Zippety, his cage, his wheel, his track and his ball. My daughter Bibbeth, two and a half years his junior, seemed to be most interested in the ball. This ball was one where Zippety was placed inside, though with a clear view of the outside, becoming for him a conveyance with which he could navigate around his new world.

For several months after his arrival, Zippety was just that. His energy provided for my children a form of entertainment unrivaled on television. Zippety in his ball was monarch of all he surveyed for these, the best moments of his retirement.

Yet, the reason for his retirement eventually became evident. One brisk fall day, Zippety got very cold. Bridget tried warming him up, as we had read in books and seen in movies. Zippety, though, was not a young runt starting out in his life, but an old, well-traveled gentlehamster coming to end of his. Tipher cried profusely over the death of his best friend and we needed some more comforting form of closure for our son. We also needed to dispose of the body.

Fortunately, we had with us Jessamy, my daughter from my first wife, a Presbyterian minister. Jessamy relished the opportunity to mimic her mom in officiating the funeral. I took the role of undertaker and grave digger.

After I had dug the grave and prepared the furry little body for funeral in his shoebox coffin, Jessamy led Tipher and Bibbeth in a procession to the gravesite. She gave the opening sentences with the comforting expression “Dearly Beloved” and the less comforting ones involving dust and ashes. Jessamy then asked Tipher to “say something about Zippety”.

It is a cliché to say that funerals are mostly for us the living who are left behind. It is probably also a cliché, though less mentioned, that this is because we have lost someone who has loved us. We are the “dearly beloved”, in the past, who need to know that someone still loves us in the present and future. By telling others how we were loved by the departed one in a eulogy, we bring that love back to the present. This comforts us in our grief until we can accept the loss.

Yet it remains that there is a part of funerals that is for the departed. It is not for anything in this life, which has ended, but rather as an epilogue to the book of their life. In this scene without them, their life is affirmed, it being shown that they were precisely who they were meant to be. Eulogies for this small, but better part of funerals resemble, not mourning over a death, but a celebration of life.

Tipher's peroration was clearly of the first, mourning kind, extolling the virtues of Zippety the Hamster. You might question whether a hamster could show love to a little boy, but in Tipher's mind and heart everything that Zippety did that amused him, the hamster had done especially and lovingly for him.

“I loved the way you raced in your track, the way you got into your ball, the way you rolled across the floor...”

It might seem inconceivable that more than a minute would be needed to describe a hamster, yet Tipher took about five, all with profuse sobbing. When he seemed to have finished -- or was it that he had just taken a breath between sobs? -- Jessamy moved the service on to the next speaker.

“Bibbeth, can you say a word about Zippety?”

Bibbeth, with all the earnestness of a three year old, contemplated the awesome task before her. For a good minute or so, she stood there, the concentration not only visible, but palpable, on her face. Then she started.

“H-h-aaa... H-h-aaa...” Bibbeth raised her body, shoulders and chin up, opening her mouth wide. She hovered for a few seconds until she swooped down and with one exhalation said:

“Hamster!”

That was it.

Jessamy and I nearly fell down trying not to laugh. I could hear Bridget on the porch stifling a guffaw.

When we had regained our composure and completed the burial, though, we realized that we will likely never hear a better eulogy of that second, better kind than Bibbeth's word for Zippety.