This is a kicker and a good one at that

The Sad Tale of the Demise and Funeral of Mia Hammy

She kicked the bucket but was ruled offside

Sometime in the early 1990s, my loving Sister decided to gift my two Daughters their first real pet, a hamster.

That seminal hamster was the first of a dynasty that graced our humble residence. Daughter the Elder and Daughter the Younger, aged eight and four years respectively, along with Mother and Father, soon learned the Facts of Lives of Hamsters:

1. Hamsters eat their offspring. Not in the generic sense of Larry eating Trixie’s newborn, but Trixie eating her own newborn as a side dish to hamster pellets.
2. Hamsters eat dead hamsters. And they don’t necessarily wait for their roommate to die of old age.
3. Hamsters don’t live long. Unlike “dog years” that hover around seven, “hamster years” are more like seventy.

Facts 1. and 2. taught us not to buy two hamsters at a time or even one pregnant one. Fact 3. is germane here, as starting with Mr. First Real Pet we went through a steady procession of new hamsters.

Both Daughters felt age-appropriate pangs of sorrow when one of their domesticated rodents hit its expiration date. Putting the corpse away with dignity and decorum was embraced as an Adulting thing to do, even if the doing was done by the two adults in the home.

We had a nice yard behind our house, the right to do anything we wanted on our own property and the gardening tools to make it happen.

And so it was that starting with Mr. First of His Kind and continuing on an irregular time frame, we held a little non-denominational funeral service in our back yard and buried an aluminum foil-wrapped ex-hamster along our neighbor’s fence in as straight a line as we could remember in which its predecessors had been planted.

For those of you old enough to care, the United Stated Women’s Soccer Team won gold at the 1996 Olympic games. The unquestionable star of the American team was Mia Hamm, who became a household name for her brilliant play and uncanny resemblance to Danica Patrick.

Daughter the Elder and Daughter the Younger were between hamsters shortly after those Olympics, so when the latest one was acquired it was pretty much a no-brainer that they would name it Mia Hammy. The rodent’s gender was never ascertained and seldom questioned.

Mia Hammy lived a good life, as good as one can expect in a suburban New Jersey home. Contrary to USWNT stats, her one and only goal was to please us by pooping neatly in one corner of her rather commodious cage.

But all good things must come to an end, and so did Mia Hammy.

Her unforeseen demise came at an inopportune time: Daughters and Mother were holed up in the Catskills during summer vacation and not due to return for another two weeks.

As the token working drone I visited the vacationing family members on weekends, and on the occasion following Mia Hammy’s kicking of the bucket I broke the somber news to Daughters Elder and Younger.

They took the news rather well, asking if they can still hold a funeral when they returned in a fortnight and if the resort pool was open.

I am nothing if not accommodating to the wishes of my Daughters, and so it was with the funeral plans for the late Ms. Hammy.

Upon returning to New Jersey I carefully wrapped her lifeless little body in a shroud of aluminum foil. Keeping Lifeless Mia in the house was not an option. I did consider the freezer if only for a few disturbing seconds, but in the end nixed the idea and placed her in the garage for safekeeping.

Mia Hammy, or what remained of her, resided somewhere in the back of my mind for the better part of a week and a half after she had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Two days before I was to drive up to the Catskills and retrieve my tanned and well-rested family, I thought to check on the little stiff that was to feature prominently in a somber ceremony upon the family’s return.

New Jersey is not exactly south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but it does hit its share of high-nineties days in the summer. And our garage was most definitely not air conditioned.

I am not going to describe what I found in Mia Hammy’s aluminum foil cocoon other than to state the obvious: unspecified garage residents and summer heat combine with natural metabolic processes to give credence to the Biblical incantation that “to dust you will return.”

Mia was somewhere in the middle of the From Mammal to Fine Dust continuum.

I did the only rational and compassionate thing a Father can do in this situation. Mia Hammy, wrapped in an extra layer of protective aluminum foil, was quietly set out for pickup the next morning as per my township’s garbage collection schedule.

Saying goodbye to Mia as the municipal waste truck pulled away left a little hole in my heart and a great big one in my plans to be the officiant at her upcoming funeral.

Little girls don’t want the experience of celebrating a life in absentia. They want something they can stick in the ground.

With the wisdom acquired over eight years of fooling offspring into believing that what they see and what their parents say they see do not always match, I came up with a workable solution.

I mentally calculated that a dead hamster was about the size, weight and shape of a small potato.

The rest flowed from there. A slightly old/soft tuber was duly wrapped in a little foil blankie and left to repose in peace while waiting for its big turn on stage.

On the appointed day I retrieved Daughters the Elder and Younger along with Mother from the clutches of the Catskills. It was decided that serious unpacking could wait until the family had paid Mia Hammy the respect she was due after serving us well with seven months of diligent eating and pooping.

Following a custom developed and honed over time over the dead bodies of previous hamsters, our family solemnly marched single-file to our back yard. Father, bringing up the rear of the procession, carried *poor little Mia Hammy* because it was deemed to be the position of honor and nobody else wanted to touch a dead hamster even if it was wrapped in sufficient protective sheathing.

Words were spoken, tears were shed and the small form that had once held life (potatoes are living things too, no?) was buried with great care alongside, among or perhaps on top of the rest of the hamster corpses as no grave markers had ever been used to pinpoint their exact location.

At some point I confessed to Mother what had transpired prior to the family’s return. And I vaguely remember many years later finally spilling the tea to Daughters both Elder and Younger, when they were mature enough to be able to laugh at funeral fails.

While writing this story I mentioned it to Daughter the Younger, herself now a Mother, inviting her to read it and laugh at the sweet memory of our past. Her reaction was, “Wait, WHAT? You never told me this before!”

Oopsie.

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