Song of my Life

December 13, 2005 was a sad day in Miss Walker's class. One of our guinea pigs, Unnamed, passed from this world into the next. I'm sure that you're saying to yourself, "I didn't know they had guinea pigs! Why didn't I know they had guinea pigs?" I'll tell you why you didn't know. I just got the guinea pigs last week. Monday was Unnamed's first day in our class. Tuesday, he died.

Unnamed and his brother, Unnamed Too, were given to me by a man who works with my dad. His daughter was getting too old for guinea pigs (as if...that's why I don't teach junior high) and she wasn't taking care of them anymore. She'd had them for about two and a half years. Unnamed was sick when I got him, but we didn't realize it for a couple of days. He was obviously getting worse, so I took him home on Monday night and did what the guinea pig website told me to do. He seemed to be getting much better, but he took a turn for the worse, and sometime between 11:00 and 1:00 on Monday, he breathed his last.

I found him after I got back from taking the kids to PE. Fortunately they weren't in the room when I discovered that he'd died, because it's safe to say I was more than a little distraught. Then again, if the kids had been around, I would've held myself together just fine. I planned to tell the kids that I was taking him home to live with me, and I really hoped they wouldn't even realize he was gone. Obviously that didn't happen. As soon as we walked back into the room, they asked where he was, and I felt I had to tell them the truth. It was a very valuable teachable moment.

I called the kids down onto the floor, and I reminded them how he had been sick, and I told them very gently that he died. They were sad for a minute, but got over it quickly, which is a reminder of how incredibly resilient children are. One of them asked where he was, and she meant his physical body, but I asked them where they thought he was. Several of them pointed up, and one said that he was in Heaven. She went on to explain that, "Heaven is where people spirits and animal spirits go when they die." Almost all of the kids had their hands up, wanting to talk about who lives in Heaven (God and Jesus) and what happened to the guinea pig and why he died and what we should do now. I'll now entertain you with what they said about it all. :)

On who lives in Heaven: "I know about Jesus. He was born and then he died. They put him on a cross, and then after that they took him down and put him in a cave and they put a rock in front of the cave and then three days later the body was gone and he was walking around, and then he went to Heaven."

On where the guinea pig is: "A long, long time ago (at which I wanted to break out into the song American Pie,) when Jesus was born, they named him God and the Devil put him on the cross. They scraped his back with swords and they put needles in his head. (I kind of tried to rush her through that part, but the kids seemed to forget it quickly.) Then he went to Heaven, and our guinea pig is with him now and the angels are taking care of our guinea pig." This is the same little girl I talked about here.

On why he died: "I think we were too loud and it got sick of the noise in the class and died."

On replacing him: "If a new one costs too much, you can take this one (the one we still have) back and get two more."

I took the guinea pig to my parents house and my daddy buried it for me. Just one of the perks of living close to him. Free burial service.


In all actuality, Unnamed and his brother really do have names. They are Reese's (deceased) and Calico, two names which I find to be somewhat uncreative and definitely not respectable for male guinea pigs, so I planned to let the class pick new names. We just hadn't gotten to it yet at the time of death. As you can imagine, we picked a name for the remaining guinea pig quickly. I let the kids suggest names, and here is the list of what they came up with:

Patrick
Frisky
Jeremy (pronounced germy)
Sponge Bob
Squidward
Mr. Crab
Usher (yeah, you know the one)
JST
Andrew
Smokey
Steven
Michael
Fish
Johnaluna (we read Stellaluna recently)
Puppet
Angel Baby (which may have led to some gender confusion)
Sam
Patch
Max

I'm sure you appreciate that we have almost the entire cast of SpongeBob Squarepants on the list. Hopefully most of you didn't realize that. I'm surprised that a certain child didn't mention 50 Cent or Kanye. Actually, come to think of it, he left early yesterday, so he wasn't here when we did it. It came to a tie between Frisky and Max, so we decided to call it Frisky Max. In hindsight, I think Max McFrisky might've been better.