Wednesday 22^nd February 2006

Death of a household member

He was surely dead we thought, with his guts oozing out and an eye popped from a socket. But then an occasional twitch or wriggle told of the more awful truth: almost dead. The pain we felt when looking at him was selfish when you consider his pain from those wounds.

We don't know how our resident lizard came to be injured so. Our best guess is that he went for a scurry along the wall, to visit one of his hide-outs behind the fridge when one of us, unknowingly, slid the door open and jammed him against the wall.

Whether we played an unknowing part of his demise or not doesn't change our sense of guilt and shame to have had a fellow household member die.

Euthanasia was necessary in the circumstances. I chilled some water with many ice-cubes and placed him in. The death rattle lasted less than two seconds. A mere blink compared to what may have been many hours of unbearable agony.

Lizard had been with us for some years. He was a skink to be precise and a decent eight inches in length. He never had loud parties or stole my beer and he never insisted on watching a different program on the television.

Alice buried him in the garden - after I retrieved his carcass from the bowl and wrapped him ceremoniously in a torn off piece of brown bag paper. We placed him near a non-descipt bush, and then we went our way.

It is a sad thing to have lost our lizard. In the years he chose to live with us, we got to learn his habits, became familiar with his special noises as he rummaged about the place, and we took pleasure in spotting him on the occasions he was traversing to another room.

No doubt the cockroaches will be celebrating his demise; many a nest of theirs has been raided over the years I suspect.

So, with a tear in my eye, I bid ol' lizard farewell.

End of blubber.

(C)opyright Sylvano Lucchetti.