Good night, little prince.
It was very quick. One moment he was fine; the next, there was a sudden flurry of noise from his cage, as his legs failed him and he fell off a shelf. I sleep through normal rat sounds, but this was unusual. I bolted awake and went to see what was wrong.
Cas was never a lap rat. I wasn't even allowed to pet him, when he first came home. Mickie wanted to live in the armpit of my shirt forever, but Casper permitted me only to politely boople his snoot through the cage bars. Actually picking him up was reserved only for dire emergencies, like the fire alarm.
This was a touch awkward when it came to play time, since I needed a way to get them from the cage onto the bed where their rat-safe blanket and boxes were set out. But if he didn't want to be picked up, he didn't want to be picked up, and I wasn't going to argue with him too much. Instead I just offered them use of the box they came home in as their own private Rat Transport Device™. It was a red New Balance box, from sneakers (size 8), which presumably belonged to the lady I got them from. They learned quick that shoebox = runarounds. The fit became tighter and tighter as they grew, and while chewing bigger air holes gave them more room to poke their faces out, it didn't really make the interior any larger. Eventually they loved it so much they peed holes in the bottom, and I had to add more cardboard to the floor to keep it intact. But the Rat Transport Device™ still worked fine, so I kept the box.
Casper and Mickie were rarely separated. Their longest solo spell was when Tseng tried to take Mickie's tail off out of spite. Mickie got to spend a week in the hospital cage, getting his most distal point dunked in diluted betadine twice a day. He thought it was a great vacation. Casper was not as pleased. When it came time to take Mickie on his very last trip to the vet, Casper did not want me to pack the other rat up unsupervised. So I put them both in their box, put the box in their carrier, and carried them through the T together. Cas came home with me alone, now the sole and exclusive proprietor of their red shoebox.
Whenever I lose a rat, I make a small plushie and stuff it with some of their used bedding, so the friends they left behind have something to cuddle that smells familiar. Casper couldn't have cared less about his substitute Mickie, but I left their box in his cage a while, and he holed up in it for about a week, coming out only for dinner.
All of my rats journey across the Rainbow Bridge packed up in a box with grave goods, like the tiny royalty they are. The vet's office thinks it's sweet, and probably a little bit nuts. The receptionists definitely think of me as "the rat lady". Casper wasn't possessive of too much in life. He liked chocolate, and Cheerios, and destroying chopsticks, and they went with him into eternity. So did the little luminarium bag with the Mickie-silhouette from their New Year's Eve party, which was still sitting on my desk. But his favorite thing was probably just chewing companionably on his idiot brother, which he is now free to do once more.
I sent him to see Mickie with their red New Balance shoebox, just in case.
Casper's last meal, purely by coincidence, was pesto pasta with tomatoes and flakes of the nice canned tuna, because it was what I was having for dinner, and I'm not allowed to not share. If you would like to honor his memory, get someone else to give you a vigorous shoulder rub. Then have them make you a simple but tasty meal, and snatch it out of their hands to hide in your bedroom and gobble it down. I promise you, it's what he would have done.
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