Pepita the guinea pig, RIP

It wasn’t quite a screech to raise the dead, but close. It could certainly rouse us from sleep.

Pepita had us well trained. If we weren’t nearby to notice her “where’s my frickin’ food” body language, the guinea pig would start squeaking and gradually crank up the decibels until someone came running.

Yet she was the pickiest of eaters. We would offer her carrots, celery, kale, timothy hay, lettuce, banana, cucumber, mandarin orange and other delicacies. Often it took two or three tries to hit on the correct entrée for la princesa.

She was truly (in a phrase we used often, sometimes with affection, sometimes with exasperation) the World’s Most Spoiled Guinea Pig.

Pepita was a terrified little cuy when she came into our lives, a gift from another family. They loved her…but their dog did not. Just imagine how she must have felt every time a big-toothed monster loomed large.

Pepita was also apparently grieving — in her own guinea-pig way — at the loss of a piggy playmate sometime earlier.

It took a long time to calm the jittery creature down, yet she would never be fully tame. Jumpy, she was. But it dawned on her that the new humans had their uses — and furry royalty she became.

Her moment of greatest ecstasy was on my wife’s lap, being petted in broad strokes that made her trill with pleasure. Guinea pigs are social animals, and she’d greet me after a fashion — dashing to a corner of her big cage and demanding sustenance — when I arrived from work every night.

That I could develop a bond with so tiny a creature surprised me. I was a hamster kid all the way and detested guinea pigs. I was such a fool. Hamsters are supercute but lacking in any personality. The larger cavia porcellus is a more complex creature — one that can become a true companion, after a fashion.

Pepita was more than a pet. She was family. We loved her distinctive, unique physical feature, a ridge of fur at the nape of her neck that gave her the aura of a punk ewok.

Pepita existed largely to teach our child the value of life, and the importance of all creatures, even the tiny and seemingly insignificant ones. So her decaying health in recent weeks hit him the hardest. He cried.

My wife would not let Pepita go that easily. The guinea pig had been on the brink of death before, and my wife had nursed her back to health with baby food and water-softened food pellets delivered through an eyedropper, hour upon hour upon hour.

So it was in recent weeks, as Pepita became gaunt and unable to move properly, but seemed to rally more than once during my wife’s ministrations. She was thrilled whenever Pepita shook off her near-death lethargy and sucked eagerly on the dropper. The pig made valiant attempts at imperiousness on a couple of occasions, just like old times.

That’s why my wife was shocked to find her stiff and cold one afternoon, calling me in tears to give me the news. Pepita was seven (pretty old in guinea-pig years).

I had my first experience with grave digging that evening, by the side of the house, as the kid held Pepita in her coffin, a cardboard box he had inscribed with his nicknames for his pet and his words of farewell. He was inconsolable.

So was my wife, whose eyes still well up at the mere mention of Pepita, days after that piggy funeral. 

Soon the burial ground will grow hard as winter envelopes it. But next spring, the flower seeds my wife and son planted at the grave will bloom, and we’ll speak often of Pepita Popicita Pecuecuda (loose translation: Pepita the stinky pooping one).

We won’t miss having to clean her cage every night (ugh), but we’ll miss her terribly.