A Squirrel No Longer Lives in Our Beach House

Last Updated on January 22, 2020 by Marybeth

And so, no longer will I hear “You have a pet squirrel?” And then a couple of beats later, “But where does he pee and poop??”

That last question may have bothered a member or two of my family, but not me. If the question was asked with anything ranging from mild distaste to flat-out grossed-out incredulity, I just smiled and felt pity. If you don’t understand a heart for rescuing those who are helpless and smaller than we are, if you don’t know what it’s like to fully embrace an odd and altered way of living to make room for family members of all stripes, then man, I feel sorry for you.

Illy died yesterday, which also happened to be National Squirrel Appreciation Day. Ironic. And I’m choosing to see it as beautiful and oh-so-appropriate, because we appreciated him and the life we had with him in it, and he appreciated us and the comfort he sought out and got from me every single day, plus the giant plate of healthy (with occasional additions of not so healthy) food Robert made for him in the mornings. We appreciated the laughs he gave us and the hundreds of photos we snapped of this quirky child, and he appreciated being able to race around the house, clamber up the curtains to lord it over the dogs from on high, and the occasional lucky escape outdoors to roll around in the dirt like an addict finally getting his fix.

For the last couple of months Illy has been wheezing some, sneezing now and then, and making occasional weird whistling noises. I figured he had a cold and he’d get better like we do. Also he was getting old; he would have been nine this summer. In the wild squirrels live to be a year old on average: they get hit by a car or eaten by a predator. But in captivity they can live up to 20! Most rescued squirrels I know live to be somewhere from eight to ten.

And so I also had a little bit of “la la la,” figuratively putting my fingers in my ears and not wanting to know that he might be actually ill. Me, the Queen of whipping out my phone and Googling everything, didn’t Google this until it proved to be too late. I feel heavy with regret for this, but I’m also the person who is constantly telling everyone else “Don’t stumble over things in your past.” I did what I did, and we tried to get him fixed up. We did the best we could with what we had.

I also thought we wouldn’t want to do anything heroic or put Illy through a grueling, painful surgery. But facing just seeing him fade away gradually – and suffering – wasn’t a great option either. When our squirrel friend Brad, of Seymour the Squirrel fame, advised us to take Illy to a squirrel vet in Port Orange (I now call her The Squirrel Whisperer) and that Illy still had a lot of life left in him, we took him to Dr. Emerson. She said she thought she could help Illy, though his Odontomas (bone that grows blocking the breathing, is a simple quick way to describe it for now) were big and advanced. She’s performed hundreds of these surgeries. She did what she could. Thank God for Dr. Emerson and her crew.

At the end of Illy’s second surgery he was doing okay, but before he woke he threw a clot to his brain and he was gone in an instant. This can happen. She explained she had patients (I love how she called the animals patients) who would come out of the surgery fine only to have a clot lodge in their brains weeks later, as their owner was feeding or holding them. I’m glad Illy didn’t wake up, in pain and disoriented, only to come home and possibly have that happen.

While Robert and I were still working in Orlando Illy spent the days in his huge cage (built by Robert) so that he was safe from the dogs and any danger he could get into, like falling into the toilet, which he did when he was very young, but only that once: smart squirrel. When I’d get home from work I’d sometimes take my glass of wine into his cage and sit there while he climbed all over me. Now that I type that I don’t really know why I got in there – maybe just because I could? And wanted to share his environment, as he did ours. Because when we were home he did have free range of our house, and would race up and down the stairway (and the banister, so frightening to me as his mom!) and in and out of all the rooms.

When we moved to the beach and Robert retired Illy didn’t need that huge cage (nor did it fit in our down-sized, perfectly compact little house) so for the last few years Illy was free-range. And so yes, he did pee and poop in the house. Can you tell that is said with a bit of defiance, or even rebellion against the close-minded thinking of non animal lovers?

Our upholstered furniture was all draped with beach towels and then blankets over top of those, and we were diligent with finding his favorite pee places and cleaning up after him. One such spot was an antique bowl that Mom willed to me, Morecroft or something, very valuable I guess, that we kept in the middle of the table near his cornucopia-like, food-photography-worthy plate of nutritional fare. (Robert would actually “plate it”, arranging foods by color and height, with a half ear of corn standing tumescently in the center; we would laugh every time.) I wonder how Mom would feel about that use of that bowl, but I bet now she would be laughing, too. And his poops, if you’re still here and really want to know, were tiny and hard, so, easy to paper towel up and dispose of. You do what you do. You clean up after your kids.

Illy made various nests all over our houses through the years, dragging paper towels, toilet paper, swaths of torn newspaper, and beer koozies (?) into each one before eventually, and inexplicably, abandoning it and plotting another. His final bed here was on the top bunk of the “kid’s room,” (our kids are in their 20s and 30s) in a ratty fleece blanket that he’d burrow into and sleep for hours during the day, more and more as he got older, and then unbeknownst to me (la la la), sicker.

After his first surgery, last week, Illy retreated to his nesting box up near the ceiling, even higher than the top bunk, I’m thinking to try to get away from the pain and discomfort and also to feel the safest he could feel. Though he was pretty rough, especially the first day after the operation, he would still seek me out and roll up against my body to be petted. He would fall asleep in my hands, against my warmth. If I had to get up – and I’d try so hard not to have to go to the bathroom (the only thing Robert couldn’t do for me! He was so good otherwise, bringing me food, wine, my book) – I’d cradle him on my lower stomach like a furry fanny pack. In the past he’d dart away at the least inconvenient movement on my part, but after that surgery he stuck to me like the child that he was. Either that or he was sleeping, long, hopefully healing, hours.

One of our favorite Illy stories:

A few years ago we were across the street at a big annual Memorial Day party, and my lifelong friend Mary Reed came back over to our house to refill her wine from her stash here. In the kitchen she happened to notice a squirrel, outside the glass door, knocking to come in, and so she opened the door to let him in. When she told me, for about a half second I thought wildly “OH MY GOD I WONDER IF ROBERT WILL LET ME KEEP HIM” and then, silly me, I realized it was ILLY. When we’d left for the party we’d kind of checked on him to make sure he was in his room, thought that lump in his blankie was him, and shut his door so we wouldn’t have to worry about him escaping when we came back for supplies. Only he wasn’t in his room, obviously, he’d gotten out somehow without our noticing and had spent THREE HOURS OUTSIDE UNSUPERVISED. And was still alive. And wanted back in. I love that.

I won’t miss having to shut him up when company came over, or when we were busily coming in and out of the house working on projects and didn’t want to give him a chance to dart outside. I just sat here and tried to think of what else I won’t miss. Nothing.

I didn’t mind the clean-up, the scratches he didn’t mean to inflict as he climbed over me like I was a tree, the occasional nut hidden in my shoes, the nuts hidden in my tank tops that I sometimes didn’t know about and walked around all day in public with a “lump” visible in my chest. I didn’t mind having to share my potato chips (he’d come racing at the sound of the bag, and root around to find the largest one) or my pizza crust or my lima beans.

I will miss the morning ritual of feeding all the animals and climbing back in bed with our coffee, Illy finding me to curl up by my side for morning petting. I will miss him seeking me out all over the house to spend time with me, jumping up in my lap as I type here at the computer. I will miss the way he’d gently take one of my toes in his teeth and give a little tug (?) and how he’d work to pull my hair tie out of my pony tail (?) How he’d come when I’d call his name. I also called him my Special. You know how nicknames happen. They often don’t make sense. But this one did.

Illy enhanced our lives more than I can tell you.

Rest in peace, my Special.

If you’d like to read more about Illy and how we found him and why we didn’t release him, I wrote an article a few years ago, “A Squirrel Lives in Our Beach House.”