Shirleena and Frankenberry as newlyweds
Today my hamster Shirleena died. She was a roborovski (robo) hamster, and she was a little over two years old. She died peacefully in her cozy shoe-shaped bed, with her cotton and food lying all around her.
I expected her to die. About two months ago her husband Frankenberry passed away and she never seemed to be the same after that. (A gross aside: she ate his brain after he died.) She seemed to get frail after he passed, as if her reason for living had been taken from her.Yes, they were both old, but it’s sad to see two souls who loved each other so much be separated like that.
Another gross aside: they were brother and sister. I got them from the ASPCA here in Sacramento, and when I got them, they were called Mark and Luke. As in both boys. Lo and behold, a few months after getting them, I found a baby in their cage! Shirleena ended up eating it. The whole ordeal was too sad for me to bear so I had to separate Frankenberry and Shirleena in order to avoid a repeat.
Shirleena couldn’t stand being away from Frankenberry, though. She climbed her cage and squeaked, she chewed the metal bars and knocked her bedding out. It was devastating for her to be separated from her husband. I felt so bad that after a while, I thought maybe I could put them back together, hide their cages in the closet (for privacy) and hope for hammy babies.
So I did just that. She had more babies and they made the cutest squeaks in the world. I changed her water one last time and left her alone to raise her young’uns. She tended to them for about a week, and then one day the squeaking stopped. I’d hoped that they were okay, but I knew deep in my heart they were dead. I looked in the cage and found two babies with their heads torn off.
After that I kept Shirleena and Frankenberry separated for good. They eventually became accustomed to a solitary lifestyle but it just seemed so wrong to me. I kept them apart for well over a year and I felt like a jerk for it. Frankenberry continued to make a mess of his cage ( like a true man) and Shirleena continued to put her food in her wheel and run in it, waking me up every night with the clanging. It was sad, but they managed.
One day, though, I remembered something I had read in a hamster care book when I first got them. It said that robo hamsters typically became infertile around one and a half years old. Great! I thought. Now they can finally be together again!
So once again I put their cages together and they got to know each other again. Frankenberry chased Shirleena around trying to do it with her and they slept all curled up in little hammy balls next to each other. It was as if they had never been apart.
Now they are both dead. I regret keeping them apart for so long when they were so in love. It was my inability to cope with Shirleena eating her babies that kept them apart, and I am sorry for that. I am not sorry, however, that I saved potentially dozens of babies she would have eaten had they stayed together. They are both buried in my back yard under a tree and next to each other, and I hope that somewhere in the universe, they are happily running together in the same wheel, just like they did when they first fell in love.
