I got home late from a meeting of a new independent filmmaker’s group. I immediately went out in the backyard to check on the squirrel.
There she laid, in the same spot where she was 8 hours ago. She was dead. She had obviously died shortly after I left a little after 4pm.
I started to cry. I don’t really know why, most people would say “it’s just a squirrel.”
I don’t understand what happened, or why it all ended this way. A squirrel in a chimney, a bunch of babies, death. It doesn’t really make much sense to me.
And I feel like there must have been something that I did to her that caused her death. Maybe I shouldn’t have closed the damper this morning. Maybe I shouldn’t have had her babies taken away. Maybe…
I don’t know.
I moved her body a little farther away from my house, in hopes that my cats wouldn’t find her. Tomorrow I will try to find a place to bury her, perhaps. And perhaps she will live on in her babies, which I will optimistically assume to have survived — I refuse to call the Animal Welfare League to confirm their fate. I’ve had enough emotion for one day.
I feel awful.
