A Dead Mouse Is Not Just a Dead Mouse

The saga started last year, when I heard them skittering in the wall between my son Jack’s closet bed and the living room. As I laid there in the dark of the closet, the soft breath of my newly-sleeping son on my shoulder, his silken hair tickling my neck, I welled up with anxiety and rage. I watched myself go down the worst-case scenario path, my common response. How dare these vermin invade my space? What if they are vampire mice and could find their way into the closet bed and eat my child? What about if/when they died in the wall and smelled? Could we get sick from the odor of their rotting bodies? Would they take over the apartment and we would have to move? How would I pack up and how in the world would I find another affordable space to live in this crazy town? Oh yes, my thought process went there.

And, most of all, how do I deal with this on my own, as a widow, a single mom, and a working midwife? That was the biggest question. This was something that for sure my husband Matt would have dealt with, without blinking an eye. But now, here I was, dealing with yet another mundane life event that was literally a mouse getting blown up into a monster in the face of grief.

I took my son to Home Depot a few days later and zoned out at the pest control wall for a few minutes. I raged against the fact that I had to do this, and not Matt. I wanted to destroy that whole display of catch ‘em - kill ‘em contraptions. Like how some TV shows cut out from the current scene and show the protagonist’s fantasy, I stood there in the aisle, imagining swiping my arm across the products, knocking them to the floor, stomping on them, going back for more, throwing shit, and even tearing the shelves themselves out from the walls. Fucking mice and fucking widowhood and fucking solo parenting and fucking rodents gnawing into my sense of security and self-sufficiency.

Cut back to real time: I finally picked two different kinds of humane traps, calmly brought them to the checkout, and brought them home. And then I did not open them for a year. It was overwhelming for some reason, but also because I didn’t hear the mice in the wall again. It was as though purchasing the traps was enough, for now.

A year later, I heard them again, the sound of chewing seeming to be audaciously right in my ear, on the other side of the wall. I hate the sound of chewing anyway, most especially when humans do it in my close proximity, and this was just as bad. The grating noise felt like it was directly on my nerves, as yet again, I lay in the dark, snuggling my now-bigger sleeping son.

This time, I was able to open the mouse traps. I did it the next morning with Jack, and even though I felt a bit lame using my three-year-old’s company to get through this, it was actually a rather fun activity. He was into it, figuring out quickly how the traps worked, and interested as he watching me put the peanut butter in the designated bait area. We set the two traps against the wall in the living room, where there was conveniently a little hole in the wall for the mice to get through.

The next morning, there was a strange excited anticipation, a little like Christmas, when we looked at the traps. One was no longer set in its open state, it was closed! I was rather amazed that it worked! When I picked it up, I was surprised by how light it felt, and I wondered if it had closed on itself with no mouse involved. After a few minutes of debating, I decided to peek in there, and face either a trapped mouse that might try to escape, or the disappointment of a false catch. I figured we’d better know for sure if there was a mouse in there before we brought the trap down the hill for releasing.

I carefully opened the cover and peeked in. A little shock and thrill went through me as I saw two little black eyes peeking back at me! I yelped and told Jack that there was indeed a mouse in there. It was fun to share this with him. We brought the trap down to a field close (but not too close) to his preschool, and shared a fleeting but exciting moment as the little gray mouse ran out of the trap.

The mouse saga escalated over the next few days when I smelled dead animal in our house. I felt sure that one had died in the wall. It was an oppressive, invasive smell and I felt helpless and frantic to find a way out of it. I texted my landlord, Rob, with a mix of righteous entitlement as a tenant and trepidation of asking too much and jeopardizing my “bro deal” rent situation. To my relief, he came over the next day with non-humane traps, on a mission to dominate nature. He set them around my apartment with peanut butter, and while I was grateful for the help, I now felt just as at-risk as the mice, vulnerable to coming upon gore and death around any corner.

The next morning, I was preparing my coffee in the kitchen, and suddenly knew without a doubt that the trap under the sink had caught a mouse. I cautiously peeked under, and sure enough, two black eyes popped out at me. Only this time, they were glazed and lifeless, unlike the two I had seen from inside the humane trap. I quickly stood up and moved a cooler over to block the horrid view. I tried to shake the shock of death from my body. I texted Rob that we had caught one, and I was too squeamish to do anything about it. Would he please come by and dispose of it? He said he would, at the end of the day.  

The traps were quiet for a few days after that.

Then I thought the trash was smelling. I took it out. The next day, the house still smelled. That smell, the smell of rotting death. I blood-hounded around the kitchen, checked the traps I could find, and yielded nothing. Maybe it was coming from under the house like what I had smelled before? It was unsettling and infuriating that I couldn’t track it down.

And then, the other night I lay on the couch after a long day of work and hardly any sleep the night before due to a birth. I had come home to my son writhing in pain with an earache. I spent over an hour holding him close and helplessly in between homeopathic doses and cold compresses, until he finally settled into sleep. Afterwards, I snuck out to the couch to unwind with a little wine before bed.

The weight of work, the agony of parenting a child in pain, and the harsh loneliness of widowhood came crashing down on me as I sat in the dark. I crumbled into a sob. I cried softly, then hard, then screamed into a pillow, then subsided into whimpering again. And then my nose led me out of my misery and to finding the culprit of the odor I had been hunting down for days. It was under the couch, just two feet from where I had been grieving for the last half hour, the same spot where we had found the very first mouse in the humane tube trap. This one was not the humane trap. The vicious snap had flipped over the trap, so the mouse was under the little rectangle of wood. I was grateful to be blocked from the full view of it. But I still had to remove it, and now.

I put on a latex glove I have around for work, and strategically grabbed the trap by the end that was furthest from the mouse. It was surprisingly light as I carried it to the door and flung it as far as I could across the yard and onto the landscaped hill nearby. I felt okay about that disposal technique because that is what Rob had said he does with the mice. Only, he takes them out of the trap first. I gave myself permission to fling mouse and trap together. Rob could go get the trap himself if he wanted to.

Glove still on, I sprayed the floor excessively with my essential oil cleaning spray and rubbed it down thoroughly. I realized I wasn’t breathing out of my nose. I gave a tentative little sniff and was pleasantly surprised that it smelled lemony fresh, and not like death.

I threw out the wipe and glove with a satisfied flourish, and laid back down on the couch. The air was refreshingly free of death, both literally and figuratively. I had handled something that some would see as just a small thing, but for me was a big deal. I didn’t succumb to helplessness, depression, and the “why me” mentality when presented with the task of dealing with a dead mouse this time. No, this time, I faced it head on, like Matt would have, without blinking an eye.