Morrie, born in December of 1998, passed away on February 17, 2003. He was 4 years old.

We liked to call Morrie our "galumphy" ferret, becuase he so playful and big and clumsy. When we first got the ferrets, we had a spare bed that we let them play on. Often, Morrie would be so focused on his play that he would run off end of bed while looking at you. At some point, he developed a mysterious bald patch on the side of his body. Our theory was that he got burned (maybe on our baseboard heater) and and it killed the hairline.

Unfortunately, Morrie tended to "get burned" rather a lot. Once when we left him with some friends, they let the ferrets run around in their kitchen. The ferrets would go under the stove until our friends noticed that their whiskers were getting singed. When we got back, Morrie had no whiskers except one long one that bounced oddly out of his face. He looked so funny with only one unbalanced whisker.

Morrie suffered other misfortunes, too. We still have the bed Jen's grandfather slept in as a boy. One evening, we were lying on the bed watching TV while the ferrets ran around and played in the room. Unfortunately, after holding together for decades, the bed frame decided to break while Morrie was underneath it. The squealing sounds he made were horrible. Miraculously, he seemed to escape relatively unscathed. On another occasion, Jen decided to hold a slumber party for the daughters of some of our friends (why she did this, I'll never understand. The girls, being young, were fascinated by the ferrets, but weren't especially attuned to their needs. Morrie somehow got his head trapped underneath the bathroom door, and the girls tried to free him by opening and closing the door, dragging poor Morrie back and forth across the bathroom floor by his head.

In spite of the hard knocks life threw him, he was very playful. He was careful not to hurt you at all. He would pretend to bite you, but grip your finger with his eye teeth so that it didn’t actually hurt. He was a very gentle ferret.

Morrie had surgery on Monday, February 10, and never really fully recovered. He came out of surgery fine, but had a hard time eating and getting his energy back. We had to drive him from the vet to the Animal Emergency Clinic for overnight care in the evenings and then back to the vet in the morning. Wednesday night we brought him home in the hopes that he would be more motivated by being at home in a familiar surrounding. He had a seizure in the evening that lasted only a second or so, but the scream he gave was enough to chill you to the bone. He had another during the night and then one on the way back to the vet in the morning. They put him on a medication that made him really lethargic to prevent the seizures, but then it was hard to see if he was improving. He didn’t have any seizures on Thursday or during the night and then actually started improving on Friday.

So we brought him home again with 3 different medications. One was an antibiotic. One was a pain killer. One was to prevent the seizures. While at the vet, he had a catheter in his leg. They removed the catheter on Friday. However, the bandage was too tight and his foot swelled up huge. It looked really funny, like it was one of those big fingers at sports games. He ate a lot on Saturday and was actually kind of active. He started using the litter boxes around the room. Then on Sunday he just gave up. The vet thought he had given it all he could, but he didn’t have any more energy. By Monday morning, he barely looked alive. So I drove him to the vet and we decided to put him to sleep because he was obviously suffering too much. His breathing was labored. He didn’t even flinch when the vet put the needle in his stomach.

I held him in my arms and hugged him and whispered to him how much I loved him and what a great pet he was. Finally, he gave a shudder and made little noise and he was gone. I am grateful that I could be there with him in the end though I will miss him greatly. It hurts so much to think about him being gone.