“Shit!” I say. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!”

     To be precise, mouse shit…five dark brown droppings, each the size and shape of a grain of rice. On our kitchen counter! I recognize it because of my previous experience with mice. “We have a fucking mouse!” I rant. “In our house! Could the timing be any worse?”

     My husband backs out of the kitchen and flees to our bedroom. Our daughter is out with her friends, doing whatever New York City teenagers do on a cold weekend day.

     It is January 2012 and I have just come home from my mom’s funeral. Nine months earlier, my seemingly healthy and fit 73-year-old mom fell and broke her collarbone while walking my sister Anne’s dog. When the break didn’t heal, she went in for a CAT scan. The abnormal results of that scan led to more tests, which led to a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer. This diagnosis hit hard because after almost three decades of a pack-a-day habit, she had finally quit smoking in the early 1990s. By the time her cancer was detected, it had spread to her bones and brain. She fought back with several painful months of radiation and chemo before the doctors announced nothing more could be done and she should be allowed to die in peace.

     At the beginning of that week, Anne called me in the middle of the night: “Kate, they think this is it. You should get here as soon as possible.” A few hours later, I was sitting in the Delta Crown Room at LaGuardia waiting to board a 7 AM flight to Cincinnati when Anne called again. “She’s gone, Kate. She went peacefully. Everybody was with her.”

     The unspoken phrase “everybody but you” hung in the air. As I sat in that sterile homogenous airport lounge, I pictured my mom. Not as she had been in those last terrible months, shrunk to 100 pounds and robbed of vitality and speech, but as she had been before: funny, fun, competent, and loving, the life of every party, my biggest cheerleader and my helpline for how to navigate a bully or a bad grade, cook a brisket, get the baby to stop crying, fix the toilet. Now she was gone and I hadn’t been there to hold her hand, tell her how much I love her, say good-bye.

     My dad and sisters picked me up at the airport and we drove to the funeral home to discuss the “arrangements.” The next day I delivered a eulogy in front of a hundred people. At the cemetery a couple of hours later, I shivered in the damp January air as earth was shoveled onto her grave.

     Everyone left the following afternoon, but I stayed behind for a few days to keep my dad company. That first night, we drove to a pizzeria across town and ordered a large mushroom pizza to go. We snuck it into the movie theater next door and ate the whole pie while watching Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. I watched my dad more than the movie, so I remember little about it except for the scene where Tom Cruise dangles off a super-tall skyscraper high above Dubai.

     Now I’m back home with a furry disgusting problem. I ask myself, “WWMD?” (“what would Mom do?”) and call the exterminator. He arrives the next day to plug all visible holes with steel wool and put down glue traps. The week after that, we host a pseudo-shiva at our apartment not only for my mom, but also for my father-in-law, who died of melanoma a month before my mom’s death. I call my dad every other day and he sounds sad and overwhelmed. My mother-in-law calls my husband every day and she sounds even worse. To cope with the pain and loss of this challenging time, my husband and I tacitly form a mutual survival pact with only one rule: “don’t talk about your feelings.”

     As part of my coping strategy, I develop a morning mouse-inspection routine. Each morning I creep into the kitchen and survey the counters, which remain miraculously free of droppings. Next I grab a flashlight to check the glue traps inside heating units, under couches, inside bathroom and kitchen cabinets, and finally, in the hole located under the garbage can set into our kitchen counter. This last part requires several steps:

     –stand on the kitchen stool to get above the counter;

     –take the lid off the garbage can;

     –pull the can out of the counter;

     –shine the flashlight into the dark hole below.

     During this final step, I hold my breath and pray I won’t see anything on the sticky white rectangle at the bottom of the hole. After a week of clean counters and empty traps, I let myself believe that the mouse was an aberration caused by unusually cold weather and our home is now rodent-free.

     To be on the safe side, I keep the mouse inspection going for one more week. On the last day, I shine the flashlight down into the hole—and in the middle of the white rectangle there’s a small brown blob the size of my thumb. The mouse’s oval-shaped body is framed by the exclamation point of its tail and triangular shape of its ears. It isn’t moving but it also doesn’t smell, which means it’s probably still alive.

     This isn’t my first encounter with a New York City apartment mouse. Back in the 1980s when I lived alone in a studio on West 24^th Street, a mouse appeared in my galley kitchen on one of the rare nights I was home to cook myself dinner. We both froze but I recovered first. I grabbed a glass from the sink, plopped it over the mouse, and turned the glass right-side-up. I covered the top of the glass with a plate and carried the glass-mouse-plate contraption outside. At the end of the block I released the mouse and it scurried away. I threw away the glass and plate in the corner trashcan before heading back upstairs to eat my pasta.

     This story surprises anyone who doesn’t know I had a pet mouse as a kid. My mom loved all animals (except snakes) and made sure her daughters did too. For my 12^th birthday, she gave me a mouse to replace my pet parakeet who had died a couple of months before. This mouse, whom I named Mousie, was white with red eyes and a long pink tail. Mousie’s cage sat on my bedside table, where he would run on his exercise wheel or nap in a nest of shavings. After school I would take Mousie out of his cage (making sure to close my bedroom door so our cat Smokey wouldn’t come in and try to eat him), put him in a shoebox on my bed, and stroke his soft fur. I gave him pellets and fresh water every day and once in a while some apple slices as a treat. I also changed his shavings frequently, since one small mouse can excrete up to 75 droppings a day!

     Mousie lived an unremarkable life until a year into his tenure, when he nibbled a dime-sized hole in the curtains next to my bed. These curtains, which my mom and I had picked out together, were made of a dark green cotton printed with neon-colored Warhol-esque flowers. As punishment for his act of domestic vandalism, my mom banished Mousie and his cage to the top of the dresser across the room. I don’t remember what happened to Mousie after that. I’m hoping he died of natural causes, since pet mice live only a few years. My mom is the only person who would have remembered that morsel of family history.

     Now as I stare down at this poor trapped mouse, I want things to go back to the way they were before the mouse found its way into our apartment, before my mom died, before she got sick. I want to call my mom right now and have her tell me what to do.

     At that moment it hits me: she’s really gone.

     I scream my husband’s name. He comes running.

     “What’s wrong?”

     I hand him the flashlight and point. He shines the flashlight into the hole and recoils.

     “Oh,” he says.

     “I think it’s still alive,” I say.

     We stare at each other.

     “What should we do?” I say.

     “I’ll take care of it,” he says. “Good,” I think. Because I can’t right now. Gone is the quirky, loving girl who used to cuddle her pet mouse. Gone is the resourceful young woman who once caught a mouse bare-handed. In her place is a middle-aged motherless child exhausted by grief.

    Luckily my husband is the son of an engineer with the problem-solving skills for this moment. He dons work gloves, grabs a yardstick, and marches into the kitchen. He lowers the yardstick into the hole and after a couple of tries, manages to attach it to the glue trap. He slowly fishes the trap out of the hole. When he lays the trap on the kitchen counter, the mouse’s small body moves slightly as if to free itself from its sticky coffin.

     All this activity has attracted the attention of our miniature poodle Mickey, who runs into the kitchen. When my husband pulls the trap out of the hole, Mickey starts barking.

     “You’re a big help!” I scold. “Where were you when the mouse was pooping on the counter?”

     “Please get the dog out of here,” my husband says.

     I grab Mickey, bolt into the dining room, sit down on a chair, and hug him to my chest. He squirms in my arms. I croon his name and pet him to calm us both down.

     My husband picks up the trap and places it in a garbage bag. Holding the bag at arm’s length, he says, “I’m going to take this into the community garden next door.”

     I nod and keep petting Mickey. When I hear the apartment door close, I release him. He runs back into the kitchen to scratch at the baseboards and whine.

     When my husband returns, I ask, “Did you club that poor mouse to put it out of its misery?”

     He shakes his head. “I wanted to, but in the end I couldn’t. I put the trap in the garden trashcan. I figure the mouse will freeze to death pretty quickly in this weather.”

     It’s been over 12 years without my mom, and sometimes I talk to her in my head. I tell her what she’s missed. Catastrophes like the Trump presidency, the COVID pandemic, and the Dobbs decision; she was a lifelong reproductive rights activist, so that one pisses her off. Blessings like the recent weddings of her three oldest grandchildren, including my daughter. She wishes she’d been there to celebrate with us.

     “How’s Mickey?” she asks.

     “He died in 2019,” I say. “Right before the pandemic. Which is too bad, since we were all stuck at home for months. He would have loved that.”

     “Are you going to get another dog?”

     “I don’t think so,” I say. “Mickey was part of our family and I miss him, but it’s a lot of responsibility.”

     “I get that,” she says.

     I tell her about this essay: “Mom, I’m writing about coming home from your funeral and discovering we had a mouse! We caught that poor creature on a glue trap and put it out in the cold, where it probably froze to death. I still feel bad about that. What would you have done?”

     She wrinkles her nose, then says, “Katie, you know how much I loved animals, but if one shows up at your house uninvited, it’s fair game. Remember when we had rats under the house? I had no trouble calling an exterminator to get rid of them. I was just worried they might die down there and start to stink. They were thoughtful enough to die somewhere else though, so we didn’t have to move.”

     I laugh and shudder. “The trap door to the foundation was in my closet. I used to lie in bed unable to sleep. I was worried the rats would come up and bite me! Thanks for protecting us from rats and other scary things, Mom.”

     She smiles at me and it feels like a hug. “You’re welcome, Katie,” she says. “I’m always here if you need me. But you know what to do.”

– Kate Levin

Author’s Note: This essay is the third in my “dead parents” trilogy.