In Sickness and Death

Yesterday Sophie went out to feed the guinea pigs after school.  She came back in quickly, asking for help because "Brownie" wasn't moving very much.
 Our piggies are feral creatures.  Morgan got them 4 years ago as a reward for getting three of his hardest merit badges and so that he could get his Pets Merit badge.  They spent the first winter inside, but the smell finally drove me to cast them outside.  All of the experts  (and by that I mean the people at PetCo and the author of "The Care of Guinea Pigs" book)  said it wasn't possible.  They would die. Our little piggies thrived out there.  They were the biggest I've ever seen.  We fed them, but didn't play with them or domesticate them.  We could barely get the kids to feed them.  They complained and whined.  Morgan got to the point where he just "forgot" that they needed feeding on a daily basis.
It came to a surprise to Dan and I that the little girls would be so emotional about this whole process.  Sophie was a mess last night.  She went through the grief process in a matter of hours.  She bargained with God and tried to tell us that our celibate guinea pig was probably just pregnant and that was a happy thing.  We kept trying to help her understand that at this point the bigger kindness and show of faith would be to let Brownie go.
We finally got the girls to sleep last night at 11 pm.  Dan and I checked on Brownie this morning at 5:30 when we got up.  She was finally gone.
Morgan and Malynn got up first; they were glad she was gone.  We let the little girls sleep in and then had a funeral.  We now know that the little girls can be hired out as professional mourners.  There was some serious, serious sadness going on.  We tried to be patient with them, but there came a point where they were just feeding on each other's hysteria.  It was time to get them to school.
I'm sure that people who have always had family pets will look at us like we are crazy people.  Dan and I both grew up where animal death was just part and parcel of life.  I saw dead feral cats all the time.  We raised steers for meat.  We lived in the country where we saw things die.  It was not a big deal.  This was our daughters' first foray into real death of more than a goldfish.
Hopefully we handled it okay.