A Tribute - The Conclusion

After parts I and II, I know I've left you hanging for a few days, but here's the final chapter of the story.

It was Sunday morning, time to head out the door for church, when Emma Lee started crying downstairs and Kerri came rushing upstairs struggling to get out through her own tears that Shelby was dead.  

Great.

I followed Kerri downstairs and assessed the situation. The crab was out of its shell, and from what I can gather it seems like Emma Lee picked it up and it just fell out. We spent some time staring and trying to see if it was going to move, but I couldn't really tell if it was alive or not (and I wasn't about to touch it!) We had a  mixture of emotions going on for a good 30 min while I tried to get the girls calmed down and figure out what was happening (or had happened). Emma Lee cried because it was dead. Kerri laughed and said it was just having a baby (because the curled up tail part was a different color it did kind of look like it). I offered up that it might just be moving shells. They both took turns exclaiming that they thought they saw it move every few minutes (I never did...). In the long run, we ended up closing it up in the bathroom, cranking up the heat (because I think it got too cold), and left with the hope that it would be fine when we returned.

Fast forward a couple of hours. We returned home, and it was pretty obvious that Shelby was no longer with us. As the girls stood crying in front of the cage, Emma Lee pronounced that Daddy was going to have to perform a ceremony for her crab.

Great.

The ceremony quickly consumed all her thoughts and conversations, and I finally suggested (after literally hours) that maybe she should just go away and write out an order of what she wanted instead of asking me about it every five minutes. (Just a guess, but the Sympathetic Mother of the Year Award is probably not going to be mine!) That suggestion was right up Emma Lee's alley though (I'm actually surprised my little list-maker didn't think of it first), so she set right off. After much thought and deliberation, here's what she came up with:

With a spoon from the kitchen, Andy and Emma Lee worked together to bury Shelby right outside the back door. Kerri was put in charge of the song. She stood "center stage" and right on the spot came up with "This Little Crab of Mine I'm Going to Let It Pinch." Andy and I were fighting as hard as we could to hold back the laughter, and I was wishing more than anything that I had grabbed the video camera to record the ceremony! Andy was up next on the agenda, and he choose to recite a quick verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death (slightly cringing in case a lightening bolt was headed his way!). We all had to contribute a gift to Shelby. Emma Lee placed grass on her grave, Kerri added some flowers, I chose bark (because she liked to eat it), and Andy gave up a penny. Emma Lee also really wanted a stone with Shelby's name on it marking the spot, but she decided to settle on sprinkling some of the aquarium rocks from the cage.The ceremony moved on to a joyous celebration of Shelby's life by playing a game. Emma Lee was in charge of that, and she came up with some type of a crab-pinching tag game that left everyone laughing.

Well, you might think that was the end of that because that's what I thought too. Not for Emma Lee, though, I should have known! She has still cried just about every day since (over a week!), and she often requests to go outside and have "private alone time" with Shelby. After the first few times, I asked her why she wanted to do this and she said that she wanted to spend more time with Shelby since she didn't spend a lot of time with her when she was alive. Almost every prayer time, she thanks God for the little bit of time that she did have with Shelby, and she's anxiously awaiting next year's beach vacation where she can get another hermit crab.

Kerri's been very sweet through the whole process and "shares" her crab (who's been given a new name of Shell Lee in honor of Emma Lee). Kerri's crab hasn't been very active, so we moved it back into its original cage and it seems to be doing just fine as far as we can tell.