Dead Pet

Good-bye old friend

Since September we've kept a small black widow spider in our windowsill.  We found her in our garage and I put it in a jar so I could take photos of it to send to my dad and then never took her out.  I wanted to see how long she would stay alive.  I thought maybe a few weeks, but months passed and she was going strong, eating whatever I put in there and spinning a giant web inside my large mouth quart sized jar.  Everyone thought I was crazy, including myself, for keeping a pet that could kill my children in the house, but they were totally disinterested in it and it was out of their reach so I just left her there.  The kids excitedly showed their friends around Halloween time that they had a pet black widow, but then they forgot about her.  I enjoyed watching her spin her web and gracefully move around the jar as I did dishes and I was always on the hunt for bugs to feed her.  She was the perfect pet for me!  Just a few weeks ago I put some bugs in her jar and she didn't touch them and ever since then she just started to shrivel up.  Today I noticed she was sitting in the position that dead spiders sit in instead of her usual sprawled out, beautiful, elongated position.  She wasn't dead, but her abdomen was shriveled up and her usually red hourglass marking had dulled to white.  I knew she was on her way out and I didn't want to watch her die over days and days so I tossed her outside in the freezing cold.  She would die quicker that way(do I really feel like I'm going to cry? haha). I know people expect to get their pets back when they go to heaven.  I wonder....