Hammy est Mort

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Hammy the hamster died this morning.


He’d spent his last day next to my laptop lying on a warm hot water bottle, or in my hands. He wasn’t interested in eating or drinking instead his energies were taken up by simply breathing.

I placed him on a warm hot water bottle on the table next to my bed just after midnight.

I had fallen asleep when I was woken by the sound of the teenager going to the bathroom.

My room was dark and I was listening to the hamster’s breathing on the table next to me.

My eyes were closed.

There was a sudden flash like orange lightning. I opened my eyes and looked first towards the hamster and then towards the curtains expecting to hear thunder following on afterwards; though it was with surprise as the weather forecast was for flurries of snow and not for thunder and lightning. I nearly got up to ask the teenager if he’d seen the flash too, but I didn’t.

As I lay there I realised that the hamster’s breathing had stopped.

I didn’t get up to check nor did I put the light on. I knew that there was nothing more that I could do.

Earlier, I had gently cleansed his eyes with cotton buds, and cleaned the rest of his body. Having worried about him all day, held him, played music, turned him from time to time, wiped his mouth with a moist cotton bud I knew that there was little more that I could do.

Strangely, I felt very peaceful and not at all upset.

My eyes were closed when there was a second orange flash. Though this one, though as brief as the first, held momentarily the hamster’s face; not the tired expression that I’d been studying with concern all day but a bright-eyed hamster face. It vanished instantly.

I listened for the hamster breathing again.

There was silence.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

I felt at peace and fell asleep.

This morning I knew what I would find.

I’ve washed him and I’m now drying his fur. His beautiful soft ears that were tightly furled have unfurled once more as I washed him in baby shampoo.

And as for those mysterious flashes?

I’ve just quickly searched the internet and found that:

‘Dr. Slawinski asserts a death flash” of electromagnetic radiation that is measurable in all living things.’

There’s also on http://books.google.com/books?id=UplEoBLXZNsC&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=slawinski+death&source=web&ots=z8-59RIQdl&sig=PxPZCF7n2fWpn492rVV9e-mUda0

Another reference that reads:

“Back in the ‘80s, Janusz Slawinski, a Polish physicist who was a faculty member of the Agricultural University at Wojska Polskiego in Poznan, posited that a death flash took place whenever an organism died, including humans. He described this flash as an emission of radiation ten to one thousand times stronger than normal and contained within it was information about the organism that just released it”

I’d never heard of such a phenomenon before; but I feel instinctively that this probably was what I too experienced.

Perhaps it was a phenomenon that is easier to observe when it is dark.

I wonder if the same event has not been observed in humans as there are often lights on or perhaps back in time flickering candles. Too bright a light may mask such an emanation.

Or perhaps people are too nervous about mentioning such an event.

It seems that his colleagues scoffed at Janusz Slawinski’s ideas. I guess here on this island blog visited by so few people I guess I can safely say and hopefully be believed that this is indeed what I did experience at the time Hammy died.