I came home tonight to find a dead spider in my house. For many, this would be a non-event, or perhaps even a cause for a celebration. Unfortunately, I have long been cursed with a tender heart, and this creature was my pet.
I was the animal kid to beat all animal kids growing up. No animal was safe from my grabbing, curious hands. I scooped salamanders from streambeds and clicked my tongue at mangy feral cats. I acquired ringworm twice from petting stray dogs that did not want to be pet.
My love affair with animals extended to the many legged and the no legged. I once threatened another child while at Turkey Run State Park because he had captured a snake and was going to take it home, and by God, me and the big stick I wielded were not going to let him. Luckily for myself, my fellow animal-loving child, and the snake, my dad interceded and no blood was shed.
It often seemed to me—rightly or wrongly—that I was the only who cared. That I had been given this cause to champion. It was my sacred duty (in the sense in which all that gives meaning to our lives can become sacred) to care for wildlife. This community-building mindset would extend to my fellow humans by the time I was out of high school, but for a long time, it was just me and my animals against the world.
Regardless, by the time I was in college, my longstanding interest in spiders had flourished into a desire to have a tarantula of my own. My ever-supportive parents decided to get me one for my birthday. So, in March of 2017, I found myself in a car on the way to a specialty store in Chicago with my parents alongside my best friend and sister.
The memory is worn rosy and warm with time.
I rooted through a bin of plastic cups until I found a species I recognized. She was a Mexican redknee tarantula, smaller than I’d expected. A little, precious life that was to be mine.
I am not so self-deluded to be unaware it is profoundly silly, even disgusting, to many people to imagine a spider to be an important thing. Something of value. Something to be cherished. But that younger me of eight years ago, who feels damningly distant but also achingly familiar, was holding a pearl. A statement. A promise to care for something vulnerable.
My best friend and I were in the midst of watching Daredevil during this time period. While attempting to quote a line from the TV show that contained the Spanish word for lawyer on the way home (correct: “abogado”), I said “aguacate” instead. The word for avocado. Thusly, Aguacate had her name.
We took her home. In the way of all pets that come to us as we are on the threshold of great changes in our lives, she was an observer to my slog through my undergraduate degree. My slog through working at a grocery store. I waned and waned until eventually, my passion for life returned.
All the while, this innocent life grew along with me. Bearing witness not in a human way, but in an animal way. Running from my shadow. Filling her water bowl with dirt so I’d have to clean it. Climbing walls that went nowhere.
Female tarantulas in Aguacate’s genus, Brachypelma, can live long lives. Some specimens have lived to 30. I would often fantasize about my own children asking me how long I’d had that spider in the living room.
It was not to be.
It is both a source of release and frustration in the tarantula hobby that little can be done for ill tarantulas. Sometimes there is peace in being powerless. You can wash your hands of the situation.
When Aguacate molted a few weeks ago, I knew something was wrong. I knew it by the awkward way she held herself after she’d shed her exoskeleton. Something wrong doesn’t have to become something grave, though, and I convinced myself I’d imagined it. There was nothing I could do either way.
I came home from a family celebration on Memorial Day of 2025 to find my precious spider deceased. There was a senselessness to it that I tried to find comforting but failed to do so. I’d done nothing wrong as a keeper. Her care parameters were perfect. Tarantula hobbyists know these things can just happen.
Yet it was insufficient. She was the tarantula I was supposed to show my children. The tarantula I’d named for a lawyer. The tarantula who’d made it to my first home with me, sitting in a place of honor in the animal room of my long-held dreams. She had two more decades, damn it!
To call a tarantula a “sweet baby” or a “friend” is ill-fitting. Aguacate did not care for me. She did not know me as anything but a shadow that assailed her terrarium. Sometimes I brought food, but her mind was not complex enough to make the connection that I was her benefactor.
But I loved her. I loved her even though, and perhaps more so, because she could never love me. I loved her for what she was.
As I’ve become older (which I’m aware is a grandiose statement to make when you’re not yet 30), I’ve become preoccupied with forgetting. Forgetting how I felt at certain times, forgetting what mattered to me. Forgetting people, places, things.
I don’t frequently find myself concerned with myself being forgotten by others. I find my positionality as a blip in human existence comforting. Yet as I prepare to bury Aguacate in my pollinator garden tomorrow, I find myself desperate to preserve the love I had for her. For someone to bear witness to her existence so she doesn’t fade quite so quickly from human memory.
Aguacate mattered to me. She was scared of shadows and crickets that were too big and she kicked hairs at me when I changed her water. She could have had three decades but had just under one.
She was a good creature.
