When Butterflies Fall by the Wayside
I was promised five butterflies.
I ended up with seven.
To be honest, I hadn’t planned on having any butterflies. A couple of months ago, my aunt had called me to say hello. We made small talk before she reminded me it was the birthday of her late brother, my father. Her voice was strained with emotion as she speculated about how nice it must be to have birthdays in heaven. We found ourselves reflecting on our last memories of him and the painful events that followed in the days after he was found dead in his home.
We both couldn’t help but feel that he could have lived longer if things had been different. We beat ourselves up asking questions for which there were no good answers. What if we’d persisted, against his wishes, in trying to get him into a different living situation? What if we’d tried harder to advocate for better care for all his conditions? What if we’d been more present, checking on him more regularly?
If you’ve lost a parent or other loved one, you’ve probably found yourself lost in the what ifs as well. It’s hard to silence your mind when it starts asking those questions, even when you recognize how pointless they are. They haunt you.
I could tell they were haunting my aunt and I felt bad for her.
I thought back to when my father had died. I remembered how intense the emotional highs and lows had been. I remembered something that had actually helped to ease the stress of riding the roller coaster of grief.
Butterflies.
My coworkers at the time had sent a memorial butterfly kit to my family. It included a small pop-up enclosure made of mesh netting, a plastic cup of caterpillars, and their food supply in the bottom. The caterpillars would spend a week or so eating, shitting, and growing, after which point they would attach themselves to the paper liner atop the cup and pupate into chrysalids. The paper liner was to be moved into the enclosure with the chrysalids hanging upside down. Another week or so and they’d emerge as butterflies.
The experience of raising butterflies was unexpectedly delightful. Ripe with metaphors about life as a series of transitions, it gently distracted us from grieving and pulled us into reflection. Watching caterpillars grow into butterflies, then saying goodbye to them had helped me feel some peace in those difficult weeks following his death.
I felt like the butterfly-raising experience might help my aunt find a little peace and comfort as well, so I placed an order online and let her know they were on the way.
A couple of days later, I received the butterfly kit in the mail.
Shit.
Apparently I hadn’t double-checked the shipping address and had sent them to myself in error. I opened the package to find a cup with 7 fuzzy baby caterpillars crawling frantically around their habitat. I couldn’t imagine boxing them back up to send on another journey through the mail, so I kept them instead. I placed a duplicate order for my aunt, this time getting the shipping address right. Within a couple of days, we both had butterflies to raise.
For the first phase of their lives as caterpillars, there was literally nothing to do but watch them grow. Every couple of days, they’d double in size. They had insatiable appetites and the daily diminishing of their food supply was just as visible as their rapid growth. As they chipped away at their food, they left behind a mess of white material which looked like cobwebs. Caterpillar poop, it turned out to be.
A week and a couple of days later, they started making their way to the top of the cup. Soon I had six caterpillars squirming around up there.
One little dude – still smaller than its peers – was still hanging out in the bottom of the cup, eating and shitting its way through its youth. I was hoping it would catch up and move to the top soon.
The following day, the six caterpillars at the top had attached themselves to the paper liner and were hanging upside down, wiggling and gyrating like they were auditioning for an adults-only Cirque du Soleil gig. The little one – which I named Runt – was still at the bottom, but now it was surrounded by a bunch of dark, round objects, each about half the size of a pencil eraser. I knew they weren’t poops, but didn’t have a clue otherwise as to what they might be.
I took to the internet, where I found out way more than I ever wanted to know about the life cycle of a butterfly.
Apparently when caterpillars are ready to pupate, they go through some changes to prepare. Before they spin themselves into chrysalids, they have to do some shedding and leave some things behind. Their skins, of course.
But those little dark objects?
Caterpillar heads.
Yes. You read that right. They pop their own motherfucking heads off.
After I stopped dry heaving, I stared at Runt. I wondered if the little guy would be joining them soon, or if it would choose a different life. Maybe it would just stay put, eating all the food that remained, repurposing the piles of shit into crafts it could sell on Etsy, strutting around wearing the decapitated heads of its peers like trophies…
It could have been a lovely, alternative caterpillar lifestyle, but Runt had a destiny to fulfill. The next day, the six caterpillars at the top were slumbering in gray chrysalids, hanging ever so delicately by a tiny little silk thread connecting them by their assholes to the paper liner.
Nature is weird like that.
It was time for me to move them to the enclosure, but I was hesitant to do so. Runt was still at the bottom of the cup. It wasn’t moving very much and I noticed it had stopped growing after the other caterpillars had moved to the top a few days prior. Back to the internet I went in search of advice for what to do with a caterpillar on a timeline behind its peers.
“Most caterpillars will become butterflies unaided,” advised a butterfly-raising website. “On rare occasions, caterpillars will fail to thrive and won’t pupate. You can discard caterpillars which do not thrive.”
Discard?
Meaning… throw away a living creature?
Oh hell no.
No fucking way. The little caterpillar was still alive and deserved a chance. I would try my best to give it one.
There would be no what ifs.
I waited one more day before moving the chrysalid-laden paper liner to the enclosure. While observing Runt for signs of life that day, I saw that it was indeed alive and had been trying – without success – to climb to the top and attach itself to the paper liner as well. Unfortunately, the caterpillar would get disrupted whenever it would bump into one of the nearby chrysalids, resulting in a swift fall back to the bottom.
After watching Runt repeat the process and fail again, it dawned on me there simply wasn’t enough room on the paper liner for seven caterpillars to pupate into butterflies. The kit had promised five butterflies; apparently the strategy for ensuring that number was for the supplier to send seven live caterpillars, expecting that one or two wouldn’t make it. Maybe it was a small miracle that six of them had been able to attach and form chrysalids.
But there simply wasn’t room for one more. Time for an alternate plan.
I moved the paper liner to the enclosure, attaching it at the top so the chrysalids remained suspended. Then I placed the cup in the bottom. Within a short while, Runt climbed out, explored its new surroundings, and made its way to the top.
Runt attempted to attach to the top of the enclosure, where it had plenty of room to do its thing. Unfortunately it dropped to the bottom again. I learned that it needed to create a small silk pad to attach itself to, but the mesh netting that the enclosure was made from wouldn’t support it. I attached a paper towel inside the top of the enclosure and waited for Runt to give it another go.
Poor little thing. It must have sustained some injuries from the falls. It must have been tired and pissed off. I couldn’t have blamed Runt for giving up, had that been the outcome.
But the little dude rallied and tried again. Runt climbed back up to the top, attached itself to the paper towel, and went for it. I watched while it wiggled, squirmed, shed pieces of its tiny little body, then started spinning itself into a chrysalid.
Whew.
Now there were seven chrysalids. Seven butterflies in progress.
There was nothing more for me to do but wait and watch.
Each day the chrysalids seemed to expand a tiny bit. The appearance was changing too, with specks of color and metallic sheen shining through the gray. Sometimes they’d vibrate ever so gently, an understated whisper of the transformation happening on the inside.
I was curious about that too – what exactly was happening to their little bodies, so I went back to that handy website I’d found.
I really wish I hadn’t.
After caterpillars seal themselves inside their chrysalids, their bodies liquify and reassort into new organs, new skin, new heads to protect their little brains.
Oh dear God.
I gagged my way through that little science lesson too, and decided I had learned as much as I needed to know about raising butterflies.
I waited patiently.
Eight days after the six caterpillars had formed their chrysalids, they began to emerge as butterflies. Suddenly I had five of them strutting around inside the enclosure, opening and closing their wings like fabulous little drag queens warming up for a big performance. Runt was still attached to the paper towel at the top, still doing the gruesome and fascinating work of reshaping its body into that of a butterfly. Six out of seven accounted for.
And at the bottom of the enclosure, one of the butterflies that had emerged stood alone. It had no wings, just black, shriveled lumps of flesh where the wings should have grown. Sometimes, even under all the right conditions, caterpillars don’t successfully complete the transition. I remembered reading about the possibility of this scenario and the instructions for how to handle it.
Discard it.
But I couldn’t.
The wingless butterfly appeared to be in perfect shape otherwise, so I named it Boeing and promised to keep it comfortable and safe for however long it would live without wings. I put a dish of paper towels soaked in sugar water in the enclosure and placed Boeing on it. The little guy knew just what to do and started slurping away.
Then the five other butterflies got in on the action, swarming the sugar-soaked paper towels. They kicked Boeing off the dish. I found the flightless butterfly on its back, wiggling its legs helplessly while its fellow butterflies went to town on the sweet stuff. Motherfuckers!
I rescued Boeing, moving it to a dish of its own with plenty of sugar water paper towels on my kitchen counter. It got right back to bingeing on carbs and seemed content with that being its mission in life. Later that day, I moved it back into the enclosure after I released the five butterflies that were ready to go. I set them free near a honeysuckle bush so they could dine out as their first adventure in their new lives.
Boeing lived another five days, which was much longer than I expected. I looked into the enclosure one morning to find the flightless butterfly on its back, having passed onto glory on a sugar high.
And hovering above the dear departed soul was Runt in the chrysalid, shaking, squirming, working its way out.
Fifteen minutes later, it had extricated itself and was standing upside down in the enclosure.
Its body looked whole. It had fully formed wings. The first time Runt spread them open, I cried.
I don’t think it hit me until that moment just how emotionally invested I was in these tiny little lives. These two little creatures I was supposed to discard, but wouldn’t.
I couldn’t. Not after the past five years of living through the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
I saw myself in them.
I saw all of us – the fragile, the injured, the disabled, the marginalized – in these two butterflies that fell by the wayside.
I refused to leave them there. They deserved to live. They deserved freedom, to be out there in the world as nature intended. Those who couldn’t make it happen on their own deserved every bit of help I could give them.
And if their bodies couldn’t sustain them, they deserved safety and comfort until their last breath.
We all deserve that.
When it was time to be released, Runt didn’t want to leave at first. I gently removed the little butterfly from the enclosure, placing it on the same honeysuckle bush where I’d released the others.
And then I was the one who didn’t want to let go.
I stayed by the bush watching Runt take its first steps on a leaf, sip a bit of nectar, spread its wings in the sunshine, and at long last, fly away. I buried Boeing’s body underneath the honeysuckle bush and said farewell to both of them.
A couple of days later, I called my aunt so we could debrief on our butterfly-raising experiences. All seven of hers had pupated without issue. All seven came out as perfect butterflies. Nothing short of a small miracle, I told her. She was lucky. Or rather, they were lucky. Their journeys had been uneventful. Everything had gone as planned. Fate had smiled upon them.
That's all there was to it, really. They just got lucky, as did five of my butterflies. They’d done nothing to earn it, nothing to deserve it.
We talked at length about Boeing and Runt. How they fell by the wayside. They’d done nothing to earn it, nothing to deserve it. They were just unlucky. They were meant to be discarded.
We talked about how little it took to change their fates. A little kindness, a little creativity, a little hope.
A not-so-little acknowledgment that their lives held meaning, and it was worth the time and effort and compassion it took to give them a chance.
We all deserve that.
Two days after I released Runt, I stepped outside to see a butterfly perched above my door. I can’t say for sure it was Runt, but it was the same kind of butterfly. I hadn’t seen that particular species before where I live. And it was small-ish like Runt, so who knows? Maybe it was.
“You’d better get going,” I said to the butterfly. “You’ve only got a couple of weeks at most, so go live your best life or something like that.”
The butterfly fluttered away.
About a month later, I saw another butterfly that looked like Runt. Same kind, small-ish. Even smaller, actually.
Then I saw another.
And another.
Apparently one or more of the butterflies I had released laid eggs nearby. Now their offspring are hanging around here in the same honeysuckle bushes where their parents started their new lives. Maybe some of them are Runt’s kids.
Wherever they came from, I’m glad they’re here. Seeing them humbles me. They remind me of the important lessons I learned while raising their elders. They bring me tremendous joy.
It’s an incredible gift, one that I’ve done nothing to earn, nothing to deserve. I guess I just got lucky.
We all should be so lucky.
You can support my work by signing up for a membership to The Guiness Pig Diaries, by sending me a tip, or buying me a coffee.
Created with ReelMaker