Thread: As you enjoy this pic of #Eddiethetortoise pruning a rose, I want to tell you part of his story that I feel needs more context. After my original (pinned) tweet, many of you, rightfully, expressed sadness and/or anger about the neglect he suffered. And yes--

--Eddie did suffer. Nearly died, in fact. But there's more to the story than blame. When we moved into our house years ago, we learned that our next-door neighbors had a tortoise named Fast Eddie. The couple--

--was nice, and the wife especially was a self-described animal lover. She was also someone who, perhaps, felt that love more strongly than most. Maybe even obsessively. I remember the first time we met, she took a photo of--

--a cat out of her wallet, a pet that had died a few years before. The cat had died on Thanksgiving, and since that year, she had stopped celebrating the holiday. Anyway, she loved Eddie. She had found him in the street a few years earlier and rescued--

--him. (He had, we later learned, escaped from another neighbor's yard.) She doted on Eddie and worried about him constantly: was he eating enough, was he getting enough sun, etc. She checked on him all day long; we'd hear the door to their backyard open and--

--shut constantly, often more than once an hour. I think in hindsight that our neighbor had anxiety issues. Still, for a long time, if she did suffer from anxiety, it only resulted in more care for Eddie, not less. But that eventually changed. At some point--

--the couple split up, and he moved out, leaving just our animal-loving neighbor and her cats and Eddie. But that began a spiral. We stopped seeing her as much. In years past--

--theirs was the first house our kids stopped at for Halloween. But now, no one came to the door. The house was quiet all day, but not at night -- she began practicing on a drum kit, well after midnight, the frantic drumbeats like a syncopated symptom of--

--her addiction. Soon there were police cars stopping by to talk with her or the people sometimes hanging around her house. She was arrested, once that we know of. Then one evening, she came to our door. She looked shockingly gaunt. She said that--

--she needed to borrow $20 for “car repair,” because “the ATM was out of cash.” It was after eight at night. She looked desperate and nervous. I gave her a twenty, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing why, but feeling so terribly sad to see this person whom I’d known--

--for over a decade standing in front of me, almost unrecognizable. But of course this wasn’t sustainable. One day the drumming stopped – because she was no longer there. And soon after, her now ex-husband came to our door, holding the cardboard box with--

--Eddie inside. He explained the house was finally being sold. He said his ex-wife had been in jail and was going somewhere else to live, I assume some kind of rehab or halfway facility. He was now emptying the house, which--

--was, I’m sure, an awful task for him, both physically and emotionally. It was during this cleanup that he found Eddie. As he showed him to me, he looked stricken and embarrassed, but he knew we had another tortoise and hoped we’d be able to help. He said--

--that we must know bad things had gotten for his ex, for her to have neglected Eddie, whom she had once loved so much. It was awful and sad. I told him I was sorry, and assured him that of course, we’d happily take Eddie. And then--

--he left. Now it’s fifteen-plus years later. I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t know if she is in recovery or using. I don’t know if she is in prison or free. I don’t know if she is alive or dead. But I do know that I feel no anger at her. As I originally wrote, when--

--her ex-husband gave us Eddie, he felt like an empty husk. Hollowed out. But addiction had hollowed her out, too. And while Eddie’s story has a happy ending, I’m not confident that the same is true for our former neighbor, the woman who cared for Eddie for so long. That’s why--

--Eddie is more to me than a fascinating animal and a symbol of resilience and strength. He is a also reminder to me that I don’t always know the whole story. That I need to judge less. And--

--that suffering overcome does not mean suffering understood… nor suffering ended.