What is "it" exactly? Well, we'll get to that later.
First, let's talk about how the rabbit died.
When I was a teenager, we adopted a rabbit. Domesticated rabbits have a life span that can rival a dog, so while we grew up and went to college, Buns the Rabbit lived on.
Yes. We named him Buns. We named the gerbils Crockett and Tubbs. We named the twin cats Stripe and Gizmo. After that, our creativity was spent.
Twin cats? Blog for another day.
I finished my bachelor's degree, but I stayed on at home while I paid for graduate school. In the mornings, when I would roll in from night shift, I could hear my mom talking to Buns while she ironed her work clothes. She would bring him a carrot, sometimes milk for a treat. My sister and I were busy with school. My brother was off in the Army. My mom is a mom and moms need kids. Buns was her surrogate kid, her morning buddy.
Sadly, it was during this time that Buns grew terminally ill. Any time with my blog will tell you that my mom does not go down without a fight. Buns had an intestinal obstruction. My mom employed every treatment possible. There was medication. Daily treats of milk which, now that he was dying, we discovered facilitates, um, rabbit pellets. My mom inspected Buns' litter daily for signs the obstruction had passed.
It was all for naught.
One night, after I had finished an evening shift - eleven at night - I sat up studying for a statistics test. I am atrocious at math and as one o'clock in the morning rolled around, I was getting no better. It is difficult to be bad at something when you are an ardent perfectionist. We perfectionists are bad at nothing.
I just wish my stats professor agreed with me.
I was considering an appeal to God to eradicate all math when there was a knock at my bedroom door. There, on the other side, stood my mom, cradling Buns and weeping. The only thing sadder at that moment was my mathematical abilities.
Shortly before Buns got sick, my mom's diabetic friend had euthanized her pet cat with her own insulin. It wasn't pretty.
My mom had come to me because it was time to euthanize Buns. Naturally, my mom thought she would have more success euthanizing Buns with some of our cat's crushed Valium, mixed with water and drawn into a syringe. But she didn't think she had the emotional fortitude to inject him.
I have two things to say here. One, yes, we had Valium for my cat. You know I will also tell you that story someday, and yes, it was Valium for one of the twin cats. Two, I was not injecting that rabbit with crushed feline Valium. Under any circumstance. Even if God did eradicate all math.
How about, I said, we call the vet?
We were directed to a 24 hour emergency veterinary hospital, someplace we'd never been.
As it turns out, 24 hour emergency veterinary hospitals are not very easy to locate at two o'clock in the morning. At two in the morning, 24 hour vet hospitals exist on some alternate plane, like Middle Earth or Tron. For over an hour we drove around, me desperately looking for anything that would indicate we were close, my mom engaged in some kind of end-of-life careless whispers with Buns.
In the days before GPS, my options were limited. The donut shop off the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a terrifying prospect to seek directions, but, like Obi Wan Kenobi, it was my only hope. The truckers probably thought they were hallucinating when a twentysomething ponytailed me, still in scrubs, bounced in looking for an emergency vet in the dead of night.
I wish I could tell you my mom followed me in, still holding the rabbit, like a demented version of the Log Lady. She didn't, but what I can tell you is that if I had gone into that donut shop under different circumstances - say, after the bar or club closed - my parents would have slaughtered me. Apparently, serial killers don't stalk twentysomething ponytailed nurses when they are euthanizing a rabbit, only when they're returning from club hopping with unsavory boys.
We finally located the vet. Buns was injected. He passed. We brought him home.
In my house - not my house now, my house then - our tradition was to place our dead animals in a pillowcase and bury them in the yard.
Someday, a nice family will buy my parents' house. They'll decide to put in a pool for the kids. And when the digging starts, they will find bones scattered through the yard, concealed in a variety of pillowcases.
One of the pillowcases features the gigantic head of a black and white cat with a red lipstick kiss on his cheek.
So, tacky pillowcases.
I like the way I do it. Everybody gets cremated and stashed in the bar.
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| Valium worked. |
Now on to what I should have seen coming when the rabbit died.
Lightning began to spiral the drain two weeks ago. It was so very clear that death was close and inevitable.
Quick aside here. I got to thinking. What if my mom had died five months ago? What state would my dad have been left in with his two favorite mammals gone?
So I asked my dad. You can only save one. Mom or Lightning. Whom do you choose?
He hasn't answered.
Soon, things didn't look good for Lightning. Our vet said Lightning probably wouldn't live through the night. I texted my mom, told her I was sorry and that my dad didn't have to dig the hole. Husband would come do it.
Husband dug a hole for my parents' cat before. Once, while my dad was in Scotland, my parents' cat, Molly, died. The cat was frozen until my dad could come home and bury her.
My mom couldn't bear the thought of her cat spending two weeks in a freezer. You know, I don't know what freezer that cat was in, but I never eat anything at my parents' house unless I brought it or bought it.
My mom pleaded with me. Couldn't Husband come bury Molly?
Husband agreed, although I'm still not sure why. I was about eight months pregnant, so he definitely wasn't getting lucky anytime soon for his efforts.
My mom and Husband tried to remove the frozen cat from plastic wrapped tight around her body, like a Popsicle wrapper.
You know, to put her in the pillowcase.
While they struggled, the plastic unraveled and the frozen cat came crashing down on the glass tabletop of the patio furniture.
Nothing broke except the tension.
As Husband dug, he and I acted out the scene from Goodfellas where Billy Batts gets buried. Which totally freaked out my mom. She's never seen Goodfellas.
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| Aww...twins! |
So Lightning is dying and Husband is on call for burial duty.
To be continued....
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