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I just rewatched the end of a popular TV show. It was a fantastic ending, and one I enjoyed a lot when it first aired. But, as often happens, for no particular reason, I was suddenly struck by the impulse to rewatch it today and upon this second viewing it really bloomed, emotionally and metaphorically. I was struck, this time - struck and emotionally devastated - by the ending’s stark finality - something that, especially with long running TV narratives, tends to be hard to come by.
As my nose reddened and my collection of snot soiled tissues collected on the floor beside me, I recollected an unexpected memory from a long time ago - a memory I had not forgotten, so much as neglected - like a puzzle box one becomes so tired of trying to solve that its insolubility becomes a source of pain - and so you put it down in frustration on some desk or book shelf and move on with your life - maybe picking it up now and again, turning it to and fro in your hands with an air of resignation.
The memory in question concerns the tiniest baby bunny you can possibly imagine. I’ve found a picture of a small gray baby bunny and added it to this post as a rough illustration of just how terribly cute a tiny baby bunny looks - but, really, that picture does not do the beloved teensy bunny I’m thinking of any justice in terms of either the extent of its cuteness or the extent of its absolute tininess.
I don’t know how my family ended up in possession of this infinitesimal bunny rabbit. I mean, I know in purely causal terms - I can track the chain of custody of the bunny from disreputable 1990s pet store to my mother vis-a-vis some token payment. No, what I mean is that I have no idea why in the world my mother would purchase such a doomed creature.
It was, no joke, barely even bunny shaped - more like a little sphere of living, black/gray down. It had been, presumably, both the runt of its litter and ripped away from its mother far too early. When we came upon it in the store it was barely moving. Nonetheless, my siblings and I were instantly drawn to it - it was, after all, the cutest ball of gentle warm fur you could ever imagine. It emanated an aura of perfect, innocent beauty. It embodied life’s aborning potential, and engendered in everyone who laid eyes upon it a poignant mixture of affection, pity, and joyful hope.
I remember that my mother was told, explicitly, by the pet store that the bunny would almost certainly die. I remember also that she told this to the three of us - my siblings and I. Beyond that, I can’t speak to how the purchase itself went down. Presumably, us three, to varying degrees, small children assured our ostensibly more mature mother that we understood the risk and were willing to move forward anyway. Suffice it to say, howsoever it was legitimized, the bunny was ultimately purchased.
Now, DISSOLVE TO about half an hour later - setting: my childhood home - ancient, peeling, and cramped - my whole family huddled around the kitchen table staring longingly at the physical embodiment of both the word “cute” and the turn of phrase “failure to thrive.” I remember all of us watching the bunny in my mother’s cupped hands, captivated, taking turns petting it with trepidatious care, as though it were a soap bubble that might pop under even the slightest pressure.
I know my mother tried to feed the bunny, but I don’t remember how. I would guess that the correct way to feed the bunny involved a very specific formula, possibly administered by a plastic syringe, but I really have no idea. She had some thick milky concoction - I don’t know what it was or where she got it but I will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that it, and the means to administer it, were provided to her by the pet shop. In any event, I think her efforts may have been somewhat successful, at least insofar as I remember having the impression that the bunny had eaten and, as a result, I felt a little more confident as I went to sleep that night that the bunny might survive.
I believe it was the next morning when someone found it. It must have been somewhat hard to tell whether or not it had died - it was so small and its fur held so much warmth - but at some point death was confirmed and announced.
What followed was the only instance of truly open, unabashed, and shared emotional expression I can remember in the entirety of our time as a family unit. The five of us in the car, driving to my grandmother’s house, passing over the Verrazano bridge, sobbing uncontrollably. Even in the throes of enormous emotional intensity, a part of me could not help but take stock of the sheer uniqueness of that moment. Moreover, another part of me was saliently aware that we were all crying over more than just a bunny - that the bunny was a symbol of some kind, though I could not at the time, or for many years afterwards, say for what.
It was only watching the ending of the TV show today that, suddenly, 30+ years later, the bunny bloomed for me. The bunny was the perfect physical embodiment of life’s unremitting, unfeeling finality. In the bunny we saw ourselves. The bunny pronounced to each of us, child and adult, the inexorability of our march toward death. We endowed the bunny with our dreams and our dreams were irrevocably lost. The bunny was our dashed hopes and the certain promise of future dashed hopes. The death of the bunny was, in a real sense, the death of our joint innocence - and, for a moment, formlessly, we mourned that loss together.
Unfortunately, since everyone in that car was, to some degree or another, a confused child, the inflection point of the bunny’s death, with all its clarifying potential, was squandered. As a result, at least two things which ought to have been discussed and capitalized upon, were not.
The first thing was the extraordinariness and significance of this moment for us as a family - for maybe the first and only time, we were all on the same page - something earnest and real and undeniable had passed between us. For a few hours, the bunny made us into a community - its demise temporarily pierced our discomfitures and unified us. Of course, the onus was on my parents to seize the day and try to ride the momentum of the moment into a larger change in the narrative arc of our time together - but they were not, I’m afraid, up to the task and, left to my own devices, just as swiftly as I recognized the uniqueness of our familial communion right then, so to returned my ever present companions of shame and fear to ruthlessly deride my tears.
The second, and perhaps the more significant, thing was the failure to utilize a profound teachable moment - that is, having the wherewithal to discern, extract, and communicate what might be called the central lesson of the bunny - which is, in hindsight, that one can either accept life on its own terms or reject those terms and suffer needlessly.
Instead, I vaguely remember some platitudes about the bunny going to heaven - which is to say, the exact opposite lesson was taught. Fuck life’s terms - the hell with reality - it wasn’t unfeeling natural law and capricious chance which dictated the bunny’s death - it was the will of God, whose wise and omniscient plans required the bunny to die - and anyway, who says the bunny’s dead at all? In fact, you know what not only isn’t the bunny dead, but you’ll see the bunny again one day, up in the clouds! And Lucy the dog will be there! And grandpa to! The bunny and grandpa and Lucy the dog and you and me, we’ll all ride eternal, shiny and chrome, awaited in Valhalla!
The 5 stages of grief were officially coined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death And Dying. Of course, I’ve not read the book - rather, like any iconic idea the Stages of Grief have broken free of their original confines and now exist as one of the axioms of human psychology for the lay person. Those five stages are:
* Denial
* Anger
* Bargaining
* Depression
* Acceptance
I’m not sure whether Kübler-Ross intended this, but the 5 stages tend to be interpreted as some kind of fixed universal human process - that is, many people treat the bullet points above as though they were the numbers 1-5 and the stages of grief are sometimes imagined to be passed through linearly by each grieving person.
However, the consensus view in psychology seems to be more that the stages of grief are a useful heuristic - that is, they tend, in no particular order, except that acceptance comes last, to be indicative of the kinds of things grieving people feel in the course of their grief.
The death of that perfect little bunny had the potential to be a perfect little lesson. The whole family, together, had the opportunity for a practice run at grieving - at what grief looks like and feels like and, ultimately, how it is to arrive at, and abide in, acceptance.
But instead, the bunny became an object lesson in self-delusion. The bunny was used to teach us that grief stops at bargaining. That is the function of the afterlife - of any talk of heaven or fate or God’s will as it relates to our unhappinesses on Earth - to conflate acceptance with bargaining. For the religious person, there are only four stages of grief - acceptance - that is, embracing reality on its face, on its own terms - is excised completely in exchange for a simulacrum of acceptance in form of a metaphysical bargain.
This may seem harmless, and perhaps for some it is. But, for my part, I see it as a curse. Maybe the deciding factor is whether you continue to believe or not. Perhaps, in the throes of faith, the bargain pretending to be acceptance can retain its power - and perhaps that charade can carry you all the way through to the moment of your death. I know it did for my grandfather, who waited, stubbornly, to die, until a priest arrived and absolved him of a lifetime of sins.
But if, like me, you cannot swallow the lie of belief, then, in belief’s wake you’re left with the bones and none of the flesh - and the skeleton underlying and supporting the body of belief does not include accepting reality - so you search and you pine and you bargain with countless devils, within and without yourself, stuck in a dissatisfied loop, chasing your own tail, terminally confused.
Until, one day, if you’re very lucky, a bunny blooms in your mind.
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