Year of the Rabbit by Alida Miranda-Wolff

Fergus’s stiff body lay prone on the vinyl floor of our bunny room. I had strewn chickweed and wildflowers around him, taking care to choose edible varieties for the two rabbits who survived him. The three of us were sitting shiva together, Penelope and Cassie enacting their sacred funerary rites while I thought about the room we were all grieving in.

We lay on the floor of the bunny room, a room that was one of just three non-negotiables my husband and I set when buying our first home. In fact, in an email to our realtor from May 15, 2020, I wrote of a beautiful house in our price range: “What was missing: We have three rabbits, and we need a home that has a dedicated space for them. In the Maplewood Ave home, they had two enclosed sunrooms that were bunny-proof, which is a must-have.” We found the house with the bunny room, green space, and three bedrooms in October 2020. And now, in May of 2021, I was gently petting the corpse of the animal I loved most in the world. My best friend. My soulmate. My reason for even wanting a house to begin with.

***

It’s not lost on me that as the COVID-19 pandemic was felling millions of people worldwide, I was learning to grieve after losing a rabbit to a respiratory virus. My pet parenthood story is so like the millions of Americans who—when faced with the incredible stress, shock, and anxiety of 2020’s mix of contagion, quarantine, civil unrest, and economic collapse—turned to animal shelters, pet stores, and independent breeders for a source of security. Perhaps the only major difference is the animals I chose to bring home.

Penelope started me on the journey to house rabbit care.  On a new medication for mold allergies, which had worsened because of almost two months enclosed in my mold-filled condo during quarantine, I started having vibrant lucid dreams. In one of these dreams, I was driving in the passenger seat of my mom’s car when my eyes locked on an animal behind a glass storefront window. She was a white rabbit with a dark brown ring around her glowing eye. In the dream, I said she was the most beautiful rabbit I had ever seen.

Two days later, my husband, mom, and I took a long drive from downtown Chicago to Evanston, known as the home of Northwestern University, tony neighborhoods, and the first attempt at city-wide reparations in the United States. Exploring the downtown by car and glumly noting that no stores were accepting patrons of any kind, I saw her: a white rabbit in a pet shop window with a dark circle ringing her languid eye. The door to the store was open. Its specialty food and supplies for exotic animals earned it the all-too-rare status as “essential.” I knew almost immediately that Penelope, as she was already named mere moments upon seeing her up close, was coming home with us. I didn’t know that we would also be bringing home her litter mate, Cassiopeia, in the same hay-lined cardboard box.

We fell in love with these rabbits on the car ride home. They did not love us back. At best, they were indifferent, with an almost obsessive focus on destroying our condo. One of their projects was chewing bunny-sized holes into our mattress box spring so they could crawl inside and skitter, preferably when we were sleeping. In the middle of the night, my husband and I would have to climb off, prop the mattress on its side just enough to force them into a reachable corner, and then pry each rabbit out as they kicked and quaked.

“The girls,” despite being fully litter-trained, peed in every corner of the condo. This was how we learned that rabbit urine is corrosive and will strip paint off of walls and bore holes into wood floors. They loved eating: my yoga mat, any and all cords, baseboards, upholstered furniture, house plants, Amazon packages, blankets, and priceless wooden antiques. Naturally, we adopted another rabbit.

***

The problem with pet stores is that they trigger your compulsive consumerism. We went back to the pet store looking for supplies and found instead a front enclosure filled with rabbits of all breeds: Lion’s Mane, Netherland Dwarf, Holland Lop, and French Lop. If you have never seen a French Lop playing with other rabbits, you cannot possibly understand the cognitive dissonance of seeing a bunny pile of tiny three-pound kits—baby rabbits—and a straight-up buffalo. Fergus was not pretty. He was giant, attention-grabbing, and friendly.

My husband did not want another rabbit. As if hearing Isaac’s resistance from across the enclosure, Fergus hopped toward him with his soft, earnest face and floppy ears and started to nudge his hand. Fergus — his fur matted with wood shavings, hay, and pellets —unselfconsciously asked to be petted. Isaac had already sworn that when we finally adopted a cat, it would not be long-haired because of his personal revulsion of knotted fur. And yet, Isaac was already picking out knots in this giant mountain of a rabbit’s coat, almost automatically. We both agreed it would be reasonable to bring Fergus home.

***

Rabbits are weird. They are prey animals, which means they’re skittish and easily frightened, always wondering if you are about to catch and eat them. Still, they are the third most popular pet in the U.S., especially favored by small children who should not be allowed to care for creatures who are, without exaggeration, more fragile than glass. In addition to being popular pets, rabbits are also kept for their fur and meat. If you become a person who surfs the house rabbit forums like me, you’ll notice that some threads about sick rabbits devolve into how-to guides on how to kill, skin, and eat your rabbit. When entering an exotic animal emergency clinic, as I have done many times, packets on why rabbits should never be purchased as an Easter gift also include lists of life-threatening foods like avocados, chocolate, and houseplants. Some of these lists are twelve items long; some are over a hundred.

What these packets don’t say, never say, is that your rabbit is spry, clever, and living its life with the reckless abandon of a creature whose only survival strategy is procreation. In other words, the minute you set down your morning plate of avocado toast, a rabbit — in this case, Fergus — will appear out of nowhere and eat the whole thing. Or, despite a lack of opposable thumbs, they will, like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, learn to unlatch your baby gate and decimate your lovingly tended collection of monsteras and sansevierias.

The list of things that won’t kill rabbits is significantly shorter than the list that will. If you don’t neuter or spay your rabbit, they’ll die of various reproductive organ cancers. Suppose you don’t carefully monitor the proportion of timothy hay, pellets of compressed timothy hay, and greens they consume. They will die of gastrointestinal-related distress in about twenty-four hours. If you leave them unsupervised in your yard, they might poison themselves by eating some unknown weed. If exposed to the wrong bacteria, they will likely develop an infection and die. If they go too many hours without eating, their teeth will grow through their gums and the top of their mouths, which, naturally, can also lead to death. Thumbing through Karen Patry’s practical, no-nonsense The Rabbit Raising Problem-Solver, I learned: if a rabbit vomits, farts, sneezes, or makes any sort of noise, they are not long for this world. And, of course, these lists don’t even include the rabbit-specific diseases that won’t just kill your rabbit but decimate entire rabbit populations.

When I was growing up, one of my favorite songs was “Myxomatosis,” a Radiohead song about a real genetically engineered disease meant to curb rabbit overpopulation in Australia by making rabbits’ heads fall off. Susan Orlean’s in-depth 2020 New Yorker essay about the rabbit-specific pandemic of rabbit hemorrhagic disease (RHD), makes the case that even while being an absolutely devastating disease, RHD is just another in a long line of population destroying viruses, infections, and outbreaks afflicting rabbits.

***

Unlike many people, my husband included, I did not grow up with rabbits. I lived in a strictly cat-only household. We knew how to take care of cats, we liked how they looked and acted, and perhaps best of all, they required very little in the way of upkeep. That’s why convincing my mom to let me have a slider turtle at six turned out to be such a victory. For whatever reason, she gave in, and I named the turtle Lenny Kravitz and watched him swim in his tank with removed fascination. One day, I noticed he seemed off; he had completely stopped moving for several hours. Before school, my mom and I went to the pet store, where we showed the clerk the turtle, who prescribed a bag of crickets. Despite being grossed out, we dutifully followed the instructions. I was met with grim news when I returned from school later that day. “Ali,” my mom started, “I have something to tell you. The crickets ate your turtle alive. I took out a shovel and buried him in the backyard. From now on, just be happy with the cats.”

Given my history with non-cat pets and new knowledge of rabbit fragility, when I noticed Fergus sneezing and sniffling just one day after coming home, I knew to panic. I called the only exotic animal hospital specializing in rabbits within a 15-mile radius and learned he needed to be brought into urgent care immediately. He was diagnosed with “Snuffles” one of the leading killers of house rabbits. This bacterial infection is either caused by Pasteurella multocida (generally fatal) or Bordatella (survivable if caught early enough).

How much can one person grieve over an animal they’ve had for only one day? It turns out quite a bit, especially if confined during an era of intense human suffering and death. I fell apart.

It didn’t help that this rabbit was an absolute charmer, who lapped up his bubblegum-flavored medicine with enthusiasm, slipped and slid all over the wood floors because of his over-fluffy paws, and zoomed into our laps and onto the bed with the same earnest good humor of a new puppy. For the next six weeks, we administered medicine to Fergus twice daily, took him to weekly veterinary appointments, and generally braced ourselves for the worst. After the medicine had run its course, the vet shared the news — Fergus’s test results showed improvement. He was going to make it! In my mind, he became “the rabbit who lived.” I let myself become fully attached.

***

As time passed, Fergus and I became inseparable. With no in-person contact outside of my time with Isaac and my mom, and two other rabbits who were either coldly unmoved by my presence or openly hostile, there were few people to cling to for emotional support. Fergus was a living, breathing lint roller with a propensity to pee on the floor and then splay out in the puddles. But this only endeared him more to me. His actual care was so total that I hardly had time to worry about anything else.

It’s an understatement to say a lot was happening. By the end of 2020, more than 350,000 people would die of COVID in the U.S. The economy took a nosedive, with unemployment spiking at the same time my husband, after ten years in school, was finally getting ready to graduate with his PhD I had started my own consulting firm just two years before, and because of its unexpected growth in 2019, had hired a small team, one I was now struggling to pay. In fact, my “number two” employee offered not once, but twice, to quit or be furloughed if it meant I could pay his colleague’s salary — she had three kids, and she needed the health insurance. In this context, giving Fergus a butt bath was a welcome reprieve from the challenges of everyday life.

When I clocked twelve-hour days at my laptop, he sat at my feet or climbed in my chair with me, gently clicking his teeth together in the rabbit form of purring. Over time, when I’d call his name excitedly, he’d come throttling towards me, ready to put his face up next to mine. If I snacked on baby carrots, it’d only be a few moments before he’d come barreling over, snapping part of it out of my mouth. Lady and the Tramp for the quarantine era.

I started thinking maybe Fergus wasn’t a rabbit at all, but some other kind of life form. He wasn’t afraid of people but welcomed them with an unselfconscious curiosity and joy. After all, the next stranger might have a blueberry or a radish. When I cried, which was often, he was quicker to respond than any human partner I’d ever had. With his shining eye turned to face me, he’d look up at me as if to say, “I know. I’m here for you.”

The idea that he wasn’t a rabbit, or that he was in fact, more than a rabbit, only gained in traction as time passed. At his neuter appointment, I received a concerned voice message from the veterinarian: “Dr. Byron here. We went to do the neuter… and, well, are we sure Fergus is a male? We can’t find any male reproductive parts.” By the time I called back, the vet had responded with even more confounding news, “Fergus, he — well, maybe we should be using ‘they’ pronouns — doesn’t have any reproductive parts, male or female. We cut him open and removed all of his organs, and we found nothing. So, we’ve sewn him back up. It also doesn’t look like he had any procedure beforehand.” Fergus recovered within a day, much sooner than the two-week standard, and went on with his life as if nothing had transpired.

Over time, Fergus’s cheerfulness and fearlessness around humans started to influence Cassie and Penelope. The three formed a unit, strengthened by the semi-trauma of a move from the condo to a new house. He was sixteen pounds at this point, and when they were with him, they seemed safe enough to sniff, climb, and nudge Isaac and me.

The strength of our bond hit its zenith one spring day when I opted to take him into our garden, the first I’d ever had in my adult life. Blooming with peonies and asters, replete with mountain mint and native Midwestern herbs, it was an idyllic place to take a hungry rabbit. He gorged on greens while I felt the cool air press up against my face and took in the glow of sunlight streaming over us both. I wrote on my Instagram later that evening that it was the best day of my life. Four days later, he was dead.

***

We’ll never know what it was that caused Fergus’s death. A late-night rush to the animal emergency room when we noticed he was rejecting food wasn’t fast enough to save him. I listened to him die over the phone the next morning when they called for my permission to resuscitate him. The veterinary technician brightened and exclaimed, “It’s working! It’s working! He’s coming to,” before taking a long pause and then admitting he was wrong. Fergus was “gone.” The tech asked if we wanted to incinerate Fergus’s body for $69.

***

Rabbits require special funerary rituals to process loss, so cremation was out of the question. Fergus wasn’t an only rabbit. If a rabbit is taken away from its bonded mate or the other members of its colony, those left behind will always be waiting for a return. They will engage in relatively benign activities, like watching the door or searching the room, and more dangerous ones, like over or under-grooming, starving themselves or becoming catatonic.

However, if the living rabbits see the body, they will react differently. For two to three hours, they will groom the deceased rabbit, and take turns sitting on the body and jumping and dancing over it. They might bring items to the body, such as hay or plants. When they finally stop paying attention to the body, it is an indication they have accepted their fellow rabbit’s passing, and the body can be removed and buried.

Isaac held that while he knew the girls needed time with Fergus’s body, he did not. The ritual was macabre; what made our rabbit our rabbit was gone, and it was painful seeing Fergus that way, inert and lifeless. For me, though, I needed something more than another surreal erasure. In my life, I’d already experienced loss, but it had never felt tangible. Both of my grandparents died, one year apart, and I learned the news each time while sitting in my office, working. I hadn’t seen either of them in years, and neither had funerals. Years before, a college friend disappeared, and I spent days putting up fliers and searching for him before the news arrived that he had drowned in a storm. His parents arranged beautiful services, but it wasn’t enough to process that I saw him one day, and he vanished into distant memory the next. For all my losses, the story was the same as with that first slider turtle: they were there, and then they weren’t. That was all.

With Fergus, I had a chance at something different. I went out to the back garden and collected wildflowers and herbs. With Isaac’s help, I removed Fergus’s body from the box he was sent home in, and gently laid him in the center of the bunny room floor. Carefully, I arranged the plants around him in a kind of full body halo. I scooted backwards to give Penelope and Cassie room, and I watched as they reacted.

First, Cassie kicked and nipped and pushed him as if to say, “wake up.” Penelope hopped around him, nudging different parts of him and waiting for some kind of response. As the minutes ticked by, Cassie sat on top of him, loafed with her paws tucked under her and her chin resting on his ear. Then, suddenly, she began grooming his eyes, his inner ears, and the top of his head. Penelope joined her, both taking breaks to lightly nibble the herbs around him. This went on for almost two hours before the two began taking giant leaps over him, balletic and delicate, twin dancers forming a kind of kinetic yin and yang symbol together in the air. Finally, the two jumped away and began eating hay. That was it; they were done.

Only then did I crawl on my hands and knees, feeling the slightly rough surface of the floor against my palms. I neatened the wildflowers and herbs and started to gently stroke him, from the bridge of his nose to the tip of his tail. I told him how much I loved him. I thanked him for being there when I needed an anchor most. I recognized him for the blessing he was. And for the first time in my life, I let myself burn with a pure and wrenching grief that thrummed through me like the corroded strings of a neglected guitar. It was the hurt I had needed all along.