Rabbit Funeral

This past week a rabbit died. The body was thrown into the middle of the street, and run over by cars. My mother showed it to me, and asked me if I thought we should call someone to pick it up. It's intestines and muscles were torn, half flattened. Red oozing internal organs smushed into the grey concrete road.

A day passed, and the rabbit's body seemed to disappear. Today when I was walking home from the store, I saw it lying where the edge of the road meets the sidewalk a little down from my house.

I put on gloves and put it on some brown paper. I covered its body with flowers, leaves, and grass that I had picked from my garden. The body was flattened and broken. No blood, guts and gore. It's fur was soft and warm. Only fur and bones left. I could feel this through the gloves, and it made me incredible sad.

I tied string to keep the paper together. My hands started shaking, and I realized I am not good with dead things. I was very sad, yet I realized this is what I had to do. This animal did not deserve to decompose on the side of the road.

I was going to give the rabbit a name, but I realized that rabbits don't have names. Not ones that humans have. It was not a pet rabbit, and I didn't want to give it an identity. I just wanted it to be the rabbit that died and deserved to be buried.

The next thing I did was sit down on the plastic lawn chairs in the backyard, and sit the coffin across from me on another plastic chair. I felt like there had to be some sort of ceremony. I was burying this previously living thing, and I didn't want to just shove it in a hole. I thought back to church ceremonies I had been to, and I realized the only part that I ever liked was the singing. People don't sing in public enough in large groups.

So I sung to the rabbit. I sang Regina Spektor's On the Radio, Fleet Foxes Tiger Mountain Peasant song, Kimya Dawson's Loose Lips, and finally Reconstruction Site by the Weakerthans. This might seem silly, but it was an important and necessary moment. I am sure the rabbit would not have cared if I sang to it, but they were someone that affected me deeply in the past week, so I had to let them know.

I had to wash my hands, get my bag, and the shovel, so I let my ipod play Regina Spektor out of its speakers while I went inside. I didn't want them to feel alone when I wasn't there. I started walking down the street with the coffin in a blue reusable bag. I walked to the trail where I knew other rabbits would live. I found a shady spot near a tree, and began to dig a small hole.

People started walking by. Guys in white undershirts with backwards hats on their bikes, a little girl and her mother, two university looking guys riding bikes. Every one of them looked back at me, but even if I had tried to explain what I was doing, they wouldn't have seen the importance of it. I was going to just put the paper coffin in the hole, but then I realized that if I were a rabbit, I would want to be buried in dirt not brown paper.

I lifted the body out of the coffin after I had snipped the thread and unfolded the paper. I laid the rabbit gently in the hole, and covered the body with fresh wildflowers and grasses I had picked on the way up the trail. I took a moment, and paused before I covered the body with dirt. I placed one wildflower bunch on top of the fresh hole.

After this I was very sad, yet I wanted to stay with the rabbit for a little while longer. I sat on a log just across from the grave. I took the book that I had in my bag and decided that I would read a small passage out loud from it. I brought it with me because it always makes me feel better. I read the last 8 pages of The Little Prince. It was the passage about the stars, and how bodies are really just empty shells. I realized that the rabbit was gone, and I had only buried the empty shell. It made me feel better to think that somewhere out there this rabbit was hopping along with all the other rabbits, and it had merely left behind the body.

I don't know if anyone will understand this. I felt very strange doing this today, but it felt important, and it felt like I was supposed to do it. I walked around the trails afterwards for two and a half hours and thought. Thought about the rabbit, how bodies are really shells for people to slot into. Though about people, books, and mosquitoes. I documented moments.