The Last Good Day — an afterword

Being in love means you are completely broken, then put back together,

The one piece that was yours….

….We are proof that the heart is a risky fuel to burn.

What's left after that's all gone, I hope to never learn.

-Jason Molina

Had I known that Sophie was going to pass away unexpectedly on a Sunday, I would not have spent a portion of the Saturday night prior, tormenting her with the sound of the broom sweeping the loose hay off of the basement steps.

Certain sounds really bother our rabbits, you see. Some sounds that you think would be a problem—a glass breaking in the kitchen, or the baby gate that keeps them from going downstairs getting knocked over and tumbling down every single step that leads to the basement—well, those sounds are not a problem at all. They don’t even seem to notice. But other sounds—like a broom brushing over carpeting—well you’d think I was running a chainsaw in the house with how upset they can become.

Sometimes I try to tidy up our home, and sweeping the hay fragments off of the steps is one of those things. I’d known that it was a sound that had bothered her, so I tried to move quickly and as quietly as I could—brushing each step’s debris on to the next until I reached the bottom landing. I would glance up occasionally, and I saw Sophie’s ears perked up in alert, her eyes growing wide, her stance letting me know she was alarmed.

Eventually she went into one of their little sleeping houses to hide until the sweeping was over. After awhile, she came back out, and a piece of cilantro seemed to settle her nerves, and I went about my business—sitting on the floor next to their designated area, listening to music, and watching my girls.

The next morning, my wife and I got up early to take them to the vet for a scheduled exam. It was supposed to be a routine procedure—one that they had been through before, actually. Rabbit’s teeth never stop growing, which is why they are constantly chewing—chewing on wooden toys, chewing on things in your home that they aren’t meant to, and eating roughage like dried grass mats and hay. Occasionally, the wearing on their teeth can become slightly uneven, and a tooth can have more of a point to it than the other, which can lead additional problems. Both Annabell and Sophie were due to have their teeth “floated,” which is a veterinary term for when the rabbit is sedated, and after a thorough examination is conducted while they are asleep, the vet will file the teeth in question down so that everything is even once again.

Sophie was notorious for having a bit of a rough time coming out of the sedation—taking longer than her sister would to “bounce back” following the procedure. Because of this, once it was finally time to begin the procedures, after over an hour of waiting at the vet’s office, they took Sophie first—she didn’t want to be picked up by the doctor, so my wife managed to scoop her up. We both gave her kisses on her face, and handed her over to the vet, thinking that we would see her in less than an hour.

Sometimes you take two rabbits to the vet, but you come home with only one of them.

It seems worth noting that Sophie was always struggling—she struggled long before we had adopted her in May of 2012, and it was through our care that she started to become healthier than she ever had, but there was always going to be underlying problems.

She was morbidly obese before she and her sister came into our care. It was through foster homes that she started to lose the weight, and it was living with us for nearly three years that she lost even more weight, and started to become the rabbit she was meant to be when provided a loving environment. She was a silly girl—one that only liked affection and attention on what we deemed “her terms.” If she didn’t want you to pat her, or bother her, she’d continue to evade you until you got the hint. Sometimes she would be accepting of pats on the head, or down the length of her body as she lay flopped out on the floor under our living room window.

A week after we adopted Annabell and Sophie, we noticed Sophie had bladder sludge—it’s a condition where her body was not processing the calcium she was receiving through the greens she was eating, and it was all ending up in her bladder, not passing in her urine, and turning into a paste that she’d eventually push out. It was something that she dealt with off and on for her whole life, having really bad days, sometimes weeks, where there was always sludge left behind in the litter pan where she had been sitting.

Towards the end of 2014, in the late fall, into the winter, Sophie started having a lot of digestive issues—the first time I thought it as isolated incident, but then it became more and more frequent, and more alarming each time I’d find the poop-related messes she was leaving. Our vet, at first, said to scale back on the amount of lettuce we were giving them to eat; then, only feed them greens once a day; and then, by December, the lettuce had been cut out completely, and save for a cilantro treat, it was a hay only diet.

Shortly after the start of the New Year, I woke up to find Sophie was not acting like herself. She was not eating as much, hiding in one of their sleeping houses, and was in obvious pain. We tried treating it as best we could without making a trek to the vet’s office (which is a good 45 minutes from our home.) But she wasn’t making any real progress, so after a few days, we decided to take her in. It was at the vet’s they found she had over a tablespoon of bladder sludge that she wasn’t passing, and they were able to force it out once they expressed her bladder—a technique you can perform that combines with gravity that makes whatever is in your bladder to come out.

We thought after a few days to recover from the discomfort of forcibly passing that sludge, she’d begin acting “normal” again. And there were days, sure—moments where she’d have a lot of energy, or that she would seem like herself again. But overall, she still kept to herself, and hid a lot in her little sleeping house. She still didn’t seem like she was eating enough, and she was having difficulty pooping. As a rabbit parent, you learn to read into how a rabbit is feeling by examining their poop. It’s just how it goes.

I knew that something wasn’t right, and I was glad that she’d be getting a thorough examination soon during the appointment for her teeth floating.

Never I did I think we’d lose her though. Not like this.

When you’re at the vet’s office, waiting around, it doesn’t behoove you to check your watch or seek out a clock. So I had no idea it was when they came to take Sophie back to the procedure room, leaving us alone with Annabell, who was not pleased with the situation of being away from her home. At one point, I realized it may have been close to lunchtime, and I was wondering if there’d be time to walk across the parking lot to grab a veggie burger from Burger King before we packed the girls back up and started heading back home.

In retrospect, thinking about myself, and eating fast food, seems incredibly selfish, and I’m actually ashamed a thought like that had crossed my mind.

I don’t know what time it was when the vet came back into the room to let us know that Sophie had passed away. My wife and I were sitting on the floor, watching Annabell pout in their travel carrier, when, through the window in the exam room door, I saw the vet coming down the hallway. We perked up, but then I saw the look of anguish on her face.

“Sad news,” were the first words out of her mouth, her eyes already shrink wrapped in tears.

I didn’t expect what followed. I expected her to say something like that they found an issue with her teeth, or that there was some other kind of problem that we’d have to address. “Sad news,” she said. “Sophie passed away.”

What occurred after she said that to us is a bit of a surreal blur—a dream that you’re not quite sure if you’re remembering correctly; an event that you’re unable to discern if it was a dream, or if it was something that actually happened. Everything slowed down quite a bit, and I remember feeling light headed. I didn’t really believe what I was hearing; I didn’t believe that this had happened.

It turns out that they never even started any procedures on Sophie. She had been sedated, and they were just about ready to begin, when someone noticed her heart rate had dropped dangerously low. They began to reverse all of the processes used to sedate her in an attempt to bring her heart rate back up and bring her out of sedation, but it didn’t work. They lost her.

Did you know that if, when you give permission for your vet to perform CRP on your animal it costs around $10 a compression? They performed eight compressions on Sophie before they gave up.

We were still in shock, grappling with this news, and we kept looking over at Annabell, hunkered down in their travel carrier. How do you explain to a rabbit that her sister is gone?

And what did we—my wife and I—do now as a family, with one less rabbit? Aside from the questions of “why” and “how,” what I was asking myself—what I still ask myself is “what are we going to do now?”

Somewhere in all of this, they asked if we wanted to see Sophie to say “goodbye,” so we proceeded to spend the next hour taking turns holding her lifeless body, swaddled in a blanket that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Her eyes were closed, her arms and legs limp. My wife kept thinking maybe it was all a mistake—maybe she was really still alive, like those people you hear about all the time who are declared dead but aren’t. But as the hour continued, her body started to stiffen slowly; she was cold. This was how it ended.

Eventually, we had to give Sophie back to them so she could be cremated. Two weeks later, we picked up what was left of her—a plastic bag full of ash in a cardboard box, which we then placed carefully into a photobox urn we ordered for her a few days after it happened.

Since our vet had, for lack of any other tactful descriptor, killed one of our girls, we made the choice to not have Annabell sedated and examined; but rather, they x-rayed her and performed a physical in another part of the clinic while we were saying our goodbyes to Sophie.

After hours had passed—we had been at the vet’s office probably five hours or so, we packed everything up and reloaded the car with one less rabbit in it, and made a long, silent, horrible drive back home.

* * *

I won’t say I started writing what eventually ended up being “We’re So Small Compared to Our Hearts” from a “better place,” but I started it in January—maybe during a time when I was slightly less anxious about Sophie’s health. Maybe it was on one of the good days when I wasn’t as worried, and could focus more.

I had originally intended for it to be my column for the April issue of the Southern Minnesota Scene magazine—which had been deemed the “pets” issue. I write the back page humor column; sometimes it’s funny, sometimes not as much.  The column itself is called “The Bearded Life,” so the working title for the piece had been “The Rabbit Life.”

I told my editor that I was deep into writing it—at the time, calling it “the long thing,” and once I presented it to him toward the end of January, he said that it was too long to run as my column (2,500 words, 70+ column inches [that’s industry jargon.]) However, he said he wanted to run it as a feature story in the issue.

Sophie passed away a week before the copy deadline for the issue, and once I worked up the nerve to talk about it with anyone in the office (he was the only one I told about this in person) he said that we had three options: we could pull the piece completely, I could spend the week rewriting it, or it could run as is.

Pulling it was not an option, and neither was rewriting it, given the state of mind I was in—and to an extent, still am in, more than four months after the fact. So it had to run as is, (coming from a better place) and it ended up in the magazine mid-March, and was online on March 22^nd, a month to the day and date that we lost her.

Whenever I write things—for this blog, for the pieces that I’ve written for the Scene, or even stories I write for the paper—I never know who is reading them.

For some reason, I just assume my mom is the only person who read anything I write with any regularity. Sometimes people stop me and tell me how much they like what I’m doing for the paper, or someone will comment on something from one of my “Bearded Life” pieces; occasionally, a specific blog piece will attract more traffic or comments—but, again, I never know who is out there and who is reading. I never write with an audience in mind. I just write.

A week after we lost Sophie, my wife posted something on Facebook about it because we still didn’t know how exactly to proceed with telling people what had happened. And for a month, it was something that I chose not to really address directly. Once the article was online, I shared the link for my article on Facebook and Twitter, expecting that only a few people would read it, and that would be the end of it.

I started to hear from people within maybe a day or two—people from all over the country, and all over the world. Others who had experienced the loss of a companion rabbit, or others who were also just “cool rabbit parents” like me; many of them were exponentially and admirably more vocal about their beliefs for animal welfare, protesting in front of Whole Foods. All of these people reached out to me online—people I’ll probably never meet in person, but I have a small window into their lives now because of a few words I wrote for a magazine in southern Minnesota.

Months later, sometimes I still see the article link being shared on various house rabbit groups and pages on Facebook—I’ll be scrolling through my newsfeed and then I will see my own face—the thumbnail photo that accompanies the link.  It’s surreal, but it’s also humbling. And that’s partly what the point of this—this afterword, or whatever this has turned into—was originally. It was a way to say thank you to everyone who has read the essay, or shared, or contacted me personally. Especially with what happened after I had written it, it is comforting to know that something I had to say touched somebody else.

* * *

Prior to losing Sophie—maybe in late November or December, I started process called EMDR, a type of therapy that had been recommended by both my therapist, as well as a psychiatrist. The whole processes is kind of difficult to explain, but dumbing it down, it’s a way to try to realign the thinking that comes out of traumatic experiences or memories that still have very raw emotion attached to them.

Part of it was to help me get through the three years of grief that followed after we lost our first rabbit, Dennis Hopper The Rabbit, because I blamed myself for losing him. But the other part of it was to get past something else that happened around a year after we had adopted Annabell and Sophie.

We were in a car accident with Sophie in the car. She was sick (we were never sure what was wrong with her this time) and we had let it go from when we first noticed it until the next morning, hoping she would get better overnight. She didn’t, and so we packed her up in the car and started heading towards the vet’s office.

We got onto the highway and it started to rain. And we hadn’t even made it 10 miles when it happened. It was pouring, and I could barely see the road. I was going at least 15 or 20 miles under the speed limit because of the weather and because we had a sick rabbit in the car. In an instant, I felt the car begin to swerve on the wet highway and I lost control. I tried to brake, I tried to correct what was happening, but in trying, I spun us backwards into the ditch.

Sophie was fine. I was fine. My wife was fine. Our car could be repaired and after a long series of escalating, tense, and unfortunate events, we were able to make it to the vet, where they found nothing discernably wrong with Sophie, and sent us back home with a prescription to give her.

But again, I blamed myself for what happened and I couldn’t get past it. I had a hard time driving on the highway afterwards, especially near the spot where it occurred.

And there were moments when I was sitting with Sophie, patting her on the head, that I would close my eyes, and I would replay the events—the moment where everything slowed down, and I realized that we were going off of the road despite the fact that at this same time, I was foolish enough to think “oh, maybe we aren’t going to go off of the road, maybe everything will be fine.” And I would see the image of my wife’s face; stricken with fear as our eyes met and we both knew what was coming when we went backwards into the ditch. I would think about all of this, and I would feel a terrible tightness in my chest, like it was happening all over again.

EMDR forces you to revisit memories you may not want to, and while you follow a light that moves back and forth and hang onto these things that send little pulses into your hands, you’re supposed to go “within the memory” and try to reassess what you associate with it.

In my case, with the fact that I blamed myself for what happened with Dennis Hopper The Rabbit, the realization I was supposed to arrive at (and eventually did) after several hundred dollars and a few sessions, was that he was loved, and he knew he was loved, and that was all that mattered; and that what happened in the end—with his abscess tooth and his passing—it wasn’t my fault.

Coming out of this form of therapy, one of the things I was supposed to do to help myself was to find some way to remember him—not grieve for him like I had been doing for three years, but to do something to honor his memory, or think about what he meant to me.

Late in the fall, before the EMDR sessions began, I started trying to write about Dennis Hopper The Rabbit—little sketches or vignettes about him, and our life with him. But it was coming out all wrong then, and it was difficult for me to focus on it for long periods of time.

Realizing that love was enough, and having a deadline for the “pets issue” of the magazine, set me on the course to reshape what I had been writing into something cohesive, and more importantly, something positive.

I won’t say that losing Sophie “set me back” per se with what I had just finally processed from the loss of our first little guy. But I won’t say that it helped matters much, overall, for me either.

The thing about depression, and anxiety, and general anhedonia, is that it turns the volume down on a lot of things—things that used to matter, matter less; things that should matter begin not to. This all started to be a bit of a problem about four years ago, and with each passing year, it’s only gotten worse.

* * *

It took a long time to get used to how quiet life with one rabbit is; and it took a long time to adjust to the fact that only one of them would come running for a treat, or that there was only one of them that needed to be corralled in a pen when we left for work.

It took a long time to realize we weren’t going to hear the little honking sounds she made when she slept.

We were worried for a number of days about Annabell—if she’d be depressed without her sister. The truth was that they were not getting along as well as they once did in the months leading up to Sophie’s passing. Annabell was more antagonistic wit her sister, and I’d often have to break up fights between the two of them. The fights used to be over food—more and more, they seemed to be over nothing at all.

Someone told us, after the fact, that Annabell may have been testing her sister; that she may have known the whole time that her health was in decline, and she was trying to get her to, in a sense, “prove” that she was ill.

After a few days, it seemed like Annabell was doing fine. And when anyone asked after her, we’d say she was doing the best out of all three of us. She still is.

You never can tell with rabbits. When she flops out, we can’t tell if she’s sleeping, or resting, or if she’s sad, and misses her sister. We wonder if we’re just projecting our own feelings onto her.

When I think about Sophie, the pain is still so unprocessed and new, I feel like something is squeezing my heart; I feel short of breath. When I put my head down on the pillow, most nights, I just want to sob and hope that sleep comes quickly so that I can have a brief respite before the sorrow beings again in the morning.

That “better place” that I was possibly in before—I don’t remember what that feels like now. It’s been replaced with an awful, paralyzing emptiness; it comes in crushing waves, making it nearly impossible at times to focus on anything—work, social interactions.

Long before we lost Sophie, occasionally, I would see something out of the corner of my eye—when I was at the kitchen sink washing the dishes, I’d be convinced that I saw a fuzzy flash run through the hallway. When I’d go to check to see where the girls were, they’d both still be in the living room. I told my therapist about this phenomenon, and she said that I might still be seeing glimpses of Dennis Hopper The Rabbit—his energy, his spirit, whatever you want to call it if you believe in that sort of thing. She said that this was common for people who lost companion animals, and that I should just go with it and see where it takes me.

It came and went, this sensation that I had seen something blur passed me; and since the loss of Sophie, it’s something that I have felt again. What is that black shadow I see out of the corner of my eye? Is it her? Or is it the tote bag hanging off of the closet doorknob?

We asked ourselves “what are we going to do now?” after we lost her. And it’s a question that we haven’t been able to answer in the months that have followed.

Is Annabell lonely without a friend of some kind? Does she want a buddy? We have no way of really knowing. Bonding two rabbits together isn’t the same as just bringing home another cat and hoping it gets a long with the cat you have, or adding another fish into an aquarium, or foolishly bringing another child into the world if you were already foolish enough to have one or more.

Some rabbits may not get along with other rabbits. Their instinct may not be to form a friendship, but to tear each other apart. You have to set up play dates to test the waters. You have to keep them in separate locations until you are certain—absolutely certain—that the bond has been formed and they can be trusted with one another.

Is Annabell even capable of getting along with another rabbit?

The idea of trying to find out, and starting all over again, is so overwhelming that it seems insurmountable.

* * *

We asked ourselves “what are we going to do now?”

I have a lot of reservations about bringing Annabell back to the vet—this vet, the place where Sophie died which was also the same place where Dennis Hopper The Rabbit died.

One of the things that losing Sophie did was open up a discussion that my wife and I hadn’t had—I stop short of saying we’d been avoiding to issue—but the issue of trust (mostly my lack there of) with our veterinarian.

In 2010, so many years ago now, when we first adopted Dennis, we started taking him to a vet that had been recommended from a list of “rabbit savvy” vets from the Companion Rabbit Society. Let’s call her Dr. B_____. Originally, we had no reason not to trust her, or her assessments of him and his health.

But then the problems started—specifically, his month long episode with the bladder stone.

The whole month that we watched him writhing in pain, I knew something was wrong with him, and she continued to disregard and write off my concerns, and misdiagnose what was wrong with him, until we forced Dr. B_______ to give him an x-ray, and that was when they found the stone.

A year later, when he was having the tooth problems that lead to his passing, I again, knew something was amiss. He was drinking less water, and something just didn’t seem right. We took him in, and that was when they discovered the abscess tooth. Dr. B_______ made it seem like it was not that serious, despite the fact that it was beyond her level of expertise and that it was something that needed to be addressed by a specialist.

The specialist, let’s call her Dr. K_______.

Dr. K______ is very busy, and the first available appointment with her for a consultation was roughly a month, or three weeks, from when Dennis first received this diagnoses of an abscess tooth.

We brought him in for that consultation, it was only then when we realized the gravity of the situation. I remember sitting on the floor in the examination room, Dr. K_____ placing her hands under his jaw, feeling around, and it finally registering just how serious this all was.

She told us he might not make it during the procedure to remove the abscess tooth—something that, up until that moment, we had never even considered being a possibility.

And she was right. He didn’t. He wasn’t strong enough.

One fragmented memory from that day—April 3^rd, 2012—that I can never shake is returning from the bathroom, back to the consultation room where we were waiting for Dennis during his procedure. I opened the door and I saw my wife, sitting on the couch, and Dr. K________, sitting next to her.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Dr. K_________ told me to sit down.

She told us that it didn’t look like he was going to make it. And that we were going to have to “make some decisions” about what to do—implying that we’d have to make the decision to put him to sleep. She eventually left us alone so we could sit in shock, wondering what we were going to do—a question that we unfortunately had to ask ourselves again, at that very same clinic, three years later.

Later, she came back in and said that Dennis had “made the decision for us,” and that he was gone.

However, this wasn’t necessarily true.

Two weeks later, we had to come retrieve his ashes, and she told us that she had lied—Dennis was already gone when she told us we’d have to make “decisions.” But that there was something about him, and his relationship with us, that prevented her from being honest with us right away, and she needed to buy herself some time.

Telling us this, two weeks later, it didn’t really change anything, and it didn’t really matter. She expected us to be mad, and I don’t think I was. I don’t think I was anything—I was still grappling with the fact that my best friend was no longer alive.

We couldn’t have been that upset with her, since two weeks after this, when adopted Annabell and Sophie, we chose to continue to see her as our vet, and take the girls there for their care.

One thing that never sat right with me, and one thing that I finally talked about with my wife, once we were going through all of this after losing Sophie, was the fact that at a certain point, I started to believe that Dr. K________ knew Dennis Hopper wasn’t going to make it, and that we went through with the procedure, at her behest, anyway.

What lead me to believe that was this—the day we brought Dennis Hopper in for his procedure, we were kept waiting for him in a consultation room—a room with couches, low lighting, refreshments, et. al. I later discovered that when an animal has to be euthanized, this is where they discuss it with the family.

When we brought Annabell and Sophie in for their first dental floating, two years prior, and when we brought Sophie in to have the weird dermal thing removed from her back—we were kept waiting in a regular examination room.

It took a while for me to put it together—that the staff at the clinic knew Dennis Hopper wasn’t going to live through his procedure. And that, they, in a sense, were going through the motions of what they thought was best for him. And even after I did put it together—what do you say? A year, two years, three years later? How do you even approach that subject, and the feeling the like the beginning of your working relationship was never even built on trust in the first place.

* * *

We met with a new vet the other day—my wife and I. Just a meeting to get to know him, and his practice, and his experience working with older rabbits.

On the drive home, we started discussing what happened with Dr. K________’s staff after Sophie passed away—like, immediately following the “sad news” that we were given.

In their defense, all of them—Dr. K_______ and her staff of technicians that we had built up a rapport with over the last three years—maybe they were in the same catatonic state of shock that we were in. But this is their job, and this is one of the dangers of the job; the loss of a patient.

After they lost her, nobody said a word to us. Dr. K_________ herself could barely look us in the eye to explain what happened. No one would come in to our examination room to assist us back out to the car when it was finally time to leave. I had to walk back into the employee’s only area and wave my arms around to get their attention through the series of doors and windows that separated me from those that were hiding deep within the catacombs of the building.

We received a sympathy card, eventually, that everyone signed. And maybe for a few days after we lost her, someone called to ask us how we were doing—but also how Annabell was doing. But then those follow-ups became less frequent; we haven’t heard from anyone at the clinic in the last three months.

But maybe that’s not their job—to care that much. To check in long after they’ve moved on. It wasn’t a member of their family that died that day. They aren’t our friends, after all. Just people we were paying to care for our rabbits.

There was the matter of picking up Sophie’s remains—on a Saturday morning; we drove up to retrieve them. They were just handed to us at the front counter of the clinic, unceremoniously.

There was the matter of paying the bill for all of this—the clinic makes a big deal about not talking about money immediately following the loss of a patient. We learned this with Dennis Hopper. We ended up paying the bill for his botched surgery and subsequent cremation after we went to get his ashes.

When we went to collect Sophie’s ashes, I asked about our bill. The person working at the front desk stared at the information on her computer screen with a quizzical look, saying she’d have to ask the doctors, and that someone would be in touch.

A week passed. We hadn’t heard. My wife started to get impatient—wondering how much we owed for all of this. She didn’t like having this mysterious dollar amount hanging over our head for weeks and weeks. I started to feel naïve enough that maybe they weren’t going to charge us—that maybe, in this situation, they’d say that this one was on them.

After about a month, and multiple reminders to various staff members, we eventually found out how much we owed. I instantly felt dumb for believing that they could absorb the expense. My wife called in a payment of the phone, and they emailed a receipt. That was the last time we talked to anyone who works there.

* * *

Sometimes I hear the name “Sophie” in public—a mother calling her daughter through a store—and I can feel a tightness in my chest. Sometimes when I am sitting with Annabell, patting her on the head, I think about how much time has passed, and how surreal it still feels that her sister is gone; yet, how this is what our lives our now. This is what we are used to, somehow.

We have photo collages of her frames and in the living room. We have a book of photos that a family member put together and mailed to us. We have the memories—the funny things she used to do, like the time she bonked me on the glasses with her face after had finished eating her dinner, leaving a big, wet nose and mouth spot on the lens of my glasses; the time she used the ramp we bought them and almost went onto the couch; the times she’d jump straight up into the air without needing any momentum to do so.

We still ask ourselves, “What are we going to do now?”

It’s a question that we don’t have an answer to.

The debilitating emptiness has yet to give way to something else.

Occasionally, when we’re discussing the mortality of companion rabbits, my wife reminds me that this—the grief over a loss—it’s part of the deal. The second you take them into your home, and open your heart, you open yourself up to getting your heartbroken.

The heart is a risky fuel to burn.