Yesterday Kenzie and I were taking a walk when a bunny hopped past us. She was thrilled to so closely see this adorable fluffy little creature. Two min later we got to the corner of our street and there it was: a freshly dead bunny lying in the grass, probably hit by a car. Kenzie understandably loses her mind. She started screaming, stomping her feet and refusing to leave it. She was completely devastated. I promised her that it was now a very happy bunny hopping around with its friends in bunny heaven. She insisted it couldn’t be true because the bunny was right there, in front of us, not happily ever after in bunny heaven. A bunny can’t get to heaven unless it’s buried and we can’t see it, she insisted. I finally convinced her to continue our walk home and hoped she would forget about the unfortunate roadkill.
Twenty four hours later she had talked about it 700 times and was still convinced that it’s not in heaven because we could still see it. So we did the obvious thing: we buried it. In our neighborhood (I’ll prob be arrested), wrapped in a piece of pink fabric.
We clumsily carried the shovel to the street corner and started digging. Kenzie didn’t speak the entire time, except for one time when she glared at me and said threateningly, “Mommy. Do NOT freak out.” She stood stoically and silently with a devastated look on her face while I struggled to dig a hole in the bone dry Florida soil. I carefully, while doing my best not to inhale that special roadkill scent, placed the bunny in it the too-shallow hole and covered it.
Kenzie stared at it for a moment and then she grabbed the shovel and carried it home on her shoulders. What does this mean? Does she need therapy? Will she speak to me again?
And then a twist. We came home and told Jay what happened and he said “Where was it? Yeah, I was the one who hit it.”