Apollo

My husband meets me in the hallway when I wake up.

“There’s something wrong with Apollo,” he tells me, worry on his face.

“What?” I say, sleep still clouding my mind.

“There’s blood all over his pen.”

Immediately, my minds snaps awake. “Are you kidding?” I say.

“What?” my husband says. “Of course not. I wouldn’t joke about something like this.”

I know he wouldn’t but it is my last hope that everything is okay.

When I go downstairs to see our bunny who we’ve only had for three months, I know that things are definitely not okay. He doesn’t come to me when I call his name, doesn’t move from his blanket.

My children are soon awake and they give him pets before my husband takes him to the emergency vet. They are worried and scared. My daughter goes to camp with the hopes that he will be home when she gets back.

The vet calls in the afternoon. They’ve found a large tumor near his kidneys and there’s nothing they can do to save him. They will give him pain medication to keep him comfortable and will keep him until we can come and say goodbye. My son bursts into tears and runs to his room.

I clean up Apollo’s pen, snot dripping from my nose. I am surprised by this grief, startled by how sad I am to lose this new member of our family. But it makes sense. We got Apollo to help make our home feel safe and warm and full of love. And he did these things with his little nose and whiskers, his soft black fur, his willingness to be introduced to many different children. He helped make our home feel more like home in a world that increasingly feels less so. I know as I clean that we are losing this.

We let my daughter cry for a bit when she gets home, and then we all drive to the animal hospital to say goodbye. The staff are gentle and kind and immediately bring us to a private room with a low couch and some fake plants. When they bring Apollo to us, he is wearing a soft blue cone and is wrapped in a plaid blanket. He looks peaceful and calm.

I bring out a banana from my bag and his nose does his familiar rapid twitching at the smell. It is his favorite treat, one that I have given him many times at home. He always bashed into his pen to move it closer to me as soon as he smelled it. 

He manages to eat most of what we give him, but cannot chew the second treat we bring. We all get a chance to hold him, to pet his soft face, stroke his long ears. It is hard to believe that soon he will be gone.

My son wants to stay for when they put him to sleep, but my daughter does not, so I take her to the van. I sit in the back seat with her, my head almost touching the ceiling because of my son’s booster seat. She tells me it’s too hard to process what’s happening.

Soon, my husband and son return with a box with Apollo’s name and a heart written on it. We put the box between my children for the ride home. My children and I cry the entire time.

“I thought we’d have more time with him,” they say.

“We just got him.”

“It’s not fair that he had to die.”

I do not have any answers, and if I did I know they wouldn’t help. “Losing a pet is one of the saddest things in life,” I tell them, my nose stuffy.

We bury him near the ferns, opening the box and petting him one last time. The vet warned us that bunny’s eyes do not close when they die, and we see his big brown eyes one last time as we touch his soft fur. My daughter and I pick coral and blush zinnias to drop onto his box before my husband covers it with dirt.

As my husband dug, he found several white tiles and a heart-shaped rock. My children clean the tiles and rock and assemble them in a flower shape to mark his grave. Exhausted and hungry, we then go down the street for dinner and I let my children order their own pieces of chocolate cake for dessert. We watch a silly movie and my children take baths. While brushing their teeth, they look out over the backyard and say goodnight to Apollo.

That night neither of my children can fall asleep. My son wakes up as soon as my husband turns off his bedroom light so I bring him into bed with me to sleep. But he can’t sleep. He cries, his tears becoming harder and harder and I know that he cannot go to bed like this. I turn the light back on and pick some soothing books to read to him. I keep nodding off as I read, but by the final book, his eyes are closed and his breathing is slow and steady. I think of Apollo out in the cool summer night among the ferns and flowers. It was only last night that he was outside in his pen as I sold flowers to the neighbors. He ate clover and grass and let the toddler across the street pet him. Fireflies flickered as the sun went down.

There is a quiet now that my son is asleep, now that Apollo is gone. It settles over the night as I turn off the lamp, the curtains softly blowing in the breeze.