On Sunday, we lowered the small coffin into the earth, an ochre box of our rabbit’s ashes. Something about the ritual felt wrong. For my partner’s twenty-ninth birthday, he said he wanted finally to bury the ashes and plant an evergreen over them in our backyard. He had gotten the tree some months before that, when it was summer still, and the tree sat unplanted near the garage, branches paling brown. I know he would’ve done it earlier, but I couldn’t bear to touch the box holding what remained of my soft one.
I pulled his box back up out of the dirt. He was the first one I took care of outside myself. My woolly one, the strangest cat at the shelter, he found me in college, broke out of two cages before I declared him a house rabbit. His nose never still, ears tremendous, he showed no signs of aging eight years later, but each of those years was, for him, a decade. His eyes fluoresced with cataracts. His heart slowed when I asked for it to go on.
I imagined the box’s wood rotting in the damp soil, the ashes sealed off in the plastic bag inside. I think we wanted to keep all the ashes together, to keep him all together, but this tree would only stand guard then. I wanted it to grow from him.
Returned to roots
you scamper through soil, scattered
in gracious ground
I still love this piece. The world needs your writing. It is essential