...Say Goodbye to Mason

I went downstairs this morning and Mason, our pet rabbit of ten years, was dying.

He was old – ten years is a long life for a rabbit - and he had recently gone blind, suffered weight loss, and had a surgery to remove a cyst on his leg. But, despite all that, he was happy and ate all the time and didn’t show the worst health signs a rabbit can (gastro distress). He wasn’t in pain.

Mason was a brown lop-eared rabbit with soft wide eyes. Nancy – my wife now, girlfriend at the time – and I adopted him and named him after George Mason University, where we had met years earlier as undergrads. She lived in a studio apartment back then, and Mason quickly made himself at home. We didn’t know a lot about rabbits…for example, I didn’t know that they played with toys. Mason would pick up a rattle and swing it up and down, usually at five in the morning, which irritated me and cracked Nancy up. He was also very picky about the setup of his pen. He preferred his litter box directly in front of the door, and would drag it over, which irritated Nancy (who wanted it and its layer of rabbit poop tastefully hidden in the corner). He would grab the edge of it with his teeth and drag it over, then stomp in annoyance.

Rabbits aren’t solitary, so we got him a little girl rabbit named Abby, and Mason deeply loved Abby. She would hop out of their pen while Mason was eating and hide in Nancy’s closet, and then Mason would run to the door and hurriedly look around until he found her. Abby only lived a year due to sickness, but we matched him up with another rabbit named Emma, who is nine years old and still with us - Emma won’t be matched, because it distresses a senior rabbit to add another to their environment (but she’ll get lots of attention from us).

So Mason liked the ladies, but the one he liked best was Nancy. Mason and Emma actually had their own room (Nancy and I over-spoil our animals, we know), a spare bedroom we don’t use next to our den. Nancy and I watch TV in the den and, every night at 10:00, for almost all of his life, Mason would hop to the baby gate that sealed their door and wait for Nancy to pet him. And she would patiently sit with him for hours, stroking his coat or playing with his ears. He would lie there, contentedly, while we watched TV.

Mason traced the course of the beginning of my relationship with Nancy. Even if he wasn’t there, he was in our lives – when we got engaged in Baltimore, married in Bermuda, visited Venice, went through a brief and somewhat-embarrassing bed and breakfast phase…wherever we went, we always returned home to Mason, and he always hopped to the baby gate to wait for Nancy at 10 every night.

This morning, I went downstairs and Mason tried but couldn’t move. Nancy and I stayed with him and held him as he died.

I know some people don’t have empathy for pets, particularly a pet that’s not a cat or dog. I’m a softie for animals, but I get that. I didn’t know rabbits were little bundles of personality until I had one. I didn’t know how loyal they were, or sweet, or that they played games or hopped over to see you. I didn’t know they would sneak over to you and take a bite out of your food when you weren’t looking, or hop onto the bed of your studio apartment and wake you up, or lick your hand to show you affection, or do crazy little pivots when they ran and wanted to have fun, or slept cuddled next to their partners, or carried a bag of treats while they ran madly around their room…

It doesn’t really seem fair that you can save an animal’s life, rescue it and care for it and give it a much better life than it would have had elsewhere and, no matter what, death comes. Death is always there at the end, and there’s hopelessness in that. But if you give in to that hopelessness, then death wins.

But I’m not sad.

I honestly can’t think of that little clown without smiling. Death loses; it can’t take that away. We live when we remember. Even if he isn’t with us, he’s in our lives.

I love you, Mase. Rest in peace.