Zeus and the Practice of Loss

Last week my wife came up to me after she arrived home from work.

“Zeus has left us.”

Zeus was one of my daughter’s rabbits. She has had a procession of rabbits in her life since she was about six years old. A friend had given our daughter a female Rex and sometime later we decided to get a male rabbit (neutered) for bunny companionship. Thus began a series of male/female companion rabbits that have spanned the years. The older female died, then she was replaced with a younger female. Later the male died and was also replaced. This rabbit pair has had many overlapping incarnations since that first root couple in the years-ago past.

Every death has been met with its own grief, an ongoing practice of loss. Loss is a difficult thing to understand, especially for a child. Ching Man Ching in his treatise on T'ai Chi Chuan counsels, "Learn to invest in loss. Who is willing to do this? To invest in loss is to permit others to attack while you don't use even the slightest force to defend yourself. On the contrary, you lead the opponent's force away so that it is useless. Then when you counter, any opponent will be thrown out a great distance." In my daughter’s practice of loss with her pets, she has loved, lost, grieved, loved again. She is a strong and resilient young adult for her learned practice of loss.

I dug a hole in the backyard beneath a Japanese maple where we could bury Zeus. He had been with us the longest of any of the rabbits. As a young rabbit he had been full of himself, taunting us to catch him and put him back into the cage at night where he could be kept safe from the predations of the raccoons and possums. As an old rabbit he delighted in eating peanuts and fresh veggies from our hands, then waited for his head to be scratched and stroked. I removed him from the towel shroud in which we had wrapped him, then placed him fetus-like in the hole. Barbara placed a few roses from the front yard along with a few fresh sprigs of basil within the cup formed by the fetal-arced corpse. Fresh basil is a rabbit’s delight.

Article Author: John Spivey

John Spivey is a writer and furniture maker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his family. His personal blog is called Nature, Craft, & Soul. He can be contacted here.

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