Fun Times with Dying Bunnies. With Dying Hamsters. With Dying Mice.

Last week I discovered a nest of bunnies in my herb garden.

Cute squirmy little bodies under a thatch of grass, and to be honest, my first reaction was annoyance. My husband had recently repaired the fence around my garden and my lettuce and spinach were coming up and now here I had these bunnies, trapped inside with a food source-- MY GARDEN!

There didn't seem to be much I could do about it though. My husband and I got the bright idea that we could feed the bunnies ourselves-- maybe sprinkle store bought lettuce and shredded carrots around the nest for the mother to use so she wouldn't need to raid my garden...

So off we went to the grocery store.

When we returned, we found that our dog Zooey had discovered the nest and the cute little squirmy bunny bodies were scattered all over the place and I surprised my husband (and myself) by basically having a sobbing breakdown.

Is this about the hamsters? my husband asked me later, because he knew I had a history of small dying animals in my life.

Let me tell you The Story of How I Got Two Hamsters For My Birthday and Seven Died.

Once upon a time my boyfriend gave me two hamsters for my 15th birthday. Two boy hamsters, allegedly. But the first night, the fatter hamster attacked the smaller hamster and I woke to the smaller one screaming (and dying), and I was horrified and mad at the fatter hamster until I saw that she had given birth to five tiny squirmy hamster babies in the corner of the cage.

I called some Animal Hotline place and they told me to do nothing. Let the mother hamster take care of the little ones. And I was happy to do that.

Too bad for me that the next day the mother died.

Back to the Animal Hotline, where the kind Animal Hotline Expert told me calmly that I could feed the babies with an eyedropper filled with a mixture of raw egg and milk. So I did that.

And one by one the tiny little babies died. One died slowly in the palm of my hand.

The end.

I made a funny story out of it though. And told it to other people in a jokey way. I even used the incident in a writing workshop in college, calling the story The Dead Hamster Theory.

It's hit me over the years that I can use material from my own life in the stories I tell at parties, in the stories and novels I write, manipulating the true stuff with made-up stuff, finding the humor in the sad and horrifying because I know that is a way that I can examine and understand the sad and horrifying and because I know humor can make dark stuff more palatable to readers.

At the moment I am writing a novel where the main character IS this type of person--one who uses humor to deflect, as a form of self-protection, as a way to create some distance between herself and truly horrifying things that have happened to her in the past. I've never written a purposefully funny book before and I'm enjoying it, while at the same time wondering if I'm getting the humor right, if this book will be funny to anyone but myself, and if the darkness at the core of the story possibly might be too dark.

I'm not sure.

Maybe some things just aren't funny.

But back to my dying bunnies.

I told my daughter who is away at college and she immediately sent me a funny song she made.

I needed this funny song because after my husband, at my tearful urging, placed all of the stunned potentially dying bunnies carefully back into the nest, over the next few days, when I checked on them, they began to die, one by one.

We are now down to three, and this morning I am afraid to peek in on them to see if they have made it through another night huddled together in the oregano.

Confession: I didn't have a breakdown over bunnies because of what happened with my dying hamsters.

Let me tell you another story:

When I was eight years old, my new stepfather took me to a farm he had recently inherited. In the back of the property was an old barn filled with farm equipment and furniture and junky odds and ends and my stepfather wanted to see if there was anything salvageable in the place, and I was happy and curious. My father had died a year before and I was happy and curious about having a stepfather.

I found an antique roll top desk with lots of small drawers and compartments and I slid one of the drawers open and was delighted to see a nest of small squirmy bodies inside. Teeny tiny baby mice that made me think of little fairies.

Oh look! I said to my new stepfather.

And he grabbed the little squirmy mice out of the drawer with one fist and hurled them at the barn wall.

The end.

There are some things that are not funny.

On Slowly and Quietly Standing Up

A few months ago I heard the novelist Colum McCann speak at a luncheon. Colum McCann is the author of nine books, including Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award in 2009. I hadn't read any of his books. The truth is I had never heard of Colum McCann. I only went to the luncheon because a writer friend had invited me.

As soon as Colum McCann began to speak, I rustled around in my purse as quietly as I could to find a pen and my little notebook. I had a feeling that I might want to remember what the guy was saying.

Stories are important, he said in his lovely Irish accent. We each have stories to tell, stories only we can tell. It's important--as human beings--that we do this.

I nodded in agreement, but I didn't write it down. I knew it already. If I believe in anything, I believe in this.

He went on to to talk about how scientists have done studies. They've looked at our brains when we tell stories, when we write stories. Apparently, our brains light up. Something powerful is going on. What's fascinating, though, is that the same kind of lighting up of the brain happens to the listeners of stories.

When we hear another person's story, we experience it too. We feel what he feels. We step into her shoes if only for a moment.

"You can't hate someone when you know their story," Colum McCann said.

He called on the audience to practice radical empathy--truly listen to what other people are saying-- even people who seem to us to be close-minded, people who are unwilling to consider other points of views. It may be hard, but we must listen and listen and listen until the other person is storied out.

Only then can we begin to bridge whatever gaps we have between us.

I don't know if this is true. Some days the gaps between people seem unbridgeable to me.

I do what a lot of people I know do: I feel immense outrage and horror and sadness. I rant and rave to anyone who will listen. Or I mock everything.

How stupid people are. How crazy. How ridiculous.

I turn off the news when it gets to be too much. I immerse myself in a seemingly endless array of entertainment options--anything to forget how lucky and privileged I am. Because if I don't think about it-- I don't have to do anything about it.

But not very deep down I know that I am one of the carriage riders in Les Miserables, flying past suffering and abject poverty. I am a laughing clapping audience member sitting in the front row of the Hunger Games. 

The other day my little notebook fell out of my purse.

I flipped through the pages and found the notes I took when I listened to Colum McCann.

Think of others. Listen to others.

And then what, Colum McCann?