EDITOR’S NOTE: Some stories I can just publish. Some stories need a disclaimer—this is one of the latter. I’ve known David Rath (the author) and his family for a very long time. They are normal…more or less: Wife Kristie and daughter Emma are more, David and son Isaac are less. As soon as I saw the title of Dave’s story I realized we were all in trouble. Perhaps not legal trouble, but still on shaky ground. How to bury a frozen bunny may sound cute and innocuous to you, triggering no alarms, but to me it was like someone had pulled a fire alarm at a Barry Manilow concert.  So brace yourself. In Dave’s defense, despite the mental image of the man that may creep into your head as you read his tale of lagomorphic internment, he is nevertheless stable and reliable, a great husband, father, and friend. When in a crisis, the Bible encourages us to seek wise counsel, and Dave is very high on my list—although I would preface any advice-seeking conversation with, “How much Red Bull do you have on board?”  I found Dave’s bunny story hysterical, in part because I can just see the entire Rath family playing their parts perfectly: Kristie as the rational wife, always trying to maintain control but often feeling like she is juggling flame throwers; Emma (daughter), adorable, sweet, sentimental, but prone to spontaneous weirdness; Isaac (son) the typical adolescent boy with tremendous energy, no common sense, and a fascination with pyrotechnics; and Dave (husband/3rd child), who just isn’t quite right in the head (and I mean that as a compliment). The dialogue in the story, as odd and perhaps fictitious as it may sound, is totally believeable (I suspect Kristie records these things, just in case), and there is clearly a life-lesson at the end:”Don’t freeze a rabbit the long way.” This will make sense shortly, so on with the story (which isn’t for the squeamish, but remember…the rabbit started out already dead).

By David Rath

We thought it was a good idea to keep the bunny in the barn. Apparently a raccoon disagreed with us. This was on a Wednesday. I came home from work to dispose of the carcass. My wife (who had fled the scene with my distraught children), called me.

“What are you doing,” she asked?

“Throwing out a dead bunny!” I said.

(This is where I learned that one should ask if they are on speaker phone before discussing dead bunnies.) My 8 year-old daughter was not amused.

“You can’t throw it away!” my wife exclaimed.

“What?!?” I said, secretly hoping she had the same idea that I had of four lucky rabbit’s feet key chains!

“We have to have a funeral,” my daughter Emma sobbed in the background.

“Seriously!?” I said, a little too unsympathetic. “A funeral for a bunny? Can’t we just order pizza or something?”

Again, bad Idea with a speaker phone.

“I like the pizza idea,” my son Isaac shouted from the background.

My wife then said, “Honey, just keep it until Saturday, we can have a funeral then.”

Isaac asked, “Can we still get pizza?”

“WHAAAHHH,” Emma cried into the phone.

The call ended.

“How do I keep a dead bunny for three days in the middle of summer,” I asked myself? Then it hit me, “AHA!!”

I placed the bunny in a plastic bag and threw it in the garage freezer and returned to work. No harm, no foul. The next few days went by without incident. I returned home from a church event Friday night. I decided if I was going to bury something in the back yard the best time to dig the hole was at night when no one can see me. However, as I opened the barn to acquire a shovel, I found myself face to face with the raccoon! We lived in the most northern part of NY at the time. They tend to breed raccoons the size of dogs up there! That being said, the next thing I knew I had cleared our half-acre backyard in two seconds flat. My heart was pounding in my throat, and yes I think I may have peed just a little. At that point I decided to dig the hole Saturday morning.

I awoke Saturday and slowly scoped out the barn. There appeared to be nothing of the raccoon sort lingering. I grabbed the shovel and dug the hole. I went into the garage with the cardboard box allocated to be the “rabbit coffin.” My daughter was up in her room preparing a eulogy. I opened the freezer and there was the rabbit, stiff as a board. Then it hit me, I had laid the bunny in the freezer long-ways. She was too big for the box! I looked everywhere, but we only had one box! I had burned all the others. “Curse my redneck-ish infatuation with fire,” I said to myself. “What to do,” I wondered. Then it hit me, “I’ll have to break the rabbit!”

I quietly closed the garage door and placed the frozen remains of our family pet on top of two logs with a fair amount of space in between them. I grabbed my daughter’s softball bat and raised it over my head and swung as hard as I could. “CLANG!!” Once you hear the sound of an aluminum bat contacting frozen rabbit flesh, you are just never the same. However, the bunny didn’t break. So I hit it again, harder this time. It dented the bat!! I hit again and again and the stupid thing wouldn’t break. By this point I had caused quite the ruckus. My wife sent our son out to see what was going on. He walked into the garage and saw me mid-swing.

“Holy cow Dad, can I try!?” he said with all the excitement of a 12 year-old who just caught his dad beating a frozen bunny.

“AHH, what are you doing here? No you can’t try. Go back inside!”

At this point he smiled with that smile that means I can’t wait to tell Mom!!

“Isaac,” I barked, “you saw nothing!” I said this with all the authority I could muster under the circumstances.

He slyly smiled and said “Pizza!?”

“Yes we can get pizza after the funeral,” I said. He knew he had me cornered.

“Cool,” he said and ran away.

Needless to say, the bunny wouldn’t break. I ended up wrapping the box around it and camouflaging the uncovered parts with brown paper and duct tape. We had our funeral. We sang and swayed. Emma spoke of her lost friend and I closed us in prayer and covered the bunny. It was done; we had buried our frozen pet. Time to move on, and how do we do that? We go out for pizza.