As a Mom of a Sick Child, I Couldn’t Bear to Lose My Child’s Stuffed Bunny

Facing my daughter’s mortality through her stuffed animal

Elizabeth Austin’s daughter and her Snuffle Bunny stuffed animal

My daughter’s stuffed bunny was an indirect gift from my father. I was at the end of my pregnancy, and freshly out of a volatile relationship, trying to navigate life as a single mother with a bank balance of zero. My daughter’s entry into the world was less celebrated by my family than simply acknowledged, but a $50 Zelle had come in with a text instructing me to put it toward supplies for the baby.

I’d seen Jellycat bunnies heaped in wicker baskets in the window of the fancy baby store in town. I loved their signature round bellies, and as I swiped my card in the store’s machine, I imagined my daughter’s tiny hand wrapped around one of the bunny’s long sand-colored ears. It felt fitting to welcome her into the world this way. Stepping out of the store, the bunny wrapped in blue paper and tucked into a gift bag, I imagined I was one of the well-off mothers who milled around my affluent suburban town.

Carolyn became attached to the bunny. She named her Snuffle Bunny, and called her Snuffles for short. I don’t know where the name came from; I suspect stuffed animal names come from a secret, magical place that only the toys and their children know about.

In every photo I have of Carolyn, Snuffle Bunny is somewhere—at her side, in the background, stuffed under her arm. Her first day of kindergarten photo features a pair of long, fuzzy ears hanging out of the zipper’s gap in her ladybug backpack. When she had her first sleepover, Snuffle Bunny borrowed a nightgown from one of the American Girls, its beanbag feet crammed into fuzzy doll slippers.

When months of mysterious knee pain and a high fever sent us to the ER one Saturday night when Carolyn was eight, she held Snuffle Bunny against her chest as a nurse slipped an IV into the back of her hand. When the ER doctor looked into my face, her eyes like two small worlds, and said, I’m sending you down to the oncology center in the city. Do you know what that means, oncology? Snuffle Bunny came along for the ambulance ride.

An umbrella of dread stayed over us while we battled the lymphocytes that lived and bred in my daughter’s blood and marrow. I spent nights scrolling cancer mom Facebook groups laden with bereavement posts and thought, I’m in hell. This is hell. Each beautiful young face crashed over me like a wave, battering me, beating a rhythm: It’s just a matter of time; one day one of those posts will be yours; your daughter is going to die.

I tried to prepare myself for the worst by forcing myself into mental explorations of non-mom life. I wanted to make the possibility of losing her familiar, as if I could somehow keep it from surprising me by imagining her death before it happened.

Grief sat under my fingernails like splinters as I imagined a world without my daughter in it. My eyes moved over her toys scattered around the couch, puzzle pieces by the fireplace, stuffed animals beneath her bed. I imagined that all of her things were just as she’d left them, but she would never touch any of them again. How long would it be before I’d feel ready to box them up and give them away? And then, the big question, always hovering at the surface: What would I do with Snuffle Bunny? Which always led to the question, What would I do with Carolyn?

We were still in the beginning months of treatment, early enough to believe that this was a blip, that she’d eventually come through it and be just fine. Thinking about what she might want for her body if she died felt like a dark invitation. It terrified me, but when I looked at our home full of her things, full of her life, it crept into the base of my brain like rot.

I tried to imagine tucking Snuffles into a cardboard box beside a body that was once my daughter’s, knowing they’d both be incinerated. I imagined the bunny’s fur singeing, blackening, becoming dust. I looked into its sweet stuffie face peeking over Carolyn’s skinny arms and didn’t know how I’d be able to do that to either of them.

I tried to imagine burying the toy in a tomb six feet below in wet earth, tucked beneath Carolyn’s cold, moldering arms for eternity. I couldn’t leave my daughter alone under a strange dirt pile or send her into the fire on her own, but I worried that Snuffles wouldn’t understand. Would it be waiting for someone to come back and get it? Would it wonder why Carolyn was suddenly so still, why it was so chilly and damp? Would it miss the incandescent light of our home?

The thought that finally allowed me to sleep was the idea of cremating Carolyn and tucking some of her ashes inside Snuffle Bunny. Then I could press the bunny against my chest and it would be like holding both of them again. It seemed, in late, haunting hours in the hospital, a reasonable in-between solution to a problem I was desperate to never have.

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Go fish.

We were in our second week of a 28-day hospital admission. Carolyn and I had been playing Go Fish with the Oliver Jeffers cards a friend has sent in a care package the week before. I drew a card, a small boat, and nodded for her to go.

Do you have….a sly fox? She grinned, knowing I did because she’d been peeking at my cards. I handed two over while she pulled a pair from her own hand and placed the pile face-up on the rolling tray table. I wondered again how many more hospital stays we might have, and what would put a stop to them.

As if pulling my thoughts from my mind like loose threads, she announced: I want to be buried. She kept her gaze on her cards, the muscles beneath her eyebrows bunching.

Huh?

I want to be buried if I die. She glanced up at me once, held my eyes for a moment, and looked down at her cards again.

I felt my chest tighten. My body prickled in resistance. I had been forcing myself to think about all the horrifying hypotheticals for months, but I hadn’t brought any of them up to her. She was nine. I hadn’t imagined her mortality would be on her mind.

My eyes drank in her face as she studied her cards. I saw shadows of all the past and future versions of her—the girl she had been and the woman she might become. She looked like an infant and a child and a teenager and a young adult all at once. It hit me again how desperate I was for her to survive.

Thoughts cascaded through my mind like a burst dam: Would she one day be off-treatment, alive and thriving, learning to drive, graduating from high school and checking in with the clinic once a year or so to address the long-ago treatment she’d once received for a cancer she would mostly have forgotten about?

Or would I, in ten years time, be looking at pictures of her that never progress beyond the age of nine? Would I be doing little things to comfort myself on a particular day of the year, honoring her memory for the rest of my life, missing her so wholly, spending my days just trying to get by? Was there a future ahead that I would have to endure without her, a whole part of her life she’d never get to live? Would I remember this moment, how I stared into her face, drinking in her wide, dark eyes, and would I one day give anything to get it back?

I don’t want to be burned up if I die. She was watching my face again, waiting for a response. I want to be buried with Snuffle Bunny.

Her delicate fist closed gently around one of Snuffle Bunny’s sand-colored legs.

Words bubbled behind my teeth. I ached to lie. I wanted to insist that no one was going to die, that this whole thing was baloney; she was going to get well and one day it would be as if her cancer had never happened. It would be in the rearview, as they say.

I rocked along my teetering intuition for a moment, wanting to follow some invented untruthful script, wanting to gently but firmly put an end to the conversation. I wondered wildly if I would somehow be opening a portal to the worst-case scenario by even discussing it. I didn’t want to talk to Carolyn about what I’d do if she died, but I knew she deserved better than a lie. I slanted left.

Why do you want to talk about this right now, bub?

A little shrug. I dunno. I just do.

We don’t have to worry about this right now. You’re doing fine. We can talk about it if the doctors say we need to, but there’s no reason to talk about it now.

But I want to decide what happens to me.

There it was. It hit me, how little control she’d had in this whole process, how few decisions she’d gotten to make about her own care.

The doctors said the best treatment for leukemia was chemotherapy, and so she was whisked into an operating room to install a line that hung from her arm beneath a thick plastic bandage that itched and pinched at her skin.

The doctors said she needed to gain weight so a sickly yellow tube was threaded up her nose and down her throat while she gagged and screamed. I filled plastic feeding bags with thick formula that smelled like cake batter and pressed the “start” button and pumped her full of gluey liquid calories and fed her steroids until her cheeks shone from the swelling and her eyes closed when she smiled.

She pulled hoods over her head when her hair fell out and refused to turn her camera on during FaceTimes with her friends and cried out when the doctors slipped needles between the vertebrae in her back because leukemia likes to hide in spinal fluid. She endured and endured with no option to say no while I steered this careening ship on through some horrible dark night.

I was so worried about losing her, I hadn’t bothered to consider the cost of trying to make her well.

You’re going to get better.

She paused, holding her cards fanned in one hand, the illustrations sketched loosely across the sea-green backgrounds. But if I don’t, she said, I want you to promise you won’t put me in a dress. You’ll bury me with Snuffles. And visit me every day if you can.

I could do this one thing for her, I thought. I could shelve my own sentimentalities and give her what she should never have to ask for.

Okay. I promise.

She looked down at her hand, satisfied. I got another match!

She placed a pair of curious whales on the rolling tray table. A nurse walked in to check her vitals, and I jumped on the segway to bedtime. I helped Carolyn change into pajamas and handed her the magic mouthwash she used to help numb her mouth sores.

As I stretched beside her leggy form, pulling the stiff hospital blanket up to our shoulders, I watched her eyes closing softly over and over until she fell into sleep. Snuffle Bunny’s soft face peeked out good-naturedly from its place against my daughter’s softly rising chest in the low light of the vital sign monitor.

Elizabeth Austin's writing has appeared in HuffPost, Today, Thrillist, Reactor Mag, Business Insider, and others. She is currently querying her memoir about being a bad cancer mom. She holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with her two children and their many pets. Find her at writingelizabeth.com.