30 Year Secret Revealed

Recently a friend of mine was able to tell me exactly when he learned about death as a child. I had no idea when I learned about it. I recalled a time when I was very small and I couldn't sleep because I was crying with the heavy burden of guilt. I had opened up a robin's egg because I had to know what was inside. I felt so terrible about this. That was the earliest related thing I could think up.

However, a revelation came to me the other day. I was flipping channels and the movie version of Watership Down was on TV. I saw this movie in the seventies when I was a wee lassie. There is a massive death to a rabbit warren and (this movie is a cartoon) there was an image of dead rabbits floating down lots of tunnels.

It was completely startling to me because one of the two recurrent dreams I had as a gradeschooler was of friends of mine and I all slithering down these sewer-like tunnels that somehow I associated with the river behind our house... and I knew it was bad and meant death. It was a simple but scary nightmare. (The other recurrent dream involved a parade, Humpty Dumpty, and a fabric warehouse...that one might need more therapy to decipher...) The movie Watership Down probably came out around the time my first relative -- my grandfather -- died, too.

After I made this connection while watching the movie I thought about how nicely that movie deals with death as hand in hand with life, both in it's sudden extremes and the inevitability of joining that black rabbit in the sky. Kids today are allowed to see all kinds of gory violence but not generally to have to deal thoughtfully with the concept of death. It seems healthy and yet I had recurrent nightmares from it. Hmm.