When our daughters were three and ten, Paul and I put a cage with a guinea pig under the Christmas tree, and during the Santa Claus hours a second was born. More followed until supermarket box homes lined a wall of the sunroom. When each died, there was a cardboard funeral. The girls in procession, with one carrying the box and the other holding flowers and a white cross, followed their dad carrying the shovel, to find a burial place in the neighbor’s woods.
By my fifties I was drawn to working with the dying and trained at Hospice as a volunteer to visit residents. Waiting in a hallway one day just as a family member passed away in a room across from me, I saw a teary-eyed, young boy come out followed by his father. I felt inwardly pushed back by his stern voice, “Don’t cry!” Asking if the boy could come with me for ice cream in the kitchen, I said that tears were fine with me.
The inside cover of Rudi’s Pond by Eve Bunting tells that it is a true story “of the hope a young girl finds after a devastating loss.” Reading it to the end I knew that I needed the book. Even though the young girl’s loss is of a friend, Bunting’s words touched the young girl that I’d been when I lost a pet.
Rudi, born with something wrong with his heart, enters the hospital, and sinking, dies. The children in his class make a pond in memory of him, and his bestest friend brings a hummingbird feeder she and Rudi made. She hangs it in a pond side oak. The next day there’s a “shimmering” close to the glass near her desk—it’s a hummingbird! It goes to the “flower straw” to drink! and returns to her window each day (she’s sure it’s the same one). She begins to wonder …
When it’s time for summer vacation she’ll take the feeder home. She thinks that the hummingbird will be able to find her house—because it’s the one with the green gate that she and Rudi painted with yellow tulips.
My realization is, “These well-written voices, like the one of the girl in Rudi’s Pond, cause us to remember—for our memory contains our child’s voice, while both of the parents’ voices understand, face truth with acceptance, and believe in hope.”