When I was six years old, my family moved into a small apartment in Los Angeles that was perfect for a married couple with two young children. It was in this little apartment that my sister and I received our first pets. We had fish, hamsters, hermit crabs, and even guinea pigs. But the pet that I remembered the most was my rabbit named Sunny, he would always light up my day. When I got a bad grade in school, I only had to pet his soft, brown fur and then I would have a smile on my face again. The small perfect apartment suddenly seemed too small because my sister and I were growing. After some discussion, we decided to move to Colorado. It was probably the hardest task that Sunny had to complete. Judging from Sunny’s reaction to being in a car for fourteen hours, I could tell that he got car sick easily. But after almost two days of non-stop driving, we finally reached our destination in Denver, Colorado.

We moved into a much bigger home than the apartment in California and my sister and I ran around and enjoyed the spacious rooms and our new basement. For one year, we lived peacefully with Sunny as our one and only pet. After that one year though, the steady stream of pets that my family once had began again. Teaching a rabbit to be potty-trained was very difficult, and when we received two dogs, they were the center of our attention. Seeing how disciplined dogs were, we moved the “dogs’ place” upstairs and we moved Sunny’s cage downstairs. Except for giving him food once a day, he was forgotten.

We also bought Mocha the guinea pig. Now Mocha was a fat and mean guinea pig, he would always nip at the hand that fed him. But because we had nowhere to put him, we put him with Sunny. That was a big mistake. We didn’t realized that Mocha would eat all the food we gave to both of them, and would contaminate the water by pooping in it. Sunny got very sick after that and we knew we had to give Mocha away because he would cause nothing but trouble. For a month, my family and I tried our best to make sure that Sunny would be healed from near starvation and filthy water, but he was never as healthy as he was before.

On one Sunday, when Sunny looked healthier than normal, my family and I put his cage outside with plenty of food and water just so he could get some fresh air. We went to church right after doing so. Before the church service started, big and dark clouds started to form over our heads and we could tell that a storm was coming. It was hours before we came home and it was raining so hard that even the short run from our driveway to the front door resulted in us getting soaked. We ran to the backyard, and we brought Sunny’s cage down by the fireplace. Sunny was laying down inside the cage and was extremely wet. He was shivering violently and we could tell that we made a huge mistake by letting him stay outside. We dried him off and tried to make sure that he was warm. We wrapped him up in blankets for the night but in the morning, we were dismayed to see that he was so sick that he couldn’t stand or sit up. His condition stayed the same for four months.

Then on a Sunday, my sister and I just came back from a martial arts black belt test that took thirteen hours. We had both passed and we were finishing up our last pieces of homework when, my grandmother (who had come to visit) whispered to me,
“Don’t cry, it’s going to be okay”. She then pointed at Sunny’s cage. And when I got a closer look, I noticed that Sunny was no longer breathing or blinking. He had passed on. I did the one thing that my grandmother told me not to do, I cried.

I mourned Sunny’s death for days because he was my friend for two years. I felt that if I had cared for Sunny better in the past year then he would still be alive. I felt that I should not have paid so much attention to my new pets and that I could have stopped the inevitable by doing so. With those thoughts spinning in my head, I turned on the radio hoping that its music would help me feel better. One of my favorite songs started playing and I started to feel less depressed. I tried to listen to the lyrics carefully, even though I rarely do so. The next nine words that I heard shocked me: “You never know what you got until it’s gone”.