Requiem

The fish are dead, and probably have been for some time.

It never occurred to me to take care of them myself. Tom wanted the tank; Tom would have to care for the fish. Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands of their inevitable fate. The tank was rarely cleaned, and I suspect they were not fed regularly.

The muck on the glass had been building for a while, and then the pump broke. Still their little existence persisted, and at the end I found myself wishing them dead. (The guest room would look so much nicer without the deep green algae.)

My wish has come true, and I am much sadder (and guiltier) than I anticipated. For one thing, their death made Gavin wail. He had wanted to feed them, and shook his head in stunned disbelief. “They’re dead; they’re dead!” He immediately started theorizing on the meaning of death: they escaped, they disappeared, someone killed them (yes, I thought of my not-so-benign neglect).

I fibbed: “They were just very old. They had a happy life.” I thought about the funeral, and this made me even lower. The final goodbyes will be generic; the fish never even had names.

Gavin hadn’t been very expressive when Oops and Ow (his hermit crabs) died, so I was surprised by his sorrow. But then, his connection with the fish went further back. On his first tour of our home, fresh from the maternity ward, his gaze seemed to catch the glimmering “fishies”. We hoisted him up many times to sprinkle their food and peer into their depths. He liked to play hide-and-seek with them, behind the plants and, later, behind the thickening algae crust.

Last year, I wrote a nature piece called Fish Story for Snowy Egret, a delightful nature journal. It was a reflection on finding fish in the shallows of the Long Island Sound, trapped by the diminishing tide and stalked by seagulls. The piece has good drama: the craggy backdrop of the winter beach, their shimmering rainbow scales, the malevolence of the gulls, and the innocence of our interaction. I threw them back into the depths one by one, buying them time to live. I completely anthropomorphized their joy at a family reunion.

The fish that inspired Fish Story spoke deeply to me. They made me reflect on the abundant world, its paradoxes, and my own place in it. Of course, it was nothing they had done. They just reflected what was already in my mind and soul. Unfortunately, so did the fish upstairs.

A prophet is not welcome in his own country. The fish in the guest room were a fixture that I stopped seeing. They did not speak to me as their cousins on the beach had.

I would like to say that from this moment on I will always be kind to living things, always thoughtful. But I know that even larger losses have not created a perfect me. The best I can do, as I face a Saturday reserved mostly for mothering and housekeeping, is to recall that even mundane moments host meaningful choices.