Fourteenth Day - The Fish

I had a blog already planned out in my head for tonight but it is going to have to wait because the fish died. I should be clear, this was a carnival fish, one of those creatures that your child wins by somehow magically displaying more coordination than you ever thought he had and popping a ping pong ball into a small bowl. We gave him a few days to live, he made it several weeks longer than that. So, on the one hand I'm impressed he lived this long, on the other hand, I am totally and utterly devastated by the death of a fifteen cent goldfish.

When it became clear that Bready (my son named him that because he wanted to feed him bread) was not going to immediately die, I scoured the internet for information on how to keep a goldfish healthy. I realized our cheap bowl was not recommended, but I followed all the instructions for frequent water changes and chemical conditioning, tried to give him a recommended diet. I searched Craigslist, hoping someone would sell a larger aquarium with a filter for something more in our price range than the offerings at the pet store. I had no idea how expensive an appropriate habitat is for a "free" goldfish and it really isn't in our current budget to put up a fish in more deluxe surroundings than our own. We joked that perhaps Bready would meet with an unfortunate incident, whenever we wondered what we would do if we needed to leave town or when I grew sick of changing stinky fish water for days on end.

Still, it all came down to the kid. The kid loved the fish. He would sit and have breakfast across from him, sometimes having little conversations where he would provide the fish with an appropriately watery voice. He's been begging for a dog and a cat for over a year now and I thought, well, this is a good introduction--everyone has fish, right? So I'd change the water and wonder how much longer our luck would hold out.  As it turned out, not very long.

So tonight, when I had put the boy to bed and was cleaning up the kitchen, I noticed it. The fish. Belly up. Or rather sideways. In any case, definitively dead. What I wanted to do was to flush him and then tell the boy that we had taken him to the river to play with the manatees, but some shred of higher motherhood (and the advice of several friends) intervened and I now have a small disposable plastic container in my fridge containing a dead fish, awaiting a morning discussion with a four year old on the mutability of all things.

I know how this is supposed to work. I spent over 10 years in children's bookstores selling books like The 10th Good Thing About Barney and telling parents how healing it was for a child to learn about death, pontificating on honesty and the value of story to bridge the gap of grief. Yeah. I didn't know shit. It is one thing to talk theoretically about addressing death and the loss of a pet with a child and then to actually realize you are going to have to present your child with a little fishy corpse. I have no idea how he will react and I'm scared witless. Will he be in denial? Will he insist we put him back in water? Will he want to touch him? Will he freak out about death now? Do I say the fish got sick and if I do that will he think sickness=death? Or will he be completely unfazed or even curious? What if he asks to perform a post-mortem?

Where's my damn parents manual? I am not prepared for this. I refused to have a pet as a child because I couldn't bear the thought of it ever  having to die. I refused to even have helium balloons because I knew I would be heartbroken when they deflated. Even now, when my son's mylar balloons from his birthdays deflate I blow them up with air, reseal them and use them as wall decorations. I am not kidding. So you see, it is not an exaggeration to say I am possibly the least equipped parent when it comes to the subject of loss.

You would think I am an expert, our lives have experienced so much loss in recent years. We've lost a home, a house, jobs, career, friends, roots, security--it's all gone. We've been living on the edge for some time now, I place I never thought I would be again, made that much more difficult by the knowledge that there is this awesome little boy who looks to me and his father for every need. Our boy doesn't have a yard to play in, or the sibling we so wanted to give him or the "real" dog that he begs for weekly. (He does insist that his stuffed dogs are real and thanks God for them every night at prayers.) I think when he won the fish I thought it was some sort of a sign, finally a little living thing for him to love and befriend, finally something for him to come home to other than his tired and stressed out parents. Of course that is a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on a fifteen cent carnival fish. Come to think of it, it's probably the stress of inappropriate expectations that killed him.

So we'll see what happens tomorrow. Hopefully I'll keep it together and the boy won't be too upset and we can dispose of Bready with sufficient decorum. Hopefully this small loss, like all the greater ones, will continue to refine us instead of simply laying us low. Rest in peace, Bready the fish. We hardly knew ye.

ADDENDUM****

Bready was laid to rest this morning in a beautiful service attended by family and friends. He was buried in a wrapper made of butcher paper (no irony intended) which was hand decorated in red marker and glitter glue and accompanied by a paper effigy of a little fish created by his owner so that he might "have company". Tears were shed, prayers were offered, notably by agnostic daddy who commended Bready to God, asking his creator to look over him as he "swam in fishy heaven". All parties, including mommy seem to be appropriately transitioning through their respective stages of grief.