My girlfriend’s fish died this morning. That was the first thing she texted me
today, so I can only assume she found him just after waking up. Our text
exchange was as follows:
“Clyde died :(“
“Ohhh, baby I’m sorry.”
“I’m surprisingly sad”
“:( I got a hug for you okay?”
“Ok, I need it”
“I understand. It’s sad losing a
pet you’ve had for years. Even if it is a fish. I love you lots”
Looking
back on text messages can be a real bummer, especially if there was legitimate
feeling involved at the time of communication. There’s something demoralizing
about seeing what you remember as a symphonic swell of sadness represented by a
frowny face. What’s also difficult is trying to tell someone you love that you
understand their pain or sadness, because really, how do you know that you do?
How do you know the gut-sick feeling and surge of sour chemicals to the brain
is the same biochemical reaction your loved one is experiencing? How can you
guarantee their pain isn’t amplified compared to yours? That what you think is
real pain is a light thud against a callous heart?
Short
answer to a long question. You can’t.
~
I have two cats, Toast and Scuba. This is a recent
development in my life, one that sort of slinked up and sunk its claws in and
took hold, which is appropriate, I guess. We (my girlfriend and I) picked up
Scuba from the shelter. She was a kitten then, dark brown dappled with caramel,
hiding behind a scratching post and small enough to lay flat in your cupped
hands. Toast came along because I felt
guilty leaving Scuba at home all day while I was at work; he was my brother’s
cat, and though he had been adored by their toddler, they had another kid on
the way, and apparently cat litter can wreak biological havoc on a pregnant
woman and her unborn child. So Toast, who was an absolute goliath of a Siamese
(and a little brain-damaged by being toted around the house by my niece since
kittenhood), joined our family.
 |
| Toast, left, and Scuba, right. |
Our
family, my cats. Distinctions you make when you love someone you don’t live
with.
My
girlfriend hadn’t grown up with pets, and though she was excited at the
prospect of bringing home a kitten (because who can’t be excited about that?),
we both weren’t sure how well this would pan out in the long term. The general
rule of thumb was that she didn’t really like
pets, and didn’t understand why people thought of them as “members of the
family.” She’d seen her brother attacked by a dog when they were both kids, and
as for cats, well, unless you grew up with the feline variety of house pets,
it’s kind of hard to understand the appeal.
Cats,
balanced creatures that they are, tend to walk the line of being more trouble
than they’re worth. Since bringing home my cats, I’ve had countless electronic
cables chewed through, several carpets perforated, houseplants uprooted,
furniture dethreaded, allergies agitated, and every smooth surface of my house
coated with cat hair and dander. On the other hand, if I sit on the couch, my
cats will bound from whatever small catastrophe they’re causing just to be with
me. They settle on my lap and hum like the fine-tuned motors of muscle cars.
Toast, the Siamese, rattles with affection even if he’s sitting near to me. If
I don’t want to pet him because my hands are otherwise occupied, he’ll simply
place one paw on my arm, just to have some form of contact. And if I do pet
him, he lapses into a sort of nirvana attainable to humans only through years
of spiritual journey and meditation.
In
short, they’re a vessel to pour love into. It’s one of the simpler forms of
love, I know. It’s a love of simple affection, and of duty. But it’s ultimately
satisfying, and over the course of the past year, I’ve seen my girlfriend start
to get this as well, not from me trying to explain any of it to her (though
I’ve tried), but from watching her agitation slowly outweighed by affection. I
can see it in her face when she smiles, Scuba on her lap purring at full volume
and her eyes closed in sleepy bliss, when my girlfriend looks at me and says,
“She is so cute.”
~
My girlfriend’s fish is (was) a beta named Clyde.
There had been a Bonnie (they’d been gifts to her and her college roommate at
the time), but Bonnie died a couple years ago, and Clyde has been swimming solo
ever since. I didn’t see much of Clyde, but I heard about him, principally
through complaints from my girlfriend. Having to feed him, clean his tank,
stuff I’d tease her about because how can you not tease someone for griping
about something so simple? It’s strange to think of him swooshing down the
toilet drain now and into the cold, slimy expanse of sewers. Stranger still to
think of my girlfriend of not having to feed him, or change his water.
When
the shackles come off, the sadness and the loneliness is always the most
surprising feeling. This is true no matter how small or insignificant the
shackles.
The
reptile brain usually carries the rep of being the lowest on the animal brain
totem pole, and I have to assume that the beta fish brain probably isn’t too
far off. So thinking about death for such a creature is difficult. It’s hard to
think of that brain as having feelings or emotions as opposed to a relatively
complex series of connections and electric impulses.
But
this sort of reasoning doesn’t do much to assuage the sadness, and here’s why:
A
pet is a package of feelings. As an animal it has its own attributes, surely,
but a house pet is significant because it is the sum of all of the feelings and
emotions we attach to it. As a vessel of love, it’s the combined weight of all
of the love we ever poured into that pet. It’s the residual memories of the
conversations we had while petting or feeding or even stressing out about that
pet. It’s a photo album that you can look into and see not what you looked like
or what you were wearing at one point in your life, but instead what and how
you felt. A well-loved house pet is an extension of yourself, a cache of
memories and feelings and a physical tribute to your capacity for caring and
for affection.
This
is why it’s so difficult when a house pet dies. You’re losing an emotional
slice of yourself.
What’s
difficult more so is that it feels so trivial – you can buy a beta fish at
Petsmart for a few dollars – and this triviality embarrasses us. We’re
embarrassed that we feel sad and we don’t really understand why. And that’s
fine, that’s okay. But it’s also okay to mourn the beta fish. There’s no
creature too small to love.
And
this is what I want to say to my girlfriend, this is what I want to communicate
but can’t with so little time and so few words. Instead I rely on digital
punctuation. I stamp a frowny face onto the end of my text and hope that she knows
to unfold it, to look in that blank space between the colon and the parenthesis
to find the acknowledgement of a tear, of a sudden, gaping void, of an
emptiness that’s okay to mourn and weep over because it’s the sudden loss of
years of love.
