Mourning the Beta Fish

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.