Photo by Ahmed Hasan on Unsplash
Yesterday, my son’s goldfish, Daffodil, died. Ben will be twenty-four soon and the fish joined our household a couple of months after Ben turned fourteen, the fall of his eighth-grade year. He bought three fish at a pet store for a middle school science project; only Daffodil survived the hazing.
Ben and Oscar, his project partner, acquired tiny white worms from their science teacher. In our basement, they fed the worms to the fish. I don’t actually remember the research variable but only recall that the boys measured the elapsed time between food introduction and consumption.
Oscar went home after the experiment. Ben kept the fish.
My children never had a dog or a cat. My husband, Chris, was allergic to both, and that was a useful excuse since I didn’t want either. It’s one of my maternal flaws. My children will say that about me, when they complain about their childhoods. They never had a real pet. Their mother was a germaphobe and deprived them of that caregiving experience.
***
When I was in second grade, my brother and I found two small dogs outside our house and my parents let us keep one, a brown and white beagle mix we named Sugar. Daddy took the other dog off to the shelter.
Sugar was an outside dog, as my parents were not “inside dog people.” My father grew up on a farm and there were always dogs, but they lived outside like the other animals. Some of those animals were eaten.
Sugar lived in our fenced-in backyard for twenty years until her “natural” death, probably from heart worms. I was long gone, by then, married and living in Cincinnati where my husband and I were doing our pediatric residency. I remember being surprised when my mother called to tell me Sugar was gone, as I hadn’t thought of her in a long time.
When I was a child, Sugar was a reliable pet. Whenever I opened the back door, she’d come to me, crawling forward on her belly as though someone had once mistreated her. When I knelt down and rubbed her short hair on her bony skull, she looked up at me with soft brown eyes. When I sat on the back patio, she crawled into the diamond-shaped space created by my crossed ankles, out-turned knees. If I stood up, to walk away, she shot off to lap the backyard, as though in a race, or in an ecstatic pique of joy. She’d skirt the inside of the fence, all around the rectangle a couple of times, then skid to a halt back in front of me. Always seemed like she was thanking me for petting her.
***
Over the past ten years, I’ve purchased a few bags of blue aquarium rocks and a variety of imitation plant-life which suctioned to the inside of the plastic container, waving in the water. When the first fishbowl became dull from paper towel abrasion during cleanings, I ordered three new bowls online so I could give Daffodil clearer windows, on occasion.
All this time, though, she’s lived inside a one-gallon plastic fishbowl without benefit of a water filter. Whenever the water looked too cloudy, every two to three weeks, I lugged the bowl into the laundry room for a wash-out. I captured Daffodil in a blue net and dropped her into a glass vase to wait while I disposed of dirty water and rinsed the globe with fresh water, getting grimy bits out of the blue floor pebbles. With chlorine-free paper towels, I wiped the peachy slime off the fake greenery and the inside walls. With spring water, I rinsed the bowl out repeatedly, then filled it with clean water and returned Daffodil to her home.
She never seemed to mind the infrequent cleanings.
Whenever we left town for more than forty-eight hours, I carried Daffodil next door and the neighbors dropped pinches of food into her water once a day. The neighbors have a cat, Bella, so I’d loosely drape a piece of foil over the top of Daffodil’s bowl and punch a pencil through a few times so Daf could breathe.
***
When our daughter, Sarah, was about eight years old, we got a rabbit from the shelter for her. Peter lived in Sarah’s room in a cage for one month. When he was let out to play, he nibbled the edges of books and dropped hard little black turds all over her floor.
The rabbit made Chris wheeze. Sarah begged to let Peter stay, sobbing, her face wet and red, when we carried the cage down the steps to return Peter to the shelter. I really wished we’d never brought that rabbit home. Sarah was so sad, but my husband could not breathe.
***
For Ben’s high school National Honor Society volunteer hours, he sat on the cat room floor at the Humane Society, with his cat-allergic friend, Liam, and let kittens crawl all over him. He walked abandoned pit bulls on leashes around the building. Afterwards, he’d describe an animal to me, tell me how happy the dog was to be outside, how it pulled and sniffed and romped. How the kittens clung to his shirt, jumped from his shoulder. I drove him to the Humane Society. I picked him up and brought him home.
Ben’s skin testing revealed dust mite and fall mold allergies, but no allergies to cats or dogs. He’ll have a dog when he has his own apartment. When we visit him, he tells us, there will be a dog.
***
Sarah and her boyfriend, Josh, have a dog, Lupin, adopted during this novel coronavirus experience. Two weeks ago, the three of them drove from New York City to Louisville, Kentucky, to visit us for a while.
Lupin, part husky, is an indoor dog, adored by Sarah. Adored by Josh. Adored by Ben.
Chris has been on allergy shots for two years and is not bothered by dog dander now. He leans down and pets Lupin, rubs her head and her ears, coos at her.
I tried to puppy-proof the house before they arrived, elevating the pandemic-supply grocery bags of tortilla chips and fig newtons onto stair-railing posts and stuffing my purse and book bags onto my desk shelves. Lupin eats socks, so we hide them. She is sleeping upstairs in the guest room with Sarah and Josh, who take her on long walks twice a day. In the backyard, they knot Lupin’s long orange leash to the bird feeder pole and Lupin hunts for chipmunks and digs holes in our lawn. We tell her not to do either of those things, but she’s a dog.
When Lupin sees me with those ice-blue eyes, she rushes towards me, wanting me to love on her, wanting to lick my elbow or jump onto my thighs, and I do not want her to do either of these things. Every time I pet her, I have to wash my hands. When she once put her sharp-nailed paws onto the edge of my round wooden breakfast table, I shrieked, “No!” and then saw Sarah’s face and I wanted to take it back. I wanted to adore Lupin. I adore Sarah.
***
Since Covid-19 social isolation began, Ben has been home from graduate school, living with us again, resuming the chores of feeding Daffodil each night and cleaning her fishbowl. He’d dunk a finger beneath the water surface and Daf would rise up to kiss it.
But, yesterday, Daffodil was floating at the bottom of her bowl, on her side. She looked bloated, orange and white and puffy, like her kidneys weren’t working. Do fish have kidneys? Her eyes were open wide. Her mouth was still, no longer opening and closing like it had been doing for ten years.
I had imagined it would be just Chris and me, here by ourselves, to manage when Daffodil passed. We would have considered flushing her down the toilet—an undignified burial for a ten-year-old fish.
But, the pandemic. So Ben was here.
We stood there, looking at her, and I asked Ben what he wanted to do.
He chose a spot in a flower bed near the front door and dug a very deep hole with a spade. Then, I selected a page—one that wouldn’t annoy Ben—from a discarded New York Times (not sports or business or fashion or politics) and Ben lifted Daffodil from the water with the blue net for the last time. He gently set her in the bit of newsprint and folded it around her, like an envelope.
Outside, Ben lay Daffodil at the bottom of the pit and pushed the dirt over her, leveling it off. I handed over six flowers found on the driveway after the prior night’s storm, damp and limp but pretty. Five tiny red oval caps, the stigma, protruded from the folded hibiscus petals, yellow anthers beneath; green sepals cupped lavender Rose of Sharon blooms. Ben fanned them out, like a crown, over the grave, and we stood there next to Daffodil, arms around waists, quiet.
Yesterday, my son’s pet died.
Laura Johnsrude is a retired pediatrician and a Louisville-based writer of creative nonfiction. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, The Spectacle, Please See Me, Under the Gum Tree, The Examined Life Journal, Minerva Rising, The Boom Project anthology, and on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. Her book reviews have been published in Good River Review.