We had a fish tank in the dining room with a rotating population. Dan and I enjoyed feeding them, but it wasn’t something I thought about more often than I was told to feed the fish.
We had very few fish deaths in the years we had that tank. We tried to introduce a small frog once, and we were absolutely traumatized looking in on them a few days later to find one of the angelfish with a frog leg dangling from its mouth.
That’s not what I’m remembering this for, though. What I’m remembering is hearing a loud bang on the floor of the dining room. My mother and I ran into the room and found Dan face down on the floor sobbing. He couldn’t communicate what had made him like this but looking at the fish tank in front of him you could see one of the angelfish floating, apparently dead.
I didn’t really recognize how attached he’d been to the fish. I think I asked my mother about why he was taking it so hard, and I guess while I’d been busy with school or karate or friends, assuming Dan was focusing on similar aspects of his life, he’d actually been pretty invested in the fish. It was such an odd state to see him in at that point. It felt weird to not share his grief, and to also not entirely understand it. The grief I’d felt at that point was losing people, family members. The fish weren’t even on my radar.
He and my mother buried the fish in a small white box in our front yard, which was excavated within a year or two.