The phone rang abruptly as I was driving home from work. Even over my car’s crappy bluetooth connection that makes most voices sound like they emanate deep from the ocean’s floor, I could tell my wife sounded anxious.
“I can’t just sit here and watch him suffer,” she said. “It’s just not right. We need to do something, now. Any ideas?”
I paused, carefully considering the difficult decision placed before me. It was surely the first time I had ever thought about the possibilities for such a drastic but merciful act. What did I know of such things? I struggled to answer, so I decided to consult the experts.
“Why don’t you google “fish euthanasia”?”
—
Our family welcomed Stash to our home after that year’s blockbuster Purim Carnival at our local synagogue (if blockbusters are measured by record-breaking distribution of Jewish pastries that taste dry enough to have been baked in 1987). It was to be the last Purim Carnival my kids were to attend. They had clearly outgrown the bouncy-houses and the simple games of ring toss and bean bag throws that thrilled them only a few years earlier. But they each brought home one last prize to commemorate this rite of passage: a shiny new goldfish, each in their own plastic water-filled bag.
Growing up, my parents were smart enough to know that my skills in the arts of procrastination and responsibility-dodging would starve most animals within a week, so the goldfish thing was entirely new to me. And my wife is vehemently anti-pet. She handled our aggressive demands for a dog well, if reluctantly, but was no fan of introducing any other living being into our household (our great hamster experiment did not end well a few years before). But there seemed to be a common understanding between parents and the sympathetic organizers of kid-oriented festivities. Goldfish brought home from fairs and carnivals were virtually guaranteed to have short lifespans, so I figured these would provide both a good life lesson for the kids and require as small a commitment as possible for a family pet. So we drove straight to Petco, purchased a simple fishbowl and a bag of colorful pebbles for the bottom, and drove home to pour the fish into their new glass domicile. The kids assembled the bowl like eager realtors showing their clients their new 3-bedroom dream home, complete with spectacular water views and a great neighborhood surrounded by our kitchen appliances.
Assessing our newfound mates, we noticed that my daughter’s fish had two strange whiskers emanating from his cheeks. “I’m calling him Stash”, she quickly announced. I assumed these whiskers were some kind of deformity that portended an early sign of skin cancer, so I silently prepared an amazingly emotional speech about the fragility of life and the importance of treasuring our loved ones, and filed it away in my brain for a date that was surely soon to come.
And sure enough, only a few days later, an aquarium fatality struck the Wolfe household. But it wasn’t Stash and his terminal facial hair that bought the proverbial farm. It was Jacob’s fish that we found floating at the top of the bowl, his life with our family so short that we couldn’t even recall the name given to him just hours before. Stash was circling the body with what seemed like trepidation, but could easily have been a triumphant war-dance, having outlived his carnival game brethren with ease. We removed the corpse, said a few quick prayers to ourselves (in my case, a verse from “Yellow Submarine”) and flushed away the evidence.
Stash swam on.
And on.
And on.
As the days, then months, then years passed, we began to realize that we had accidentally selected the regenerating Terminator fish from the pool of possibilities at that carnival. This seemingly innocent goldfish, one that we fully expected to pass away gracefully after a few weeks, continued to swim his circular laps around his bowl and pick at his colored rocks with abandon.
We should have known that this was no ordinary carny-fish from the get-go. He is, bar none, the most social fish I have ever seen. Not with other fish, mind you, but with any human being who passes his bowl. Just a glance from a human guest brings Stash into spastic convulsions, so excited to have company in his rather mundane and bowl-limited experience. Anticipating some kind of food at any interaction, Stash races to the top of his bowl and pokes his mouth in and out of the water frantically, like a dog’s rabidly excited greeting to his master after being away for the day. We’ve had families watch our fish on weeks we’re away, and we always return to the same exclamations. “You have the strangest fish we’ve ever seen”, they say. “He keeps wanting to talk to us.”
I’ve done some research in the years since, and it does turn out that goldfish can have very long life expectancies. But there is a list of things the common owner should do to ensure maximum goldfish lifespans, and I can promise you that we’ve done a grand total of none of them.
- Buy a huge fishbowl for extended swim space? Our bowl is the size of a chinese food takeout container.
- Give the fish plenty of plant life to interact with? We gave him rocks.
- Use specially distilled water from the pet store? We use Connecticut’s finest from the tap.
- Clean the bowl every two weeks? My son showers about as often as Stash does.
And yet, we’re now almost seven years in, and Stash has continued to swim on. This despite the fact that I’m the only one in the family that seems to remember to feed him. My wife made the decision that it was OK to give the fish sustenance about once every 3 weeks, which pretty much leaves his survival in my hands. This would normally be a recipe for a slow and torturous death, but again…Stash swims on.
But things began to change in recent months. First, Stash’s namesake whiskers fell off one night, turning his trademark visage into just an ordinary fish face (sparking accusations from our children of stealth fish replacement, which would have been clever but were alas unfounded). Then, Stash’s swimming became somewhat erratic. He continued to greet us with glee at our approaches, but with a little less vigor.
And then, he began his floating routine.
After his meals of fine fish pellets and flakes of god knows what that we’ve fed him for years, Stash began to float on his side, and then upside down. This at first sparked countless Paul Revere-like declarations in our household, with one family member or another shouting “Stash is dead!! Stash is dead!!” over and over until the unwitting goldfish turned over to examine what all the fuss was about. I’ll admit to being guilty of making false declarations of fish fatality more than anyone else. Dads, for all their blustery machismo, are always secretly the biggest softies when it comes to the family pet. Try watching Marley & Me with me someday…and bring tissues.
Slowly, Stash’s oddly configured floats began to take longer and longer, until eventually he was spending more time upside down than right side up. He ate less frequently, did not greet us with excitement, and developed strange looking spots on his skin that my wife was convinced were toxic.
Then, one evening, we noticed that Stash’s body was curved into a U-shape. His eyes were open, and he was breathing, but his head and tail were pointed straight down. Not a good look for a swimmer. We began to come to grips with the fact that the end was approaching for this Legend Of The Bowl. I prepared my kids for the worst, slightly disturbed by their lack of empathy and caring but pleased that therapy did not appear to be in order (well, for them at least).
After two days of coma-like floating, we consulted Dr. Google to discuss our options. It turns out that there are really no methods of pulling the plug on Goldfish that don’t sound gruesome. We could flush him alive, but it turns out that cliche has long been discouraged by respected organizations like PETA and Karen Wolfe’s Society For Ignorant Husbands And Their Primitive And Inhumane Ideas. Some experts say to slowly ice the fish in a freezer until they stop moving…not gonna work, I feel bad for the frozen shrimp already in my freezer. The only items left involved either decapitation or large mallets, and neither fit our personalities well.
So we prepared to let nature take its course, when my wife found one lonely item of suggestion buried somewhere deep in the recesses of the Internet (in other words, on the second page of a Google search). They suggested feeding a fish that’s floating on its side a replacement diet of de-skinned peas. Fish apparently like them, and they contain some kind of magical elixir that can clear their colons and help them swim again.
Surely this was idiotic at this point…Stash was doing his version of a lifeguard-in-training’s Dead Man Float. He had hours to live, couldn’t we let him go in peace, not peas? But I indulged my wife’s fancy and let her raid my evening’s vegetable plate for a helping of defrosted Birdseye green peas. She carefully rinsed them, peeled their tiny skins away from their veggie meat, mushed them in her fingers and sprinkled them into Stash’s bowl. He barely moved as the peas sunk to the bottom of the bowl untouched. We sighed a bit at our folly, and left Stash alone to float as desired. (A quick note: I will forever deny the rumors that I subsequently tried to feed Stash a pea segment with a spoon…there is no hard evidence to support these libelous allegations).
The next morning, after a full week of baring witness to a limpless Goldfish’s final days, we walked downstairs to prepare the body for burial.
But Stash would have none of it.
He greeted us that morning with full vigor, swimming from end to end in his bowl like a fish reborn. “Good morning gang!!”, he seemed to shout as his head began bobbing into his traditional dance at the top of the bowl. “And what a great morning it is!! It’s been a while, did I miss anything?”. All seemed back to normal, except his bowl was literally filthy. Those peas, it turns out, are like power laxatives on steroids for Goldfish. Stash literally shit out everything that ailed him.
My wife looked at me. Instead of sharing my sense of joy and wonder in her eyes, I saw fury.
“YOU ALMOST MADE ME KILL OUR FISH!!!”
“But honey, it looked like…”
“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, KILLING OUR FAMILY PET!!!”
“But really, I wasn’t the one who…”
“WHO DO YOU THINK I AM, YOU IDIOT?? I’M NO EXECUTIONER!!!”
I sat silently as she glared in my direction. As I looked down at my shoes and back up to her face, I noticed a slow transformation. She smiled a little at me, then turned to the fishbowl, put her face close to the bowl and watched Stash stare back at her with life in his eyes.
“I’m no executioner,” she said. “I am the fish whisperer.”
———
POSTSCRIPT
A week later, Stash finally succumbed to the call of Father Time, ate a last meal of peas (and water) and swum to that great fishbowl in the sky. We buried him in his final resting place in our backyard during an emotional service that included my heartfelt rendition of “Octopus’s Garden” and several restless teenagers who couldn’t have cared less. Please note that our dog Chauncey eyed us during the entire proceeding, so Stash’s final resting place may not be as final as originally planned.
And the fish whisperer herself has asked me to get us another goldfish. Anyone know when Purim is?
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