Remember the four fish TheOldest got for his birthday a short 3 months ago.  I seem to be keeping with my stellar abilities to keep animals and plants alive.  I thought that since I’ve managed to keep Daisy Doodle Cat alive for almost 10 years now, Chikezie Dog has been ours for almost a year now, and Frosty Cornflakes Cat is goin’ strong, that maybe it made up for the fact that I somehow killed off all our hermit crabs last year.

I knew some of the fish were kinda sickly lookin’.  My husband pointed out one day recently that the gold fish we bought were losing their gold.  One was particularly white.  Enough so that he bet me the time of his death.  I took the bet – right down to 10:30am Christmas morning.  I know, don’t tell my children.

Christmas morn came and went without incident and I was oh, so proud.  I had won the bet and the fish had won it’s life.

Then on Deconstructed – one of our newest fav sci-shows they tore apart a fish filter and talked about the toxicity of ammonia build-up.  Guilted into cleaning out the cloudy fish-home, I set to work on cleaning out a holding tank while their permanent home was scrubbed out and set with water to adjust to room temperature.  I grabbed a jar that I had previously kept flour in (c’mon, I am a clean person – I always bleach everything before it’s ready for human consumption stuff again).  And rinsed it out really good.

Or so I thought.

I made the transfer.

By the next morning the sickliest of them all was on the bottom of the bowl.

And two others were swimming sideways.

So, the good mother that I am told my children and ‘fessed up.  C’mon, you know me better than that.  I stacked dirty dishes in front of the container until they were all dead (or so I thought) so that I could deal with the drama all at once.

Yesterday morning I brought all my children to the kitchen table and gave a talk on the extremely short life span of a gold fish (shut up, you do too know that they only live 3 months).  We looked at the bowl.  We wiped tears away.  My daughter said we should pray for them.  I explained they were through, no prayer’s gonna help ‘em now, but we did thank God for letting us have fish for a time.  Then we discussed mercy killing of the fourth that was now swimming sideways, but Daddy started singing “I’m a survivor” and we (against my will) saved it.  My view is “he’s almost dead, why prolong the pain?”  Yeah, I’m compassionate like that.

We then went and gathered ’round the potty, think: Huxtables, and said our final goodbyes.

Who of Fish, Penny, Oliver, and Pirates of the Caribbean Enemy survived?  Your guess is as good as mine.  TheOldest suggested we call TheSurvivor a combination of all the fish names in memory of the other three.  Sounds good to me.

Live on OliverPennyPiratesOfTheCaribbeanEnemyFish.  Live on.