Life Lesson Learned from the Life of a Fish

I'm sitting here tonight thinking about life, love, and loss.  And it's all being brought on by the untimely death of a fish.  Our tucking into bed routine almost went off without a hitch until it was time to say good night to Emidude.  He didn't look so good and I feared the worst as I tapped on the outside of his glass bowl.  This wasn't the first time I thought that maybe his time had come. . .but usually when I tapped, he swam away and I exhaled.  Tonight that wasn't the case.

First there was shock on Nessa's behalf and then the tears.  Wailing actually, as I called for back up.  E ran upstairs and confirmed what we already knew as I held her sobbing body with her head nestled into my shoulder and wet tears running down my neck.  I rocked her back and forth as E took the bowl and moved to the bathroom.  My heart broke in two as the dead fish released a whole different set of emotions for my little four-year-old.  "I miss my o---l----d Nina," she cried. And then my dam broke and I cried too.  I cried because a little girl her age knows only how to love.  And for the first three years of her life she was loved well by the person we chose to baptize her and honored with the Nina title.

But then life happened and love changed and she was no longer marrying Uncle.  But she was still Nina, right?  So we tried to hang onto it.  We wanted to believe that she could be one without the other.  We desperately wanted her to still want to pour into our littlest one's life. But then she went away.  And all we had left of her was this fish that the two of them went and picked out (without asking us first, by the way). And for exactly 52 weeks, we've fed him and changed his water and talked about Nina on multiple occasions.  But now one year later, Emidude is dead and we mourn the loss of more than just our pretty blue fish.  We mourn the loss of a person we thought would be a part of our family tapestry forever.
And that's where the tears came from on my part.  And on the part of Lene.  And Jonathan had to leave the room before he became emotional too he said.

The lesson we talked about around the toilet bowl as we flushed Emidude off to sea?  Love while you still have the chance.  Love the person or the pet with everything you have because they just might not be there tomorrow.  And it's better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all, right?  That's what they say. . .whoever they is. Life. Love. Loss. 

And tomorrow we begin again.  

Letting her go a little more each day.

Soon she will be just a memory.

RIP Emidude