In Memoriam

Fifteen years ago my then wife, now Ex (with whom I am at the moment staying), decided that it would be nice to have a small pool in the backyard, to go along with her other landscaping of the desert-like, fenced-in terrain. She grew up on a small lake in Indiana, in a very small settlement, in the middle of the woods south of Indianapolis, and has ever since tried to re-create that lake and its environs in the backyard.

Not being satisfied with simply a small, natural looking pool, I decided it might be nice to have a few goldfish in it, and so together she and I went to the fish store and bought a few dozen of what they call “feeder” fish. The proprietor warned us that probably 2/3 of the fish, costing 10 cents a piece, would die within a few days. They were intended as feed for those who raise flesh eating varieties of tropical (mostly South American) fish, and were not particularly healthy or even fed, for that matter. Try as we might not to lose as many fish as the man in the store had warned us to prepare ourselves for, we lost them anyway. Every morning for the next couple of weeks, I would go out and scoop up the floaters and bury them in the garden. It got harder to do each day, because by the end we had most of the fish named, and they had started developing their own little personalities: they, in a sense, had become part of the family.

Finally, after a handful or so of further weeks, the carnage was over and the new pond settled down, and I had learned (by reading 3-4 books on the subject) how to take care of fish in the backyard. So, we went out and made a major purchase, $6 bucks each for two baby Koi from a local pet store. One was gold in color and the other was white with a sort of pink head. My Ex decided she liked the white one, and named (what we assumed, for no good reason, was a female) her Gladys, and I named the Gold one Li-Po, and that was the start of our backyard Koi pond. Things went along smoothly for the next 15 years, with only a couple of causalities here and there, (two more of the original gold fish, ‘comets’ died, due to tumors or something), but other than that we had each year to give away fish born in the pond so as to keep their burgeoning numbers down. In the meanwhile, we had gotten two more Koi: Qausimodo (from a pet store), and finally Nicodemus (from Wall Mart), a tiny little black Koi who I took pity on, and who was almost dead in their store’s tank. I brought him home and hand fed and hand moved him around in the pond, until he finally started showing some life of his own. All that was probably 13-14 years ago.

Two summers ago, my ex more than doubled the size of the pond, from about 800 gallons to well over 1800 hundred gallons, and tripled to quadrupled the pumping and filtering system. It now has some of the most heavily filtered water in the universe. Then disaster struck.

One of our friends in the school district, a science teacher become school principle, died suddenly of a heart attack and they gave a slide show presentation of his life at the school for those who had known him. Hundreds of people were there, and it was a fairly big deal. My Ex, who among other things teaches photo-shop on the computer (she’s an artist by education), was approached by the dead man’s family and was asked to put the slide show together, which she spent one very long week doing (staying up into all hours of the night), and when the slide show was over, the widow gave my Ex a gift certificate for the local fish and pond store.

About a month ago now, my Ex visited the store and came home with two baby Koi (2-3 inches long) to add to the pond. She kept them in a quarantine tank for about a week (and was intending on quarantining them much longer), when the weather turned really hot and the temperature in the tank soared, and so we introduced them into the pond, perhaps early as it turns out.

Koi are notorious for harboring diseases, and there has lately been a slew of various epidemics among fish breeders, particularly over in Japan - and in the spring time, with vast and frequent temperature fluctuations the fish are anyway under a lot of environmental stress – and while the new fish seem fine and healthy, some of the older ones, like Li-Po and Gladys, started showing signs of sickness.

Koi health is not easy to diagnose, and cures are even flakier than that, and while we have been going gang busters doing partial water changes, and medicating the water, and so forth and so on, Gladys kept getting worse and worse. We didn’t know what was wrong, and were powerless to do anything about it. We segregated her into a separate tank, and my Ex tried everything we, or the experts in the area, knew or could tell us about, but in the end it was all in vain (her tank got to looking like a intensive care ward, with cords and tubes and whatnot strung all over the place). Gladys died last night, and I buried her. My Ex suspects it was some disease, to which the new baby Koi are immune, but which ravaged the old timers in the pond. No one knows for certain how long Koi can live, but 30 or more years is not unheard of, so by those standards Gladys was at best middle age.

She was a beautiful fish, loved to be hand petted and fed, and sort of watched over the little fish in the pond. We are going to miss her greatly, both for her own addition to the backyard pond, and to all that she symbolized, having been among the first two Koi we had gotten. She’d grown from this little bitty fish, into a fairly large sized Koi in that pond, and her demise will sadden us for a long time to come. She will, I assure you, not be forgotten, and her memory will live on along with the other pets we have had over the years, and who have also died.

Having pets is a wonderful thing, but it is also damned sad when one of them leaves. There will be no joy in this household today.