week 25

The koi fish in my mom’s pond were fine. And then it rained hard for a little while, and an hour later (literally, an hour) I ran out to the fish acting like they were moving in slow motion, a pond overflowing with foam, and a koi that was being sucked down a treacherous stream. I managed to grab and place a bucket in time to catch the float-away fish and moved him back to his area. I crawled under the pond net in place to protect the fish from the predatory herons and raccoons and crawled over dead cicadas and shells to place another net to block the koi from getting sucked downstream again. Then I saw another koi fish who had positioned himself sideways under the waterfall, presumably to get more oxygen, but then lodged himself in a crevasse between heavy rocks and kept wriggling to get out. I ran over and carefully lifted the rocks to free him, feeling like I was going to be sick as I gently lifted a koi I didn’t know was alive and move him back to water. He swam away and I breathed a sigh of relief. But the fish all looked bloated and sick and unable to really swim. I scooped foam out of the pond with a net, having no idea what it was but later would find out to be koi sperm. I plugged in a bubbler, used as an oxygenator for the water when the pumps aren’t running in winter months, thinking that it would get more oxygen to the water. I watched for hours, and then I went home, filthy and exhausted and frustrated and worried.

There have been many pond fiascos in the past three years since my mom bought her house, and I’ve cursed most of them. “Koi ponds aren’t a lot of maintenance,” everyone told her when she was buying the house, which is true— when everything in the pond is working properly. The second that one thing is off (the pumps, the water levels, the oxygen levels, the acidity balance, the bubbler, the heater, the electricity, the netting, the wildlife, and god forbid a leak)— the serenity of the koi pond comes crashing down and we all have to leap into emergency mode. I have had moments where I’ve had it up to here (picture hand above head) with the koi pond, and I’m sure many times when her neighbors have heard me out there swearing up a storm (sorry, Mom). I have whined and asked her why she had to buy a house with a koi pond in the first place. But I know she loves those fish, and I have come to love those fish, and have gotten equally as worried about the day that one or more of them would die.

We have had a burial for a couple, a heron ate quite a few, and then we had seven. Six beautiful koi fish, each gold, white, and mostly orange, and a black fish my mom named Licorice, who was a small goldfish type that was hard to see but would provoke much excitement when we could. We built a netting to protect these guys from the heron (and then raccoons), have made sure they were well (but not over) fed, would call out to them for breakfast and dinner and enjoy watching their mouths suck up the food pellets we tossed in the water twice a day.

In one night, after the hour of rain, they were gone. The devastation of seeing multiple fish lifelessly floating at the top of the pond was one that I had worried about for years but convinced myself would not come. I could not stop crying and am crying now thinking about it. The worry that they had suffered to their deaths, most likely suffocated by a lack of oxygen, will haunt me for years.

Of course, the fish are not just fish, they are beloved pets of sorts, and this dreadful incident is coming at a time in life when I’m already mourning so many disappointments and the idea of mortality and endings and constantly am trying to push away worry about my parents’ ages and their eventual demise. The fish are beautiful animals and deserve mourning in their own right, but they are also stand-ins for all of our inevitable deaths and the recent deaths of those I’ve mourned and those who I haven’t known well enough to mourn but know and think constantly about. They are stand-ins for the death of hope and the death of peaceful days on the porch and patio and the burden of guilt that I didn’t do enough to help save them, and the burden of guilt for all the times I complained about their maintenance and all the times when I failed to be as devoted a daughter as I could be and complained about my duties, real or perceived. The death of fish by heron had been sad, but it felt like a natural circle of life, and I could take solace in the fact that the heron needs to eat and live too. This death feels senseless and somehow preventable and tragic. To see all of this death all at once, right here in my face, is sickening and unbearable.

I don’t know what to do, but I know I will cry as much as I need to cry. I know I will bury them and thank them for all the years of joy they brought us and so many others. I know that I will forgive myself for not doing more because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I know I will remember how precious and fragile life is. But in the midst of that knowledge, I know I will be trying to live fully in the present, through all of life’s changes and cycles.