George the Fish

I have been suffering through a series of illnesses the past couple of months and that reminded me of something my oldest daughter did a couple of years ago that got me to thinking. She participated in an assisted suicide.

Let me give you the story from the beginning. Meg gave me a fish for Father's Day. She likes fish – so I got one. She named it George. I like fishing but am really not fond of fish. It is not a religious thing but I don't really believe in regularly feeding and caring for anything I am not related to or don't plan to eat (or both).Knowing that I wasn’t excited about caring for a fish, she promised she would come to my office as often as necessary to clean the fish tank. It was a sweet promise based in the reality of knowing her dad certainly wasn't going to clean it. She did give me very explicit instructions about feeding the thing and made me swear on a stack of Bibles (being a preacher, I have a stack of Bibles) I would feed George every other day. I was very good about keeping my word.

After a few weeks I noticed George wasn't feeling too well. He didn't run to greet me when I came to the office in the morning, wouldn't fetch the paper, didn't bark at strangers. He would just lie around on the bottom of the tank and stare at the ceiling. (Unless I tap on the side of his fish tank… he hates it when I tap on the tank… goes completely berserk. That's why I do it all the time.) It occurred to me that his listlessness could be due to the fact he was living in what looked like sewage. The cleaning crew was called in.

Meg, in training to be either a plumber or an appliance repair person, immediately agreed to "get right on it" and then disappeared for several days. Each time I contacted her about the job, she was very agreeable and assured me the fish tank was "next on her list." When the water finally get murky enough I could no longer tell the fish from the plastic plants – I finally decided that the plants were the things moving – I decided to take on the cleaning detail. After a couple of hours of mumbling, scrubbing, fishing the fish out of the sink and cleaning the pretty blue pebbles out of the grease trap of the sink, George was again living in the light. But he was still lying on his side on the bottom of the tank with a blank look in his eyes. He wouldn't even respond to my taps. George was not a well fish.

The next day, when I came to work, George was a "new man." He was swimming around exploring every corner of the tank and getting rather frustrated – the tank is round. I was marveling at his miraculous recovery when I noticed a change in the water level in the fish tank. Then Meg called. George really was a new man. The reinvigorated George I was observing was, in reality, George II. She had come down the night before to clean the tank and noticed George's condition and made an executive decison.  She flushed him down the toilet and replaced him with a look-a-like. She said George was too sick to recover so she put him out of his misery. He was sick so she FLUSHED HIM! Sounds like an assisted suicide to me.

Who does she think she is – Dr. Jack Kevorkian? 

The whole episode made me quite uneasy. Being a few hours short of a degree in anything, much less veterinary medicine, how did she decide the fish was terminal? Was she able to somehow communicate with the fish and know he wanted to end his life? Did she just conclude he wanted to live in the sewage system of our small town? (It would be cleaner than the water he had been in the past couple of weeks.)Or did she, my sweet, kind, good-natured daughter, just murder my fish?

As much as I have missed George (not at all), I'm glad it happened. It was a great learning experience for me. My daughter Meg is now a nurse which means she will have much to say about my care should I become gravely ill. So here is my plan: If I ever go to the hospital, don't tell her.

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved