Dominick’s Fish

Borden has heard it all before. “Fish are not considered animals first. They’re considered a hobby,” she notes. “And so they don’t have the same value as mammals. It’s important that people realize that aquarium animals are animals, and if they don’t want to or can’t keep them anymore, other people will. If you flush a fish or release it into the wild, it’s a harsh, cruel way for the fish to die. The fish suffer terribly.”

But perhaps the perception of disposability is also part of a shift in contemporary culture’s approach to the material realities of death — in particular, how to deal with what the deceased leave behind. In my own family, what to keep and what to toss before my mother passes — the heirloom versus Goodwill issue — has become an ongoing discussion. My mother, now eighty and recently widowed, is looking around her packed house and torturing herself over how much she has amassed, hoarded, and preserved. Her generation was brought up to believe that throwing things away was wasteful, decadent, even indecent. But contemporary culture tells her that a cluttered house is a burden, to both oneself and one’s loved ones.

The minimalist message fuels everything from ikea storage unit designs to condo sales to reality television and decorating shows. On tlc’s Clean Sweep, the perky hosts find a house full of “junk” and clear it out for the hapless homeowner, thus allegedly setting the lucky guest free of all sorts of emotional baggage as well. These days, we are all supposed to be sleek, tidy, unburdened by material goods, and ready to drop off the Earth at any moment without worrying that we’ll leave a trail of unwanted pinwheel crystal behind. Good luck.

And yet, despite the anti-clutter, clean your-closet mantra, mixed messages still abound when it comes to material acquisition and attachments. We are asked to shop daily, then asked to pay people to come and empty our houses of all the things we’ve bought, because we mustn’t become hoarders. We are told to be social, to make lasting friends, and to fall in love, all while being flooded with requests to join Facebook and become “friends” with hundreds of people we are highly unlikely to ever touch, hear, or truly know.

No wonder deciding what to do with one’s things when the Reaper gives you the hooded nod is so confusing and stress-inducing — everything is valuable but nothing is worth keeping. “I kept one of Dom’s tanks, in the basement,” Debbie tells me. “I still forget about it, like I forgot about Dom’s fish when he was alive, and so I have one sad bastard fish left in there. One. I am not a pet person, but I’m determined to keep at least one tank alive. God help me, I’m failing miserably, but I’m trying.”

A mid all the sadness around Dominick’s death, the care given to his lowly (and certainly unappreciative) fish fills me with a kind of careful hope. Obviously, not everyone buys into the notion that after we die everything we cared for dies with us or that we only exist as long as we are an active part of the property/equity nexus, that we are nothing more than what we hold while we can.

I understand now that we are also what we hold dear, that such care resonates, and that the objects of our attentions and affections, no matter how slimy or scaly, can, and should, outlast us. We are not what we own; we are what we cherish.

“The day the ecas people came, I bawled my eyes out,” Debbie remembers. “I mean, these were living things. It sounds weird to say, but they were breathing, in a way, for Dominick, because of him. By the time Dominick died, most of those fish were fourth-, fifth-, tenth-generation fish from his breeding program. Their entire cosmos revolved around Dominick. It was a surreal event watching them leave his fish room. I was shocked at how much I cared, because fish, I have to admit, gross me out.”

After orchestrating the rescue of Dominick’s fish, Borden, thirty-two and still in university, made thorough post-mortem arrangements for her own watery pets. “Debbie’s need to know that Dominick’s fish were going to good homes had a profound effect on me. I’ve asked my partner to think about what will happen to my fish if I can’t take care of them.”

Clean, purge, sell off, or recycle all you want, but remember that nothing is truly disposable. The concept of disposability is itself false, a convenient conceit. It all ends up somewhere.