PART I

JULY

After several years together and much serious discussion, Chris and I decided it was time to take our relationship to the next level. And so we met at Koi World at Ferndale Nursery yesterday afternoon to begin proceedings for the formal adoption of two small fish, who would take up occupation of the little pond in the courtyard of our shared love space at Chris’s home.

Together we peered into the dark water in which about thirty small koi darted around.

‘Which ones are you thinking of?’ Chris asked.

‘One of the yellowy-gold ones,’ I replied, ‘and a silvery one with bits of black.’

Chris said he’d been thinking along the same lines and we asked the salesman to come over to help us. Then without me realising it, Chris stepped back a couple of metres, leaving me to make my choice and direct the salesman, who was armed with a large net.

Talking it through on Skype this morning, I said to Chris that I’d wanted him there next to me, sharing my excitement at the final moment of that momentous decision. I’d wanted him to be involved too; instead he’d stepped back.

Chris told me that he’d done so for a couple of very rational reasons: being mindful of social distancing during the Covid pandemic, he hadn’t wanted to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger as he fished for our choice; Chris had also reasoned that one yellowy-gold fish was very much like any other, and that his input beyond the basic outline of what we wanted wasn’t needed and would only turn the scene into a farcical one, with the poor salesman trying to net various fish as we each chose new favourites every time an old one evaded him. But as we talked, I felt a large tear sting in each of my eyes. I’ve learnt enough about myself by now to know that’s a sure indicator that there’s more going on than seems apparent, and so I dug a little deeper to find out what was really going on.

‘I wanted you to be part of the decision so that you wouldn’t blame me if you didn’t like the fish I chose,’ I said to Chris.

‘When have I ever, in all these years, blamed you for anything?’ Chris inquired of me.

I took his question seriously and skimmed through our time together. He hadn’t blamed me when I called out the gate automation people because the garage door wouldn’t open one day when Chris wasn’t there and I’d assumed the motor wasn’t working properly. He hadn’t turned on me when the repair man said there was no problem with the motor; it was simply that I’d forgotten to pull up the bolt at the bottom of the door before pressing the remote. He hadn’t even become angry some weeks later when he asked where the bill for the callout was. I’d guiltily kept it, planning to pay it myself because the whole business had been my fault, but I hadn’t gotten around to paying it yet because my finances were rather strained at the time. He still wasn’t cross, just asked me to give it to him so he could settle it.

This one example, when his irritation would, by my standards, have been quite justified, is just how things are in our relationship. However, I’d become so accustomed to being blamed for everything during my marriage that years later, I’m still always unconsciously braced, waiting for the yelling and swearing to start. I guess eighteen years of yelling will do that to even the toughest soul, and I’ve always been a pretty sensitive one.

In explaining my feelings to Chris, I gave him an example from that marriage. Years after building the farmhouse that was supposed to be the home of our dreams, my ex said during a fight that the house didn’t even meet with his idea of what a house should look like.

‘It doesn’t feel like a home,’ he said, objecting to the flat roof of our house, designed in what the architect had loftily described as a Cape Georgian style. ‘It should have a pitched roof.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say that when we were in discussions with the architect?’ I answered. ‘It’s a bit late to tell me that now!’

For a while, I actually seriously considered trying to remedy the situation, wondering what it would cost to remove the flat roof from our double-storey home and replace it with a pitched roof … never mind how odd the mish-mash of styles would look. But I quickly decided it was pointless. In addition to the massive cost and upheaval, it would just be another attempt to fix symptoms without treating the actual sickness. When there’s a one-way blame dynamic in a relationship, no action, no matter how drastic, is going to put things right. I suppose it’s the same for a two-way blame dynamic too. Only a relationship that is built on unconditional love and trust can ever truly feel like home.

It’s amazing how such a simple event as buying a couple of fish was able to trigger deep unconscious wounds from the past. Luckily this morning’s discussion gave one of my old wounds the time to come up so that healing could begin.

‘I suspect you’ve had a haunted look in your eyes for much of your life,’ Chris said this morning. ‘I hope the time will eventually come when you’re able to realise that’s in your past and you can trust me. I will never turn on you.’

I, too, anticipate with joy the day when that healing is complete and the haunted look is banished forever.

PART II

SEPTEMBER

There is a sequel to my earlier piece about the two fish Chris and I adopted. It is not a happy one … and at the same time it is, in its reminder of the veracity of what Kahlil Gibran said about joy and sorrow: ‘Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.’

You already know how much thought went into our decision to acquire two fish for our small pond, and what old wounds the experience triggered in me. However, the new additions were eventually chosen, taken home by Chris and released into the pond amidst much shared and happy anticipation.

A couple of days later, on the first morning of my weekend with Chris, I ventured out before breakfast to greet the fish, filled with excitement at the prospect of seeing them swimming around their new home. To my disappointment, I found that they were obviously feeling anxious after the big move, and so had taken to hiding under the rocky overhang of the little cascade that flows into the pond. Chris and I jokingly nicknamed them ‘Schrödinger’s fishes’: in the absence of evidence either way, those fish were simultaneously both alive and dead, in our pond and not in it, until we resolved the issue by direct observation, by ‘lifting the lid of the box’.

And so that afternoon, with me helping from the sidelines, Chris disconnected the pump and removed the artificial rock waterfall. We still couldn’t see the fish, though. We took out the three pots of water plants in the pond in our search for them – the water lily that has never flowered, not once in eight years, but that we leave there in the hope that it might one day, and the two pickerel rush plants, with their spikes of startlingly blue flowers – but of course all that activity stirred up the sediment at the bottom, and so the water was muddy and clouded. We would have to wait for it to settle overnight.

Chris and I went out into the courtyard together the next morning, but the water was still not clear and there was still no sign of the fish. We were both becoming increasingly concerned that something had happened to them: perhaps a cormorant had feasted on these easy pickings, or they were trapped under a pot or a rock.

So you can imagine our relief when the first sighting of them was made later that afternoon. Once we had established that they were both still in the pond and alive, we put everything back and left them in peace. Chris fed them every morning and reported the occasional sighting to me; the pond was one of my first ports of call when I roamed around the house and garden on the first morning of each of my stays with him. And it seemed, as the weeks passed, that all was well, and that the fish were feeling more settled and confident. Just last weekend, I saw them swimming happily together, and Chris said he’d seen them every day of the previous week.

Such love and hope went into this endeavour. Chris and I both have separate histories that include fishy fatalities of varying natures, and yet we had still found the courage to risk loss again. And what an immense loss it was when we found the two bodies floating on the surface of the water one Sunday morning. Chris took them out of the water and we examined them. Their little bodies were perfect: there was no sign of disease or predatory attack.

We drank a toast of gratitude to them at lunchtime, those poor fishy souls who had brought us such joy in their short time with us. We also talked about the surprising magnitude of our sense of loss and grief at their deaths. After all, fish are not like cats or dogs or even hamsters, where there’s a warm body to hug or cup in one’s hands, loving eyes to look into, sleek hair against which to rub one’s cheek. Fish don’t even make eye contact with human onlookers, so I really can’t say we had a relationship of any sort with them. And yet their presence in our pond lit up the small courtyard, in the same way that the desert became beautiful to the Little Prince because of the well hidden somewhere in it.

In the aftermath of the discovery of their dead bodies, I realised that I was experiencing grief for a loss in the purest and most simple form that I ever have in my life. It might seem absurd: an adult woman shedding tears for the deaths of two small fish. But the clarity of this grief, and the fact that I shared it with someone who felt the loss as hard as I did, made me realise how much grief I have carried on my own, and how often I have been so overwhelmed by that grief and the incapacity of my body and heart to hold it that I haven’t been able to really feel it in the way that I could feel this small sadness.

I look back over the years and see an endless line of animal, avian and piscatorial corpses over which I’ve wept as a child and as an adult. Some small, some larger: hamsters, goldfish, a chicken, budgies, cats, dogs, a swan, a horse. In some strange way, I grieved for them all again this weekend and released some of that accumulated sorrow as I felt the pain of new loss.

I remember you all, beloved pets and friends. Thank you for your love and the joy you brought me. It’s worth every one of the tears that I cried when I lost you.

NEXT

© 2026 Louise Rapley