About six months ago, Ximena suddenly developed a thing for fish.  She had to have a pet fish.  She had big plans: a big aquarium with lots of fish, lots of plants, bubbles, lights, rocks, castles.  The works.  So Joe took her to the pet store, and after trying out a pricey all-in-one aquarium that had some rocks and a light and a bubbler and deciding that was really a bit too fancy for us, they reached agreement on a just-about-the-bottom-of-the-line set up:  a plastic quart-sized bowl and a single male betta fish.  I'm no expert, but as I understand, male bettas are, conveniently, very territorial and will not share a tank with another fish.  So we absolutely could not get two fish.  What would be the point?  They'd just kill each other.  Ximena really wanted something more, but we suggested that we'd see how well things went with this first fish, and then maybe we'd get a bigger tank with more fish. 

What to name him?  A five-year-old doesn't have a huge vocabulary of names to choose from - friends, aunts, uncles...   Ximena had her list ready, though:  her first fish would be Sally (across-the-street friend's grandmother), next fish would be Susan (neighbor), then Sherry (contraction of neighbors Sharon and Berry), and then Kerry (...rhymes with Sherry?).  So Sally it was.  Though his namesake was a woman, we rationalized that Sally could also be a nickname for the very manly Salvatore. 

So Sally, with his dignity intact, became part of our family.  For the first few days, Ximena begged to feed him ten times a day.  We kept his bowl on the kitchen table, so we could watch him during dinner.  The girls giggled when he darted around.  We soon discovered that over-feeding Sally made his quart of water so cloudy it was hard to see the fish inside.  So feeding became a bit more restricted.  And we moved the bowl off the table onto the kitchen counter, because the cats would drink his water if the bowl was left out in the open.  And in the more restricted counter area, we could control his feeding better.

After a week or two, Ximena had completely moved on to other interests.  Xiomara still enjoyed feeding Sally for a little while longer.  But pretty soon, no one ever asked about feeding Sally, changing Sally's water, or basically giving Sally the time of day.  Sally became another job for me.  No big surprise there.  The girls managed to not forget him completely, though, because at dinner time every night, we'd name all the family members, first the humans, then Sally, then the cats. 

This morning Sally was dead.  When I went to the counter to start packing lunches, he was resting on the bottom of his bowl, upside down, with bad-looking stuff growing on his body.  I was a little surprised; I'd always expected to find him dead floating at the top of the bowl.  I felt sorry for him, thinking he must have been sick and suffered.

At dinner tonight, when we started singing our prayer/song where we name all the family members, I remembered that I needed to break the news.  After the song, I said, "Sally died."  Xiomara didn't take any notice, and Joe probably thought it was amusing.  But Ximena took it hard.  She cried and said she wished I hadn't told her; she didn't want to know.  She asked lots of questions.  She thought about what could have killed him (not enough food? germs from a research lab?).  She ran through dozens of "What if... ?" scenarios. She wanted to take him to the vet. She wanted some time alone with him.  She cried and cried.  "I want my Sally baaaaaaaaack!!"  She seemed so genuinely upset, I couldn't bring myself to remind her that she probably didn't care that much about Sally, since she never looked at or talked about him.  (Perhaps that was part of the emotional load? Guilt?)

Dinner conversation gradually moved beyond Sally.  We talked about what happened at school today.  The splinter in someone's finger.  I want more milk.  When Sally somehow came up again, Ximena started crying again and blaming us for making her remember.  She said she just wanted to forget.  She asked if I wanted to forget.  I said, no, I wanted to remember the good times with Sally.  We talked about why you'd want to remember someone after they're dead, what you do with a dead body, what happens to dead bodies underground.  We finally agreed that Ximena would draw a picture of Sally and write some words about Sally, and later on she'd look at it if she wanted to remember.  Or maybe we'd fold up the picture and put it under a rock in the garden.

As we cleaned up dinner and Joe got ready to bury Sally in the garden, Ximena said she wanted to look at him one more time. She did, and then Joe poured him into the hole he'd dug.  After he scooped some dirt on top, he said now we should all say a few nice words about Sally.  I said something, and then Joe started to say something, when Ximena wandered off, distracted by some other matter that popped into her mind.

After the ceremony, she cried and cried one more time, "I want my Sally baaaaack!" I hugged her and suggested we get started drawing that picture.  She brightened suddenly and jumped up to the table with her colored pencils and paper.  "What did Sally look like?" she asked, without a hint of irony.  I drew the outline for her and helped her pick out some appropriate colors.  As she was earnestly coloring in the shape with all kinds of elaborate detail, she whispered to herself, "I'm NEVER going to forget Sally."

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