A Fish Tale

The so called immortal fish has actually died. . .we think it has anyway. We were beginning to wonder if this fish really was immortal as it has definitely outlived the normal life span of its kind. You see this fish has gone through 3 families. The first family had it for 3 years, then passed it on to a loving family with a too loving little boy who tried to feed it PB & J sandwiches. She kindly passed the fish to us (at the time there were two fish) when Hailey was just a baby. Adding all those years up, that makes this fish around 11 years old. It's been a neglected little thing, sometimes underfed when we forgot about him, sometimes overfed when two different friends noticed him and both fed him while we were out of town. Somehow he managed to live through it all. Then he amazed us even more.

You see he died two weeks ago. At least by every account he seemed dead. He was just laying there on the bottom of the tank for a couple of days. He never moved out of the spot, didn't come up to eat, or even flip a fin when we turned on the light for him. He was laying on his side and seemed dead by all accounts. Jon and I had noticed but we were waiting for the kids to notice. Hailey finally saw it on day 3 of him laying there. She said, "mom I think the fish is dead" and then she tapped on the glass and suddenly the fish started jolting around the tank crazily. It resumed normal swimming a couple of minutes later and then seemed as normal as ever for the next two weeks. I swear it came back from the dead. So, this last time when it "looked" dead, we wanted to make sure so we left it laying on the bottom of the tank for almost a week. It looks dead as a doornail. It's not moving when we tap on the glass. I think it's really dead this time.