Farewell to a Fish

Farewell to a Fish

Oh, Faramir, your lot was clear: to bring us golden bliss.
Six weeks, alas, would scarcely pass ere something went amiss.
We watched you flutter your bright fins and wait upon your food;
My memory of you must not be of your last, darkened mood.

No, let me rather think on days when you were filled with zest
For flakes and bowl, for water clean (you know we did our best).
But, in the end, our wisdom failed: you sickened, and you died.
No healing touch of king had I; yet, Faramir, I tried.

And will we get another fish? But, no, thought cannot bear
To fill your empty bowl so soon: we’ll wait ’til next year’s fair?
For now, the bowl we’ll stow away–the pebbles and the net;
We’ll bury you beneath the clay, but we will not forget.

So, Faramir, float gently down into this leaf-strewn mere:
A final voyage for steward’s son upon a golden bier.

by Sandra Fleming / Copyright @2017

As you will gather from this tribute, our goldfish Faramir, whose arrival was described here and whose exploits were chronicled here, passed away over the weekend. Saturday morning, my son put a Tetra Flake in Faramir’s bowl before leaving to play chess in a Halloween tournament. Fittingly, my son dressed up as Aragorn, who, like Faramir, is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings; Aragorn is the stalwart Ranger who eventually becomes King of Gondor. My son had named our goldfish Faramir after the younger brother of Boromir, who is part of the Fellowship of the Ring. Boromir and Faramir are the sons of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who rules Minas Tirith in the absence of a king. Boromir, the older brother, dies defending Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers. Later in The Two Towers, Faramir appears and aids Frodo and Sam. In The Return of the King, Faramir is injured; he develops a high fever and is rescued from a funeral pyre by the quick actions of Pippin and Beregond, a guard. Near death, Faramir is saved by Aragorn, who, as King of Gondor, has power to heal.

Is this his Viggo Mortensen face or his don’t-take-my-picture face?

When I came home from taking pictures at the chess tournament, I noticed that Faramir was very still—too still for a fish that has always been active; typically, he swims to the surface when he sees one of us coming with the bright orange container of fish flakes. He did not swim up on Saturday. In fact, he was motionless, and I saw his breakfast flake floating, untouched, in his bowl. Alas, I am no king of Gondor and do not have the power to resuscitate even a goldfish. I changed his water multiple times, tried a salt-water bath, and even massaged him, per the directions that I found online. When my husband and son got home, I asked my husband to try to open Faramir’s gills, which was one of the suggestions, but to no avail. Fortunately, my son had done well at the tournament, winning all his games and tying for a first-place trophy, so he was in good spirits when we broke the news to him.

Even though my son named Faramir, I developed an affection for this foundling of a fish, whom we acquired at the fair. I suspect his sudden death may have been because of a change in the type of water we used? We switched from distilled water to spring water after I read an article that suggested goldfish would benefit from the minerals in spring water. At first, he seemed fine, but we didn’t consistently buy the same brand of spring water. As I’ve subsequently learned, spring water varies greatly, and the Great Value spring water may well have had bacteria or parasites that made Faramir sick. At any rate, he hadn’t been very active for the past few days; when I went to feed him lunch on Saturday, I realized that Faramir was unlikely to ever eat a flake again.

I took this photo of Faramir on Wednesday, October 25, to document his apparent depression. By Saturday afternoon, he was gone.

A week or so before his death, my sister had half-jokingly shared an article with me about how fish can get depressed. Earlier in the week, Faramir was hanging out at the bottom of the bowl, and I wondered if he was depressed. We didn’t have time to move him to the tank, so we continued our routine—three flakes each day, water change every few days. Here I thought I was doing the best thing for the goldfish in switching to the spring water, but, as I so often do when I look up something on the internet, I quickly read one article and stopped. On Saturday I remembered these apt lines from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism”: “A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; / There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” The irony of Pope’s warning to avoid “Spring” water was not lost on me.

It rained heavily Saturday afternoon and evening, and we put off dealing with Faramir. On Sunday, my daughter had invited a friend over, so it seemed courteous to remove the fish bowl. Then my husband had a brilliant idea; some of you LOTR (Lord of the Rings) fans might appreciate his suggestion. He said, “Since Faramir was Boromir’s brother, perhaps it would be fitting for him to go over the Falls of Rauros, too?” He was referring to the way that Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli had put the fallen Boromir into an elven-made boat, which floated over the Falls of Rauros and down the River Anduin to the sea. Giving Faramir’s namesake a waterfall send-off seemed appropriate. Conveniently, we have a water feature with a tiny waterfall in our back yard—hardly the Falls of Rauros but something.

We went out by the pond—it was very windy yesterday, and we even saw snowflakes. After I read my hastily penned elegy, I quoted Pope’s lines about “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Nothing went as planned. My husband videoed both the reading of the poem and the floating of the leaf, but he kept the camera on me rather than on the fish; also, Faramir fell off the leaf immediately and drifted under the falls. Ultimately, we buried him near the pond. I apologize if this over-the-top funeral for a fish seems macabre, but somehow the pomp and circumstance were helpful. I do miss seeing Faramir swimming eagerly up in his bowl every morning.

At least my son isn’t too sad about Faramir’s death, although he no longer has a pet to work with on his Pet Merit Badge for scouts. He wants a dog, and a fish—even a gallant goldfish like Faramir—proved a poor substitute.

From The Two Towers:

Now they laid Boromir in the middle of the boat that was to bear him away. The grey hood and elven-cloak they folded and placed beneath his head. They combed his long dark hair and arrayed it upon his shoulders. The golden belt of Lórien gleamed about his waist. His helm they set beside him, and across his lap they laid the cloven horn and the hilts and shards of his sword; beneath his feet they put the swords of his enemies. Then fastening the prow to the stern of the other boat, they drew him out into the water. They rowed sadly along the shore, and turning into the swift-running channel they passed the green sward of Parth Galen. The steep sides of Tol Brandir were glowing: it was now mid-afternoon. As they went south the fume of Rauros rose and shimmered before them, a haze of gold. The rush and thunder of the falls shook the windless air.

Sorrowfully they cast loose the funeral boat: there Boromir lay, restful, peaceful, gliding upon the bosom of the flowing water. The stream took him while they held their own boat back with their paddles. He floated by them, and slowly his boat departed, waning to a dark spot against the golden light; and then suddenly it vanished. Rauros roared on unchanging. The River had taken Boromir son of Denethor, and he was not seen again in Minas Tirith, standing as he used to stand upon the White Tower in the morning. But in Gondor in after-days it long was said that the elven-boat rode the falls and the foaming pool, and bore him down through Osgiliath, and past the many mouths of Anduin, out into the Great Sea at night under the stars.