I am grieving my goldfish dying. Am I weird?

When pets die, something is missing. So, when our goldfish is dying, we are missing the goldfish.

No one needs feeding anymore. Those little flakes on the surface of the water. Smelling slightly fishy. Our fish friends quickly swim to the surface and snap them up. One after the other. And then go back to swimming around. Doing their thing.

Maybe we have several goldfish. We know them so well. They all have individual names. We can tell them apart by the way the swim. By the way their colors are. By the way they hide behind the seaweed.

All of a sudden one of the goldfish is swimming with its belly up on the surface of the tank. It died.

We have to scoop it out of the tank and what now? Flush it down the toilet? Give it a burial in the garden?

Maybe the death of a goldfish does not have the same impact as the death of a dog or a cat. But it is a pet. We have cared for it. It died. Its death has meaning for those of us who cared for it.

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