Good Bye Darth Vader

Darth Vader passed away.....who knows when....it looked alive to me at a glance. But nevertheless it was dead and today we had his funeral....I was cleaning the kitchen and the dead fish was bugging me. I called the boys to meet me in the bathroom. I didn't get farther than, "We gather here this day to lay to rest our dear fish," when Lolo breaks down in tears. I was good and held back my chuckles.

We proceeded to say our goodbyes, one of us more tearful than others. And we gracefully poured out his tank, careful not to drop his rocks. But then he got stuck to the side of the glass and shaking the tank didn't help, actually it was a flower vase. His tank shattered to pieces when the boys dropped it on their way to take it to our neighbors house before we left for a road trip. Poor Darth...more than once he has fought for his life. I can imagine him flapping around on the sidewalk while the boys ran back to the house to get a cup of water for him. I didn't have another tank so we improvised with the glass vase. Anyway, back to the hear and now. We poured some water into his vase and swished it around and he finally went into his final resting place. I proceeded to flush the toilet. Lolo was distraught. The toilet? How can this be the right place? Fish love the water and this is the best place for him, I explained. He doesn't even know his body is down there. His spirit lives on in a better place. Lolo seemed to be o.k. with that. He returned to his room to mourn for a few more minutes. So tender. Not more than a couple hours later we replaced Darth with an ugly Goldfish that Lolo calls Goldy. It's so ugly, Toki said this during dinner...."Mom, the fish is so gross I'm going to throw up." Poor Goldy will no longer be invited to dinner. It really is a gross looking fish. He has one bulging eye, a swollen see through tummy, and is just flat out sickly looking. We really will miss Darth.