Ira Sukrungruang

Passed Away

I tell my four-year-old son his fish RB has passed away. I say “passed away” because “died” and “dead” contain the same hard sound at the beginning and end of the word, expressing something irrevocable, something that will erase the possibility of RB swimming back into our lives, his indigo fins swishing elegantly in the water. So instead, I say, “Bodhi, RB passed away.”  

On the TV, the cartoon movie Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown is on. Charlie Brown sits in the classroom and the teacher talks to him in non-sensical sounds. Mwah, mwah, mwah. This is what I feel like now. A mush mouth of words.   

Bodhi runs to the tank. He does this every morning and night to feed his fish. It’s his job, and he takes it seriously. “Good morning, RB,” he says. “Good night, RB,” he says. And RB, at the sight of him swims to the front of the tank, expecting his friend to drop flakes of food. I always wonder about the life of fish, to live in a world where food drops from the sky.  

My son taps the glass gently; everything about fish needs to be gentle. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of fish, as he does about the birds at our feeders, as he does about the K-pop band BTS. He has stored away all of this knowledge in the past few months, unable to leave home. Our days have become about fish and birds and K-pop. RB is named after the rapper in BTS, RM, whose dimples, my wife Deedra says, you can drown in.

Deedra is better at this. She has gone through dead fish and hamsters and cockatiels and gerbils. She has flushed, buried, and discarded. She has had to explain to her daughters the delicate nature of life. Bodhi is our first, my only.   

RB floats in the corner among tendrils of plastic seaweed. It is as if the purple and green tips bolster him up to the artificial sun above.

“He’s just sleeping,” Bodhi says. His round face is hopeful, cheeks red from the cold in the room.

“He isn’t,” I say.

“He’ll wake up soon.”

“I’m sorry, bud.”

RB’s mouth puckers against the tank, bulbous eyes shut. His indigo fins sway in the round tank. He doesn’t look dead. He looks as if he’s entered an inverted world, in a dream state, and we are the ones upside down.

The winter light streams into the room. The sun is out after days behind clouds. It lights my son up in his zebra pajamas, standing against a light blue wall, his shadow cast behind him. He stares up at his mother and then at me and then at RB. His eyes say this is a lie. One of Daddy’s tricks. Daddy often plays tricks like this. Like pretending to be asleep. Like when he fakes his finger is cut off. Like the trick the country is playing on us all. This trick that has sent him home from preschool, makes him wear a mask wherever he goes, apply hand sanitizer after touching anything, and wave at his friends from behind fences. Like the trick where 4,142 people have “passed away” in Ohio yesterday, 2 million in the world.

2 million + a fish.  

It is a very bad trick.

Bodhi’s face crumples. His mouth twists. His mother pulls him into her. He drowns his face into her shoulder. She soothes him. Rocks him. Tells him it’s OK.

I break watching him. I break over a fish. I break under the weight of numbers. The number of deaths in a day. The number of days in a house. The number of ways to entertain a boy who is constantly by my side. The number of times I wash my hands until they are dry and flaking. The number of times I’ve canceled trips to Thailand to see my aging mother. The number of times I’ll get to see her before she too passes away. The number on the digital thermometer. The number of ways to avoid saying death, dying, dead, died because to say these words is an invitation for death to make a place in our house when it is everywhere already.

It’s only a fish.

But it isn’t.

“Do you want to have a funeral?” Deedra says.

Bodhi, tear-streaked, nods, and then asks, “What’s a funeral?”

“It’s when we say good-bye.”

He nods again. “A funeral.”

Deedra scoops RB into a net and cups the dripping water in her other hand. We walk to the toilet and gather around it. This isn’t a fancy funeral. It is two parents in sweatpants and their four-year-old son in his pajamas looking into a toilet. Deedra dumps RB in. When he hits the water, he makes a soft plop. For a second, I think this has been a big trick on all of us. That RB will start swimming big round circles in the big round toilet.  

I hold my son’s hand. It’s sticky from sweat and tears and snot.

“Do you want to say something?” I say.

“Good-bye, RB,” and because we are Buddhist and have talked to Bodhi about reincarnation, he adds, “See you in the next life.”

“What do you hope RB comes back as?” I say.

Bodhi doesn’t take his eyes off the toilet bowl. He won’t even after his mother flushes it, and RB disappears. For the next few days, he will return to the toilet to see if RB has come back, refusing to use it in case he does. He will ask where do fish go in toilet funerals, and when we tell him the ocean, he furrows his brow in skepticism. He will ask if this is what is happening to people now, passing away, and we will tell him it is. He will want to know more and more and more, and no matter how much I want to protect him, I know I can’t. We can’t. We can’t protect anyone. Not even fish.

But my son knows one thing. He knows what RB will come back as.

“My fish.”

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other mediations, Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com) and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.