Kelly The Fish, R.I.P.

We came home from church on Sunday to discover that our beloved betta fish, Kelly, had passed away.

Kelly, like most store-bought bettas, was male. However, when we brought Kelly home, one of the Aspies (I forget which one) insisted the fish was female and would not be persuaded otherwise. Well, when an Aspie digs in his heels, you pretty much have to decide if it's the hill you want to die on, and the gender of a fish was not the battle I wanted to fight. So we surrendered the hill and gave the fish the gender-neutral name of "Kelly."

Bagel was really upset. He cried for a solid hour, then off and on for the rest of the day. I told him Kelly was in Fishy Heaven now. We had Kelly's funeral Sunday evening in the downstairs bathroom. And then we had to quickly figure out the precise mechanism by which the toilet was connected to Fishy Heaven. (In case anyone's interested: the toilet drains into the sewer, the sewer drains into the sea, and the water evaporates from the sea and goes into the sky. Thankfully that explanation worked, and we didn't have to explain how Kelly's body would survive the evaporation process.)