In terms of the absolute By Laura J. Oliver

Easter is near, and although I no longer participate in an organized religion with an origin story, we have a brain bias to believe what we have grown up with—a homing instinct, perhaps. So, this is a resurrection story based on my Methodist upbringing —not the resurrection of God Incarnate, but of a family pet called Mr. Fish.

Is it silly? Well, it’s about a goldfish, so yes. But also no. If there is anything I’ve learned of late it is that there is no coincidence too subtle not to consider nominating for the extraordinary. We can’t be sort of pregnant, half-loved, or more perfect. While the U.S. Constitution refers to a ‘more perfect’ union, in reality, “perfect” is an absolute, like “always,” “never,” “all,” and “none.”

Like “miracle.”

When the kids were in elementary school, we bought them two goldfish. I’d had two goldfish in my youth—Tipper and Topper –who met a mysterious end I want to blame on the cat, but the evidence doesn’t support that theory. In the novel Lolita, Nabokov writes: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”  In deference to Nabokov, I’ll just say, “My very pretty goldfish died in a freak accident (hole, pencil) when I was six.”

But does any goldfish story have a happy ending? Stay with me. This may be a first.

In the uncanny way we recreate our own experiences for our children, I bought two goldfish for our kids. We set the bowl in the dining room, where I found Mrs. Fish floating belly up within days. But Mr. Fish lived! I removed his dead companion and cleaned out the bowl. A few days later, however, I slipped downstairs in search of my first hot cup of coffee and found Mr. Fish also belly up, eyes glazed and covered in some kind of spots.

I felt terrible. Unreasonably sad.

I’d been thinking about miracles, prayer, love, and possibility since Mrs. Fish died. Okay. All my life–or at least since Tipper and Topper bought it. So, I was alone in the dining room with a dead fish bobbing around in his glass bowl, saying a dead-fish prayer over his little spirit, when the thought popped into my head—What if to God death isn’t a thing?

What if it is all the same to God—it’s just that no one has asked or expressed a preference? What if there is no judgment over the worthiness of a request?

So I stood there and prayed, “God, if it’s all the same to you, please let Mr. Fish live.” I beamed my love, hope, and gratitude on his little floating body and left the room.

It was a spur-of-the-moment experiment—no risk and nothing to prove. Just a desire to understand the nature of limitations and love. Love of the kids, perhaps, more than the fish—but again, it may not matter. Love isn’t a need-based scholarship.

It was a pretty dining room with a fireplace in the next room visible from the cherry table and chairs under double windows, but as it was seldom used, no one else was aware of  Mr. F’s demise. The next morning, however, when I again slipped downstairs for my coffee, I peeked in the bowl where a fish had been floating, to see Mr. Fish swimming around submerged three inches underwater.

I’m stunned every time I lose someone I love—no matter how sick or how old, which must mean we actually never expect death, no matter what we say.

And it never fails that within a day or so of hearing news of a loss, I find myself thinking, “If I searched the whole world over…every continent and country, every mountain and valley; if I boarded a plane and flew to every corner of the earth right now, surely, I could find the person I lost. As if death doesn’t mean gone, it means elsewhere.

That thought experiment always ends with the realization that there are some things in this world you can’t work hard enough to earn, seek long enough to find. But maybe there are things available to us we have not attempted because we have deemed them too small, too frivolous—as if the creator of 100 billion galaxies can be too busy.

The stories of my youth and the rituals of my Methodist upbringing are permanently embedded in my mind and heart. In this season of Easter, I think of Mary Magdalene. Her grief, her devastation, her astonishment to find the boulder rolled away from the entrance to Jesus’s tomb and it empty.

I can feel her confusion and incredulity when she sees a man walking toward her whom she first mistakes for the gardener– with no idea he is Jesus until he calls her by name.

“Mary! Don’t you recognize me?”

And I can imagine her joy because, in my own small way, I have felt it, too, for people I’ve loved, lost, and found again. For miracles—which are neither great nor small, but absolute.

“Mary! You know who I am. Tell everyone.”

Our fish didn’t survive long after that—just three days, as I recall.

But he did live.

And I’ve waited 30 years to tell everyone.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.