These Three Words Helped Me Understand My Father’s Death

It was a goldfish named Freddy. I overfed him. He hung on best he could but in the end, he ate so much he stopped moving. My mother told me the shocking trifecta of news; that this stillness is called death and that everything dies, even people, even people we know. You could say this is how I came to understand death. But it would be more true to say this is how my understanding of death began, with an experience that was decoded and framed by my mother.