Good Grief

Cynthia Moss was there as the family finally returned. Teresia came back minus half a tusk; perhaps it had been shattered by a bullet or had cracked as she was attempting to lift a family member who’d buckled. Trista was missing. Wendy was missing. Tania had three badly infected gun wounds: left shoulder, behind her left ear, and on her rump. She kept dusting and feeling her wounds with her trunk. Her breasts were shriveled, but her youngest son, still nursing age, was vigorous. He’d quickly learned to eat.

Cynthia was about to leave when Tania walked right up to her Land Rover window and stood there just looking at her. Touched and disturbed, Cynthia felt that Tania was trying to communicate her distress. There was nothing that Cynthia could do.

Tania recovered, and her son survived. Wendy’s suddenly weaned orphan survived in the protective company of her aunt Willa. Teresia lived to be about sixty-two years old.

Since Teresia’s birth, around 1922, the world had changed. During her lifetime it had filled with people and new machines. She lived through, but knew nothing of, the Great Depression, World War II, Nazi camps and Hiroshima; nor was she aware of the horrors of Burma, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam; nor the incomprehensible Apollo missions to the same moon by whose light she traveled; nor the swing era, jazz, or rock and roll; the civil rights movement passed her, and the women’s movement, and Silent Spring and the environmental movement. She spent the Cold War in the warmth of tropic sunshine and took no note Nelson Mandela’s struggles to liberate the humans of a country that had killed nearly all its elephants. On the time line of the world, her life overlapped all these things. She moved to an older, more constant rhythm. She was the oldest individual in the population when three Maasai spears struck her. The wounds went septic; about two weeks, later the infections killed her.

 

 

Few elephants nowadays live as long as did Teresia. To survive now, many elephants must abandon exactly the learned traditions and knowledge—the cultures—that have kept them alive: ancient migration routes and centuries-old, handed-down paths to known reserves of food and water, reserves that themselves are vanishing as people occupy and replace them.

Teresia experienced childhood in a world with more room. “There were many bright-green, sun-filled days,” Cynthia recalled, “with Teresia and the other youngsters … racing about, beating through bushes and tall grass, heads up, ears out, eyes open wide glinting with mischief … letting forth wild, pulsating play trumpets.” Of course, there were the bad days too, droughts and deaths. But that’s life; it can last like that, bad times notwithstanding, for a million years or more. Now, though, an elephant’s chance of being killed by a human is greater than their risk of death from any other cause.

 

 

Elephants die; we all do. To elephants and some others, it matters who has died. It’s why they are “who” animals. The crucial importance of memory, learning, and leadership in a family’s survival is why individuals matter. And so, death matters to the survivors. And they show it.

A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound emanated from a speaker hidden in a thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead elephant’s daughter called for days afterward. The researchers never again did such a thing.

 

 

Elephants’ response to death has been called “probably the strangest thing about them.” They almost always react to a dead elephant’s remains. Occasionally they react to a human’s. The remains or bones of other species, they ignore.

Joyce Poole writes, “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Vicki has seen it herself; she says it is “heart-stoppingly sad.” The elephants cautiously extend their trunks, touching the body gently, as if obtaining information. They run their trunk tips along the lower jaw and the tusks and the teeth: the parts that would have been most familiar in life and most touched during greetings—the most individually recognizable parts.

Cynthia told me of a wonderful matriarch named Big Tuskless. She died of natural causes, and a few weeks later Cynthia brought her jawbone to the research camp to determine her age at death. A few days after that, her family passed through the camp. There are several dozen elephant jaws on the ground in the camp, but the family detoured right to hers. They spent some time with it. They all touched it. And then all moved on, except one. After the others left, one stayed for a long time, stroking Big Tuskless’s jaw with his trunk, fondling it, turning it. He was Butch, Big Tuskless’s seven-year-old son. Was he remembering his mother’s face, imagining her scent, hearing her voice, thinking about her touch?

Nowadays humans immediately cart off every tusk. But in 1957, David Sheldrick wrote that elephants have “a strange habit of removing tusks from their dead comrades.” He noted “many instances” when elephants carried tusks weighing as much as a hundred pounds up to half a mile away. Iain Douglas-Hamilton once moved part of an elephant shot by a farmer to a different location. Soon a familiar family came along. When they caught the scent, they wheeled around and cautiously approached the body, drawing nearer with their trunks waving up and down, their ears half forward. Each seemed reluctant to be first to reach the bones. They advanced in a tight huddle, then began their detailed sniffing and close examination of the tusks. Some bones they rocked and gently rolled with their feet. Others, they clonked together. Some they tasted. Several individuals in turn rolled the skull. Soon all the elephants were investigating, many carrying bones away. George Adamson once shot a male elephant who had chased an official around his own garden. Local people butchered the animal for meat, then moved the carcass half a mile away. That night, elephants returned a shoulder blade and leg bone to exactly the spot where the elephant had fallen.

Elephants sometimes cover dead elephants with soil and vegetation, making them, I think, the only other animals who perform simple burials. Elephants have done the same with humans on several recorded occasions. When sport hunters shot a large male elephant, his companions surrounded his carcass. The hunters returned hours later to find that the others had not only covered their dead comrade with soil and leaves but had plastered his large head wound with mud.

 

 

Do elephants have a concept of death? Do they anticipate death? One day a few years ago, in Kenya’s beautiful Samburu National Reserve, a matriarch named Eleanor, ailing, collapsed. Another matriarch, Grace, rapidly approached her with facial glands streaming from emotion. Grace lifted Eleanor back fully onto her feet. But Eleanor soon collapsed again. Grace appeared very stressed, and continued trying to lift Eleanor. No success. Grace stayed with Eleanor as night fell. During the night, Eleanor died. The next day an elephant named Maui started rocking Eleanor’s body with her foot. During the third day, Eleanor’s body was attended by her own family, by another family, and by Eleanor’s closest friend, Maya, and again Grace was there. On the fifth day, Maya spent an hour and a half with Eleanor’s body. A week after her death, Eleanor’s family returned and spent half an hour with her. Recalling this to me, Iain Douglas-Hamilton used the word “grief.”

 

 

Do elephants really grieve? And can we really know? After a young elephant dies, its mother sometimes acts depressed for many days, slowly trailing far behind her family. When a female named Tonie gave birth to a stillborn baby, she stayed with her dead child for four days, alone in the heat, guarding it from the lions who wanted it. Eventually, she moved on.

Elephants sometimes carry sick or dead babies on their tusks. An Amboseli elephant transported a prematurely born, dying baby about five hundred yards into the cool seclusion of a grove of thick palms. Similarly, people have seen apes, baboons, and dolphins keep their dead babies with them for days. But is the mother really sad? Or is she simply carrying an infant a she would be carrying if it were alive? Answer: elephants and dolphins never carry healthy youngsters. It’s different.

In September 2010 off San Juan Island, Washington, people watched a killer whale push a dead newborn for six hours. If this whale understood death purely rationally, she should have just left it. But humans don’t simply leave dead babies, either. For us there is a concept of death, and also a feeling of grief. Our bonds are strong. We don’t want to let go. Their bonds, too, are strong. Perhaps they, too, don’t want to let go.

A few years ago on Long Island, a nursing-age young humpback whale, somehow ailing and alone, still alive, washed into the surf at Easthampton. Marge Winski, the lighthouse keeper at Montauk, fifteen miles away, told me that the night after the young humpback drifted ashore, she heard “incredibly mournful whale sounds.” When a free-living Atlantic spotted dolphin named Luna got permanently separated from her days-old infant in murky water in the presence of a large tiger shark, Denise Herzing wrote, “I had never heard a mother more vocally distressed.” When a captive dolphin named Spock suddenly died, his inseparable companion looked bewildered and lay lethargically on the bottom of her pool for days, rising only to breathe. After nearly a week she resumed eating and began socializing. Maddalena Bearzi writes, “A grieving dolphin mother may seek seclusion, away from her group, but in this time of grief, she might be visited by a group of her peers, perhaps coming to check on her, as we humans often do when someone we know is bereaved.”

 

 

So: do other animals really grieve? To continue this discussion with intelligence and clarity, we need a more scientific definition of grief. Anthropologist Barbara J. King provides one. To qualify as grieving, surviving individuals who knew the deceased must alter their behavioral routine. They might eat or sleep less, or act listless, or agitated. They might attend their friend’s corpse. King’s definition of grief is quite useful. Yet science thrives best on things that can be measured. Sadness is not a pound lighter than grief, and mourning isn’t two yards shorter than happiness. In humans these emotions grade, and sometimes come and go. And they seem to grade in non-humans, too. A person might miss several days of work following the death of a parent or sibling; mourners might attend a wake for a day or two; and an elephant family might for several days return to the body of the deceased. Later, the humans might visit the grave. Ditto the elephants. The trajectory of human lives may be permanently altered by death of a key family member. Ditto, again, elephants, wolves, apes …

In a zoo in Philadelphia in the 1870s lived two inseparable chimpanzees. “After the death of the female,” the keeper wrote, “the remaining one made many attempts to rouse her, and when he found this to be impossible his rage and grief were painful to witness.… The ordinary yell of rage … finally changed to a cry which the keeper of the animals assures me he had never heard before … hah-ah-ah-ah-ah, uttered somewhat under the breath, and with a plaintive sound like a moan.… He cried for the rest of the day. The day following, he sat still most of the time and moaned continuously.” More than a century later at the Yerkes Research Center, a chimpanzee named Amos remained in his nest while the others went outside. The others kept returning indoors to check on Amos. A female named Daisy gently groomed the soft spot behind his ears and stuffed soft bedding behind his back as a nurse might arrange a patient’s pillows. Amos died the next day. For days afterward the others acted subdued, eating little. Two male chimpanzees in Uganda had for years been inseparable allies. When one died, the other, who’d been sociable and high-ranking, “just didn’t want to be with anybody for several weeks,” said researcher John Mitani. “He seemed to go into mourning.”

Patricia Wright studies Madagascar’s primates, called lemurs (pronounced LEE-murz). Pat says that when a lemur dies, “For the whole family, it’s a tragedy.” She detailed for me what she observed after a catlike mongoose called a fossa killed a sifaka lemur: “After the fossa left, the family returned. His mate gave the ‘lost’ call over and over. When sifakas are really lost they give it less often and it’s higher and more energetic. But this was a low whistle, mournful, haunting, over and over.” The other members of the group, all sons and daughters of the dead male, also gave “lost” calls while viewing the corpse from just above it, in tree branches fifteen to thirty feet off the ground. Over five days, the lemurs returned to the body fourteen times.

Professor and behavioral ecologist Joanna Burger’s Amazon parrot, Tiko, used to spend time in the company of Joanna’s mother-in-law while she was living with them during her last year of life. During the elder woman’s final month, Tiko would try to prevent the hospice people from touching her. If they merely wanted to take her temperature, he’d attack them; he had to be moved to his room while they were there. In her last week, Tiko spent the days sitting by her head as she lay there sick, guarding her. “He barely wanted to leave to eat,” Joanna explained. The night the woman died, after her body was removed from the house, Joanna says, “Tiko spent a lot of the night screaming from his room, where he’d never before made a sound at night, no matter what was going on downstairs.” For months, Tiko would spend hours on the bed that his elderly human acquaintance had used.

 

 

Grief is not just a response to death. Sometimes people we know die but we don’t grieve. Sometimes people we love decide to walk out of our lives, and though they remain alive, we grieve. We simply terribly miss them. Knowing them changed our lives, and losing them changes our lives. Grief isn’t solely about life or death; it’s mostly about loss of companionship, loss of presence. Barbara J. King says that when two or more animals have shared a life, “Grief results from love lost.”

Is “love” really the right word? If an elephant sees her sister and calls to maintain contact, or a parrot sees its mate and wants to be nearer, some feeling of the bond makes it seek closeness. One word we use for the feeling behind our desire for closeness is “love.” Elephants and birds don’t feel their love for one another the way I feel my love, but the same is true of my own friends, my mother, my wife, my stepdaughter, and my next-door neighbors. Love isn’t one thing, and human love isn’t all identical in quality or intensity. But I believe that the word that labels ours also labels theirs. Love, as they say, is many splendored. “Love” probably is the right word.

 

 

Various non-humans do not seem to miss dead companions and family members—but is that because they don’t, or because we’re not watching, or because we miss the signs? Who can watch a gull or a mongoose until its mate dies and then observe it for weeks afterward? (Or in the case of albatrosses, the years before they court and bond with another mate?) Stories of grief in free-living creatures are rare and anecdotal, because natural death is seldom seen. Most of the world does its living and dying away from human eyes. Pet owners, on the other hand, have many stories of cats who wail and remain lethargic for weeks, of depressed bunnies, of dogs who visit a companion’s grave or continue going to the train station daily for years to await a deceased person’s return, and on and on. A friend tells me that when one of her two bearded dragon lizards died, the survivor hardly moved for a couple of weeks, then resumed a more normal level of activity. Is it possible that even a lizard might miss a companion?

I have almost never observed what happens when another animal loses its mate. But my wife and I had two ducks, raised together since ducklinghood, who lived with our four chickens. The birds often wandered our yard together, but the ducks were inseparable. They bathed together and, in season, mated. One day, both ducks suddenly fell ill. A day later, the drake, Duck Ellington, died. Our female (Thelonius Duck, a.k.a. Beeper), recovered. But for days she wandered the yard, the ivy beds, the bushes, calling and searching. Grief? Sorrow? She certainly missed her companion, her mate. Eventually she stopped searching and cast her lot fully with the chickens, becoming the odd duck. I am not sure how it felt to her, but she clearly missed him and had been trying to find him. And eventually she just had to get on with life—as we must. Individually such anecdotes are weak, prone to misinterpretation, and unconvincing. Yet collectively—they add up.

As with humans, certain individuals take particular losses hard. In 1990, the killer whale matriarch Eve died in the Pacific Ocean off Canada, at age fifty-five. Her sons Top Notch and Foster circled Hanson Island, calling and calling. For the first time in their lives—Top Notch was thirty-three years old—their mother did not return their calls. The two brothers spent days visiting and revisiting the places their mother had been during the last days of her life. Faithfulness, longing. Grief. Dame Daphne Sheldrick, who has half a century’s experience with orphan elephants, told me quite matter-of-factly, “An elephant can die of grief.” She’s seen it happen. Daphne says that from her fifty years of raising orphaned elephants, she has learned this: “To understand an elephant, one must be ‘anthropomorphic,’ because elephants are emotionally identical to ourselves. They grieve and mourn the loss of a loved one just as deeply as do we, and their capacity for love is humbling.”

 

 

But even if we accept that they grieve, do they really grieve “just as deeply as do we”? Just how deeply do we grieve? Consider a human wake: A day or two of gathering. The grandkids and adult children present, the relatives, friends; the colleagues sharing a joke and business cards; the young woman whose black dress seems calculated to take one’s mind off sadness; the hole that heals and the pain that never leaves. The lives changed, and those unaffected. What is “human grief”? There is no such thing. Like human love, human grief is many things, of differing intensities, in many minds. And not exclusively humans’.

 

 

Grief doesn’t require understanding death. Humans certainly grieve, but they disagree on what death is. People learn widely varying traditional beliefs—in heaven, hell, karmic reincarnation, and other devices for keeping the deceased undead. The main thing humans seem to believe about death is: you never really die. Some believe that we simply end, ceasing to exist. But most people find that notion inconceivable. “I believe in life everlasting” are words I was taught to repeat in church. So when a chimpanzee or dolphin carries its dead baby, does it understand any less about death than does the pope? When an elephant fondles the bones of its dearly departed, does it understand more?

 

 

Fully two years after Teresia’s death from being speared, Cynthia saw Tallulah, Theodora, and their younger family members “being silly”—floppy-running through bushes, pirouetting round with tails curled, plunging into water and amusing themselves by making waves and splashing. They had recovered from Teresia’s death “and were once again,” as Cynthia put it, “the sprightly, often whimsical elephants that I remembered and loved so much.”