How Animals Grieve (22 page)

Like a hall of mirrors, an obituary illuminates in our imagination not only the person now lost, but also a life that echoes (and echoes again) across time and space. In it we read the names of those who died before and of the survivors, the past and future in unbroken continuity.
Dandelion Wine
, Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece portrait of one boy’s summer
in
1928 small-town Illinois, captures this life-within-death theme. One hot night, twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding comes to grasp death’s inevitability when he releases a jarful of fireflies to evanescent freedom. “Douglas watched them go,” Bradbury writes. “They departed like the pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. They went like the few remaining shreds of warm hope from his hand.”

Douglas’s dying grandmother imparts a lesson to him that resonates with us today. Douglas sits on her bed in the family home. He cries, knowing that soon she will leave him forever. She tells him:

Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.

There’s a phrase to arrest the heart:
No person ever died that had a family
. It is as apt for an animal who dies without an obituary as for a person who dies with one. People often commemorate an animal’s loss by coming together in some type of symbolic ritual, as we saw in
chapter 10
with the German polar bear Knut, on a national scale, and the cat Tinky, on a family-and-friends scale. We fix memories of these special creatures in our minds, and pass them along to others in our generation and the next.

And sometimes, animal
are
memorialized in obituaries. The only obituary I have yet written was for an ape. When the chimpanzee Washoe died in 2007 at age forty-two, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) asked me to compose a notice for its monthly newsletter. Based on her groundbreaking accomplishments learning signs and phrases in American Sign Language, Washoe was judged by the AAA to be a figure of importance to its members. Impressed by the slightly transgressive nature of this request, and agreeing with the AAA’s assessment of Washoe’s stature, I wrote the obituary.

Wild-caught in West Africa, Washoe as a youngster was brought to the United States. She eventually came to live with psychologists, first Beatrix and Allen Gardner and then Roger Fouts, at a number of
academic
institutions including the University of Oklahoma, where, as a graduate student, I met her. Washoe overturned species-bound assumptions about who can deploy language to communicate and who can’t. Growing up immersed in human culture, Washoe learned a modified American Sign Language. She signed creatively, as when she coined the phrase “open food drink” for “refrigerator,” and she molded the hands of her adopted son Loulis so that he too would learn signs. Going well beyond the expression of simple desire for favorite foods, Washoe conversed with those around her, as when she expressed empathy for Fouts, her closest human friend, when he had broken his arm.

The page layout for the January 2008 issue of
Anthropology News
that contains Washoe’s obituary is a study in boundary maintenance. Across two facing pages in the “Rites of Passage” section are death notices for five accomplished anthropologists, aged fifty-seven to ninety-four. Turn the page and there, all on its own above the “Kudos” section that congratulates AAA members for honors received, sits my little article. “Also Noted,” the headline reads: “Washoe, age 42.” In this way, a nonhuman animal is included with anthropological luminaries, but by physical placement and subtle use of language she is, at the same time, kept apart. This editorial decision I can understand. Were you the spouse, or child, of an anthropologist who had recently died, would you welcome the sight of his life story and photograph pushed right up against Washoe’s, who appears with her simian face and robust brow ridge? (Well yes, I would, but that’s likely a minority view.)

Constrained by space, I failed to include in the obituary any mention of Washoe’s survivors, notably her son Loulis. Yet I did address her legacy, the past-to-future continuity of which the fictional Douglas Spaulding’s grandmother spoke, albeit in another way:

As with a human, it is impossible to sum up Washoe’s life by reference to academic debates and publications. Her personality (and her well-known interest in shoes and shoe catalogs!) made her a unique individual. Messages from Australia, Belgium, Italy, Mexico and elsewhere, posted on a memorial page for Washoe, reveal her impact on persons around the globe. Reading these tributes, one gets the sense that Washoe’s enduring legacy comes not from the number of signs she could be said to ac
quire,
or whether those signs amounted to language. Rather, it relates to how she caused people to think hard about the dividing line between apes and people, indeed, about the very notion of ape personhood.

Animals like Washoe who live in the public eye may catalyze shifts in our thinking about what makes a human being, but not an ape or dolphin, deserving of the term “person.” Flo, arguably the most famous wild chimpanzee in history, had the same effect. Through Jane Goodall’s early dispatches from Tanzania, Flo’s maternal skill and inexhaustible patience with her babies and her juvenile son Flint captured the public’s imagination. When Flo died in 1972, her obituary appeared in the
Times
of London.

When animal celebrities die, few people seem to object to a newspaper’s stretching its “obituary” category to include them. When it comes to obituaries for our pets or other companion animals, the response may be quite different. Anthropologist Jane Desmond has written about the power of such obituaries to subvert the animal-human boundary and thus to unnerve a healthy segment of the human population. Some years ago in the
Iowa City Press-Citizen
, Desmond’s local newspaper at the time, an obituary was printed for a black Labrador named Bear—the first animal obituary published by the paper. Bear, who frequently walked along, and napped on, the town streets, had been known to many people. Even so, that brief obituary, writes Desmond, “became the cause of bitter debate” in the community. Especially offended was a woman named Sue Dayton, whose sister-in-law’s obituary had appeared on the same page as Bear’s. Discord erupted in the town as words like “distasteful” and “disrespectful” were hurled around to describe Bear’s printed memorial.

Desmond considers why a published obituary should incite such negative emotions when other customs that honor deceased pets do not. Through physical or virtual pet cemeteries, or online memorial pages for beloved animals, people cordially share their pet memorials with others of a similar mind. Newspaper obituaries, by contrast, are a highly visible matter of public record. “They do not have to be sought out specifically,” Desmond writes, “but rather land on our table, in the news pages flopping open by the bacon and eggs, inserting themselves into every household.” Because they openly announce that a pet was part
of
a family, and bring legitimacy to mourning a pet as a family member, obituaries for animals push up against the definition of “family” in ways that may be quite upsetting for some people. Writing for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, columnist Betty Cuniberti lamented the pet-obituary practice by imagining “a sorrowful son opening our newspaper to look for his mother’s obituary and finding her picture next to one of a hamster.” Like Desmond, I think that Cuniberti’s choice of a hamster was calculated to mock the idea of pet obituaries.

The pet obituary, then, upsets some of us while comforting others. I’m inclined to find comfort in any animal obituary. It’s the animals themselves, not their obituaries, who trample an assumed animal-human boundary. This is as true with grief behavior as it is with cognitive accomplishments such as tool use or cooperative problem-solving. We know this from bereaved monkeys with their strong physiological response to loss, from the cat who wails in grief for her lost sister, from the horses who circle the grave of a deceased friend, from the buffalo who diverted their course to be with the bones of a lost female, and from the elephants who turn loved ones’ bones over and over in their trunks. Desmond gets it right when she says, “As with humans, pet obituaries assign value to a life, define its highlights, extol socially validated accomplishments, and serve as models of living.”

Assign value to a life
. The language of the obituary is not the language of other animals. But doesn’t that phrase capture precisely what animals do when they grieve? They assign value to a life once lived, a life now mourned.

14

WRITING GRIEF

This is shock to me—that the unremitting cold of the season of Ray’s death—New Jersey sky like a pot carelessly scoured, twilight easing up out of the drab earth by late afternoon—is yielding by slow degrees to spring.

The widow doesn’t want change. The widow wants the world—time—to have ended.

As the widow’s life—she is certain—has ended.

JOYCE CAROL OATES,
A Widow’s Story

Inside me [some weeks after my wife Aura’s death], lodged between spine and sternum, I felt a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead, that’s how I visualized it, holding dead air, like the unstirred air inside an elevator shaft in a long-abandoned building. I thought I understood what it was, and told myself, The people who feel this way all the time are the ones who commit suicide.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN,
Say Her Name

Memoirs of mourning have exploded, these last few years, into the white light of publishing fame. These are no third-person scholarly tomes about people’s responses to death across time or among different cultures. Books like that, with their restrained prose and orderly footnotes, can be found on the shelves of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians.

I refer to a different genre altogether: those shatteringly personal, I-mourn-my-loved-one-here-before-your-eyes memoirs, books that penetrate into our hearts because we know that, at some point in our lives, we too will become experts on their subject in the way we dread
most.
(As a writer, I’m choosing to focus on literary grief. In the third chapter of
The Nature of Grief
, John Archer expands this focus to review grief in film, the visual arts, and music as well as a different set of literary works.)

When grief slams into a life, the background hum of daily routine vanishes. “Grief has no distance,” writes Joan Didion in
The Year of Magical Thinking,
her memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” Writers, people who have spent their lives making meaning through the flow of words on the page, recover some of that dailiness by binding some of their grief to paper.

The genre itself is hardly new. C. S. Lewis wrote
A Grief Observed
in 1961. By that time, Lewis was “the most popular spokesman for Christianity in the English-speaking world,” as one documentary noted. For decades, he had lived a don’s intellectual life, and the life of a bachelor. Then Joy Davidman Gresham, an American poet and novelist, wrote to him from across the sea. Probing her own atheism, indeed beginning to leave behind her atheism, Gresham was drawn to Lewis’s Christian perspective. Eventually Gresham and Lewis met. Relating to each other only cerebrally at first, they eventually fell in love. Lewis’s intellectual equal—for that is what he considered Gresham—now brought him the very emotion for which she was named.

By the time the two married in 1956, Joy’s cancer diagnosis had already intruded upon their lives. Her death came only four years later.
A Grief Observed
was published the following year, under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk. In the text, Joy is referred to as “H.” (her legal name was Helen). Later, the book was reissued under Lewis’s name, and by then everyone knew who “H.” really was. Lewis’s initial circumspection, his strong desire for privacy as he shared his wildest emotions and unwonted doubts, is a point I will revisit in a moment.

Based on jottings in four notebooks that he kept after Joy’s death,
A Grief Observed
showcases a brilliant mind at once both blunted and sharpened by grief. A powerful cry arises from the first few pages. It’s not a loss of faith in God that’s the problem, Lewis writes, it’s the revelation that he now believes “dreadful things” about God. He anguishes too
over
what he considers to be the inevitable dimming in his mind of the real Joy: “Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.”

It’s here, I think, that the human experience of grief begins to depart from that of other animals. Joy’s death plunges Lewis into new anxieties, and a broad reassessment of what he thought he knew and believed. In grief’s grasp, he relentlessly revisits the past and anticipates the future. He wrestles with questions that have no answer. Interestingly, in this context, he also remarks about “that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’
” Lewis assumes that our species alone is capable of self-transcendence and awe in the face of the unknowable. He may be right, but I don’t wish to assume that no other self-aware animals experience a glimmer of spiritual feeling. Jane Goodall, for one, famously thinks that chimpanzees may have their spiritual moments, based on their behavior at rushing waterfalls. Indeed, she goes further than I would in suggesting that chimpanzees as are spiritual as humans but lack a way to analyze or describe their awe and wonder. Chimpanzees’ rock-hurling, vine-swinging displays at waterfalls (“the rain dance”) impress me less in this regard than do their moments of quiet reflection, when their eyes track the falling water and they seem lost in thought.