How Animals Grieve (23 page)

Goodall’s thoughts aside, it’s clear that Lewis, or any one of us humans, grapples with grief in ways fundamentally different from the ways other animals do. In drawing such a stark dichotomy, I may seem to break with the tenor of the stories in this book. Yet as I noted in the prologue, to acknowledge that we humans think and feel differently from other living creatures need not amount to a manifesto of human superiority. To any such dismissive claim, the stories collected here shout a decisive “No!” We humans aren’t superior to other animals because we grieve differently, any more than a self-aware animal like a dolphin is superior to an animal, like a goat, who is less able to reflect upon her own life.

Why shouldn’t our grief be different? Evolutionary theory predicts species-specific behaviors in each animal. We humans don’t erupt into displays of aggression around dead bodies as chimpanzees may; chimpanzees don’t tell each other stories about the dead. Oh yes,
chimpanzees
may communicate with each other about a death in some way—we’re only beginning to ask those questions. But they aren’t the storytellers that we are, passing down elaborate narratives about our grandparents and parents to our children and grandchildren. Does that mean our grief is deeper than the grief of chimpanzees? Questions like this one miss the point. We each are what we are, animals bound together by our various ways of grieving.

Some self-aware animals, including great apes, elephants, and cetaceans, do remember past events and plan for future ones. Perhaps when individuals of these species mourn, they replay in their minds memories of time spent with the loved one. If so, those memories may not take on the vivid specificity that ours do, primed and sustained by the language in our heads: the sun-ripened image of a picnic in the forest, or the skin-on-skin feel of snuggling together on a cool morning. As the writer Temple Grandin argues, other animals’ thoughts may be visual and impressionistic, less precise than ours about time and place and more invested in the cocoon of feeling that memory brings on. Do animals dwell on their sadness, closing their eyes at night aware that the blanket of grief will still be there at dawn? The answer is probably no. A Sisyphean sense that grief will be our partner, today, and tomorrow requires a faculty of self-examination that is beyond the ability of any species but our own.

The terrible power of this kind of self-knowledge can be found in Lewis’s
A Grief Observed
. “I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get,” Lewis writes. “The old life, the old jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.” I get the sense, though, that Lewis desired less to report the contours of his grief than to tunnel deeper inside himself by writing about it. Recall that Lewis hid his identity when he first wrote the book. In this way, his book stands apart from many memoirs in the contemporary grief genre. Lewis didn’t set out to make a public, wild lament, and his grief touches me more deeply as a result.

Lewis says something very interesting near the end of
A Grief Observed
: “Passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them.” To turn a room into a shrine, to honor the death anniversary, to keep the dead one ever fresh and present in mind—paradoxically, this
only
distances us from the reality of the person who is lost to us. In a similar way, maybe, a highly passionate expression of grief in a memoir estranges the reader from the dead person and the mourner alike. Perhaps this is why I’m drawn most to the books that avoid a relentlessly raw, bewildered, stream-of-consciousness voice. And make no mistake, many grief memoirs can be described in those terms. Writing in the
Guardian
in 2011, Frances Stonor Saunders likens the grief memoirists to the hired mourners of the ancient Greek chorus, “renting their garments and generally disheveling.” She slams the “metaphysical platitude, repetition, obsession, incoherence” in these books.

But it’s not only Lewis who refuses the loud flail. Roger Rosenblatt’s daughter collapsed and died on a treadmill at age thirty-eight, altering forever the lives of her husband, three children, two brothers, and parents. In
Making Toast
, Rosenblatt writes:

Carl, John, and I had stood together on the deck in Bethesda the day after Amy died, and wept. Arms around one another, we formed a circle, like skydivers, our garments flapping in the wind. I could not recall seeing either of them cry since they were very young. I am not sure they had ever seen me cry, except on sentimental occasions. . . . The trouble with a close family is that it suffers closely, too. I stood with my two sons in the cold and put my arms around them, feeling the shoulders of men.

The phrase “shoulders of men” quietly conveys a world of hurt, and something more: We know that Rosenblatt now sees his sons as adults who, like he himself, must carry an adult grief.

In
Kayak Morning
, published two years later, Rosenblatt writes again of Amy and of grief. Asked why he wrote
Making Toast
, Rosenblatt explains in the later book that it was therapeutic, a way to keep his daughter alive. “When the book was finished,” he writes, “it was as if she had died again.” Would Lewis have cautioned Rosenblatt not to write that second book, because to let Amy go a little would bring her back with even greater force?

Oddly, then, grief memoirs may emerge from a consuming need to escape grief. The human mind may adapt to an overwhelming emotional experience by refusing to exile itself for too long in the darkest places. In
A Widow’s Story
, Joyce Carol Oates writes:

In
my study, at my desk overlooking a stand of trees, a birdbath (not in use, in winter), a holly tree with red berries in which cardinals, chickadees and titmice bustle cheerily about, I am free to tell myself Ray would not be in this room with you anyway. Your experience at this moment is not a widow’s experience.

But then the grief rebounds, and echoes, and echoes some more. It’s inescapable, at least for a time, and the hardest part may be how cuttingly aware the mourner is of this fact. Lewis put it like this:

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the mystery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

The character of Lewis’s grief changes over time, and he is so brilliant at articulating this change that we derive insight and hope from his words. He’s surprised to discover that one day he feels lighter, less closed off from God, and less agonized that the reality of Joy will leach away. The book’s very slimness signals that even if grief doesn’t end, its fiercest power fades.

Awareness of the weight of grief, and the changing topography of mental reflections about grief, are precisely what I believe other animals don’t experience. And can animals feel guilt? In
Say Her Name
, Francisco Goldman’s fictionalized account of the death of his wife, guilt seeps through the pages. Aura died in an accident while swimming with Goldman in waters off a Mexican beach. In describing his first meeting Aura, Goldman lingers over the young woman’s beautiful face and eyes, her animated spirit. He recounts the greetings they exchanged: “Hola!” he says to Aura. “Hola,” she responds. In this first movement toward her, he sets in motion an infinite chain of events that will come to encompass their love, their marriage, her death, and his grief. The chilling part comes when, in parentheses on the page, he imagines a conversation that never took place, coiled in the space between them as they met: “Hello! Meet your death,” Goldman says. “Hello my death,” Aura responds. In passages like these, grief memoirs convey the awful, grinding cost to our species of deep self-awareness.

Sometimes
it’s not guilt, or the knowledge of grief’s enduring burden, but a sort of anticipatory grief that we feel. When the hands go cold at a doctor’s grim expression, even as we wait for his words about a spouse, child, or friend, or when a loved one declines and we know only one outcome is possible, we take on board the coming loss, sometimes months or years before it happens. We anticipate the solitary path the dying person will navigate and envision our own lonely future. What will it be like, we wonder, on that day when we return alone to a home that will never be the same again?
The Rising
, the album Bruce Springsteen created after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, DC, includes a song called “You’re Missing”:

    
Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den

    
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting

But the listener knows that the house will wait forever. The song’s title is the singer’s refrain—
You’re missing
—and the song ends with a terrible finality:

    
God’s drifting in heaven, devil’s in the mailbox

    
I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.

With 9/11, there was no time for anticipatory grief. Loved ones set out for work or to carry out the day’s errands, and never returned.

Seen from this angle, it’s clear that anticipatory grief may be a blessing as much as a burden; it allows us to put our love into words, and to prepare ourselves and others for the heart’s coming absence. I felt both the blessing and the burden when, in the early 1990s, my friend Jim, only in his thirties, was dying of AIDS, at a time just before retroviral medications gave people with HIV an excellent chance to live with their disease. The funny thing about my relationship with Jim was, as more than one person remarked to us, that the English language lacks a kinship term for what we were to each other. “Friends” was accurate, but pale. We met in college, labored to find romantic love, and soon realized we were meant to share an intense platonic bond. Rooted in New Jersey, Jim followed me in my anthropologically mobile years, making visits to Oklahoma (graduate school), Kenya (field research), and Santa
Fe
(dissertation writing). Then he became ill, and there was nothing to be done—and yet everything: exploring every medical option we could find, my traveling to him instead of him to me, a pledge near the end that I would think of him every day of my life. In the last days, I crossed that line from fervently hoping for a sick person’s recovery to fervently wishing for a suffering person’s death.

Other animals may alter their behavior when a companion is ill, as did the chimpanzees who surrounded a dying female at the Scottish safari park, or the goat who leaned hard against her friend the Shetland pony to help keep her on her feet. They may feel concern and act upon it. But only we look far ahead with dread, or relief, or a mix of the two, aware that death is coming. And when it arrives, and we mourn for another, we do so with a unique mix of private and public emotion, a balance that may even be adaptive for such a self-aware species. “When the living see that others lament the dead,” writes Tyler Volk in
What Is Death
?, “they are consoled about their own future deaths.”

Alone of all species, we may pour our lamentations into art, as grief-memoir writers do. With the exception of the embodied grief that may be expressed in dance, though, it may be when we still our unique creativity that we feel closest to other animals who grieve. We grieve with human words but animal bodies and animal gestures and animal movements.

15

THE PREHISTORY OF GRIEF

When they died, the boy was no older than twelve or thirteen, the girl no older than ten. The boy apparently had developed normally, but the girl showed signs of a bilateral deformity of the femurs, meaning that her legs were short and curved; she walked with a bowed gait. The children lived in a settlement we now call Sunghir, along a riverbank in Russia about two hundred kilometers east of today’s Moscow. Sunghir’s permafrost attests to a challenging climate. When it came time to dig through the cold earth to lay the children’s bodies to rest, the Sunghir community drew together. Through a collective eye for beauty and many hours of skilled labor, these people ensured that the children would leave this world by way of a spectacular burial ritual.

We have no eyewitness reports to the ceremony, because the children died twenty-four thousand years ago. This period of the Paleolithic predates not only writing but also settled village life and the domestication of crops or most animals. This isn’t to say that the Sunghir people, anatomically modern
Homo sapiens,
led simple lives. Gorgeously rendered animal images, alive with color and painted on walls at caves like Chauvet in France starting around thirty-five thousand years ago, reveal the cultural complexity of our
Homo sapiens
ancestors.

Archaeologists’ descriptions invite us to imagine that long-ago day when the Sunghir community convened at the grave. Vincenzo Formicola and Alexandra Buzhilova write:

The
two children were buried head to head in supine position in a long, narrow, and shallow grave dug into the permafrost. The skeletons were covered with red ocher and accompanied by extraordinarily rich and unique grave goods. Thousands of ivory beads, probably sewn onto clothes, long spears of straightened mammoth tusks (one of which is 240 cm long), ivory daggers, hundreds of perforated arctic fox canines, pierced antler rods, bracelets, ivory animal carvings, ivory pins, and disc-shaped pendants were part of the ornamentation of the burial.

In the world of anthropology, this description of Sunghir’s double-child burial is famous. It was a rare practice to bury children so long ago, at least judging from the graves that archaeologists have to this point uncovered. Even rarer was the girl’s deformity, but it strengthens scientists’ suspicion that prehistoric burial for this age range occurred more often when the child’s anatomy deviated from the normal. Still, only one of the Sunghir children fits into this category, and all indicators are that she died for reasons unrelated to the bowing of her legs. Archaeologists feel certain the two deaths happened close enough in time for the children’s burials to be simultaneous. Perhaps an accident befell the boy and the girl when they were foraging or carrying out some other activity on behalf of the community, or maybe they fell victim to disease.