How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  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.

  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 an
imal. 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.”