“Soft/good/cat,” said Koko.
One night All Ball escaped from the Gorilla Foundation and was accidentally killed by a car. When Koko was told about the accident, she at first acted as if she didn’t hear or understand. Then a few minutes later she started to cry with high-pitched sobs. “Sad/frown” and “Sleep/cat” were her responses when the kitten was mentioned later. For nearly a week after the loss Koko cried whenever the subject of cats came up.
The gorilla clearly missed her feline companion. But how much did she understand about what had happened? Fortunately, it was possible to ask Koko directly. Maureen Sheehan, a staff member at the Gorilla Foundation, interviewed Koko about her thoughts on death.
“Where do gorillas go when they die?” Maureen asked.
Koko replied, “Comfortable/hole/bye [the sign for kissing a person good-bye].”
“When do gorillas die?” she asked.
Koko replied with the signs “Trouble/old.”
“How do gorillas feel when they die: happy, sad, afraid?”
“Sleep,” answered Koko.2
Gorillas not only mourn. Like human beings, they seem able to reflect on their own demise and struggle with the same sorts of questions that haunt us when a loved one dies.
All living things die, but it has long been assumed that only humans have any consciousness of this. It is a commonplace among philosophers that humankind is the only animal for whom death is an intellectual and emotional “problem.” In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, philosopher Ernest Becker draws the distinction between all other creatures, who “live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neurochemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else,” and Homo sapiens, “an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience.”3
Our power of memory and foresight, according to Becker and other philosophers, gives human beings a position in the universe that is both exalted and tragic. Our superior intellect enables us to look beyond the present moment to contemplate endless vistas of times past and eons to come. We gaze through telescopes and witness the birth of stars; we study fossils that tell of drifting continents and life forms long extinct. From this elevated vantage, however, we foresee the inevitability of death and ask what meaning our brief lives have in the vast panorama of existence.
The awareness of death is what makes human life so bittersweet and poignant, and it is this awareness, say those like Becker, that sets us apart from all other creatures. Knowledge of our own mortality is what makes us a spiritual animal. Where do we find faith and strength to live, knowing that death awaits us? What gives meaning and purpose to our days, knowing that our days so soon come to an end? Our answers may differ, but no one can ignore such questions. They are religious questions, and they are an inescapable part of being human.
But is Homo sapiens the only species that possesses the consciousness of death? There is much evidence that we are not alone in this regard.
Not only gorillas but also elephants may share in this awareness. Cynthia Moss, Director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, has for more than a dozen years studied the lives of African elephants. While uprooting the time-worn myth of the “elephants’ graveyard,” her research suggests that these animals do appear to have some awareness of death, feelings of grief, and perhaps what might even be construed as funerary rituals.4
The legend of the elephants’ graveyard probably arose because elephants that are sick or wounded tend to congregate in areas where there is water, shade, and good vegetation. Such a site might contain an unusually large number of elephant carcasses, Moss explains, giving rise to the graveyard fable. But while they don’t have a graveyard, elephants do seem to have some notion of death.
Unlike most other animals, elephants recognize the dead bodies or skeletons of their own kind. When an elephant encounters another’s corpse, he or she explores the body carefully and inquisitively with feet and trunk, smelling it and feeling the shape of the skull and tusks, perhaps in an effort to recognize the individual that has died. Even a bare and sun-bleached skeleton will elicit the interest of other elephants, who inevitably stop to inspect the bones, turning them with their trunks, picking them up and carrying them from one place to another, as though trying to find a proper “resting place” for the remains.
Even more striking is the elephant’s response when a family member dies. Because elephants live almost as long as people (the oldest elephant in captivity died at the age of seventy-one), the bonds they form are lasting. In 1977 one of the family groups Moss studied was attacked by hunters. An animal that Moss named Tina, a young female about fifteen years old, was shot in the chest, the bullet penetrating her right lung. With the larger herd in panicky flight, Tina’s immediate family slowed to help her, crowding about her as the blood poured from her mouth. As the groaning elephant began to slump to the ground, her mother, Teresia, and Trista, another older female, positioned themselves on each side, leaning inward to support her weight and hold her upright. But their efforts were to no avail. With a great shudder Tina collapsed and died.
Teresia and Trista tried frantically to resuscitate the dead animal, kicking and tusking her and attempting to raise her body from the earth. Tallulah, another member of the family, even tried stuffing a trunkful of grass into Tina’s mouth. Tina’s mother, with great difficulty, lifted the limp body with her mighty tusks. Then, with a sharp crack, Teresia’s tusk broke under the strain, leaving a jagged stub of ivory and bloody tissue.
The elephants refused to leave the body, however. They began to dig in the rocky dirt and, with their trunks, sprinkled soil over Tina’s lifeless form. Some went into the brush and broke branches, which they brought back and placed on the carcass. By nightfall the body was nearly covered with branches and earth. Throughout the night members of the family stood in vigil over their fallen friend. Only as dawn began to break did they leave, heading back to the safety of the Amboseli reserve. Teresia, Tina’s mother, was the last to go.
I have often watched people linger at the graveside after the ceremony of committal. The body has been returned to earth and the spirit commended to the keeping of God. The prayers have all been said and the last “Amen” has been uttered. Yet the family members remain by the grave, saying their final farewells. Perhaps elephants feel a similar reluctance to say goodbye to their loved ones. One mother elephant whose calf was stillborn stayed with the body four days, according to Moss, protecting it from lions and scavengers that lay in wait. Mothers who lose their calves can be lethargic for days afterward, she discovered, and the loss of a family matriarch can disrupt the social organization for long periods, sometimes permanently. It is not unscientific to suppose that elephants may experience shock and depression comparable to what human beings feel when a loved one dies.
Other eyewitnesses agree with that assessment. D.J. Schubert, who became well-acquainted with elephants while working in the Peace Corps in West Africa, once chanced upon a family of elephants surrounding a fallen infant. After long hours of trying to help the baby to its feet, the elders finally buried the corpse with dirt, grass, and leaves. Family members then continued to stand watch, slowly rocking their great bodies and comforting each other, intertwining their trunks and using that sensuous appendage to gently touch each other’s mouthparts, seemingly in a kiss. “I had just witnessed an elephant funeral,” Schubert says.5 The Peace Corps volunteer was sleepless later that night, feeling bereft and alone, remembering the screams that had been exchanged between the mother and her sick, dying child. Who could doubt that the elephants themselves were also troubled and uneasy? As evening descended, the family with a baby missing must have known something of what religious people call “the dark night of the soul.”
I feel a sense of compassion for Teresia and also for Koko, pained and at the same time comforted to