but finding the right words doesn’t get any easier with practice. What do you say to the parents whose one-day-old daughter—their first child—died because she was born with part of her heart missing? What do you say at a memorial service for a middle-aged man, a cancer victim, that will give solace and support to his widow and two teenagers? Words aren’t adequate to address the shock and desolation we feel when a loved one dies.
The only thing that seems to help is a caring presence. So we gather with our families. Our friends come around. We assemble in our spiritual communities. We light a candle, share a hug, or join in a moment of silence. And although we don’t stop grieving, we know that we don’t grieve alone. Others, who have also borne tragedy in their lives, understand the pain we feel. And out of that shared suffering we somehow gather strength to endure the loss.
Do other animals feel grief? We know that people grieve for their pets, of course. People in my congregation have come to me many times for counseling when their animal companions die. The loss of a beloved dog or cat can be very upsetting and naturally makes us sad. But I was stunned the first time I heard about Koko, the gorilla who grieved for her pet kitten. Koko’s story convinced me that animals, like people, also have strong feelings about the end of life.
Koko is a female lowland gorilla who for more than two decades has been the focus of the world’s longest ongoing ape language study.1 Instead of using spoken words, Koko communicates in Ameslan, or American Sign Language. Her teacher, Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson of the California Gorilla Foundation, has helped the ape master a vocabulary of more than five hundred words. That’s how Koko told Penny she wanted a cat for her birthday. She signs the word cat by drawing two fingers across her cheeks to indicate whiskers.
One day a litter of three kittens was brought to the rural compound in Woodside, California, where Koko lives. The kittens had been abandoned at birth. Their “foster mother” was a terrier, who suckled them through the first month of life. Handling them with the gentle behavior typical of gorillas, Koko chose her pet, a tailless kitten with grey fur. She named her young friend “All Ball.”
Koko enjoyed her new kitten, sniffing it and stroking it tenderly. She carried All Ball tucked against her upper leg and attempted to nurse it as if it were a baby gorilla. Koko was surprised to learn that kittens bite. When All Ball bit her on the finger, she made the signs for “dirty” and “toilet,” her usual expressions of disapproval. It wasn’t long, though, before Koko was signing the cat to tickle her—one of the gorilla’s favorite games. “Koko seems to think that cats can do most things that she can do,” said Penny.
“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,
