What do people go through when someone dies?
I have used a story I know about elephants grieving to allude to what the human emotion is around death. I can tell the story because it has resonated with me and saturated my experience with a deep and earthly understanding.
For me, I went through regret at first, as if it was my fault he had died. I was overwhelmed with guilt because I wasn't a good daughter and we weren't like the fathers and daughters I saw in movies.
Yet, I relate to Ariel and Poseidon in the Little Mermaid. My father knew everything, but he still didn't understand me. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out that he DIDN'T HAVE TO understand me to be there for me. And he was. And I was a teenager doing what most teenagers do. And he was like my best buddy when I was growing up, which brings me the literal & very realistic relation, most relative to human grieving.
When your buddy dies, you call out. You make a call. You sound the alarm.
It is exactly what the elephants do. They live as long as we do and longer. They are younger than Sea Turtles, perhaps, but the elephants are mammals. They are like us. Their brains are the same size as ours, if not larger.
When one of them dies, they make a call. Their herds call to each other and the signal reaches hundreds of miles. They congregate. And they form a procession. And this is a fact.
It is how I understand death. It's been that way since I was 16. I got a hold on it.
I can meditate on the image in my mind and I can feel it in my heart and my gut.
The bottom of my feet become warm when I think about it.
When I think I know it all, that means I am in trouble, so I say this with the sentiment that the unknown things in life are OKAY NOT TO UNDERSTAND, as long as the elephants know what to do.
My cousin, who was my father's best friend when he was a child; she wrote a poem that won an award. She read it for an audience recently. And it was about an elephant. The elephant was beloved. And I don't know exactly what she wrote because I wasn't there for the reading, but I am certain it was 'something else'. That's the word on the street. And I mean, literally, when I was walking with an agent of the Mayor on the sidewalk on Gay Street, he knew about the poem and made an "Mmmm" sound when he thought about it in recollection.
My cousin describes my mother and I as "other worldly," and I like to think it means we're tapped into something else. The other stuff that we can't quite know about, but we coincidentally make connections that make for a subtle pause.
