Larger Than Life

by Jodi Picoult

When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd’s collective memory.

Airavata—

ubiquitous.

There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.

mistreated monkey was biologically programmed to avoid situations where he might be put in danger again, or to lash out before it could happen. That was the whole point of encoded memory. We could literally see the places in the brain where the past was etched, to encourage caution in a similar circumstance.

cerulean

“how underneath, we’re all exactly the same.”

What we could not see clearly, we didn’t have to pretend to understand.

could spend my entire life running and never catch up to her grand expectations for what I should have been or could have been—

She was a part of me, and if you carved away a part of yourself, you bled to death.

hall closet, where there was no light. The third I set on the windowsill

As it turns out, you can love someone too much.

Then, when they leave, your heart goes missing. And no one can survive that great a loss.

safe haven of his mother. When you are truly, deeply scared, that’s the only place you want to be.

You’re a fixer, Grant mused. You’re also a colossal pain in the ass. The thing is, it’s the pains in the ass that change the world.

it was easy to fight the urge to call someone you thought had no desire to hear

from you.

I’m crying for all the things we lose that we cannot get back.

In a year when there are limited resources—a drought, say, or a herd that has grown too big to sustain feeding all its members in a given area—the matriarch may make the decision to split the group. She will lead some of the elephants off in one direction, and her daughter will lead the rest on another route. They are still family, but they know that being together will bring about high mortality for the herd, that there is a better chance of survival when they aren’t competing for the same resources.

I had to learn how to be a mother before I realized how lucky I am to be a child.