Larger Than Life

by Jodi Picoult

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

But in killing the dominant female in a herd, they destroy the collective knowledge of the entire family.

The matriarch is a knot that holds together a rope made of many strings. Cut the rope below the knot, and it unravels.

“You know,” she said, her back to me, “this wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.” We both knew she was not talking about the wine.

You cannot force a family. I learned this firsthand when I was doing research with the elephants at Madikwe. The translocated youngsters were all roughly the same age. Without a matriarch—a mother figure—they developed behavioral issues that we researchers had never seen.

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.

science, we called these sorts of queries low-hanging fruit. When so little work had been done on a question or a species (although there was compelling reason to do so), the scientist was bound to learn something meaningful just by putting in the time and effort.

A 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.

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

I think about the moon, which is always in the sky, but only comes to life when she is wrapped in the arms of the night.

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

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.

The calf scrambled beneath the 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.

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

“For someone who knows so much about the brain,” my mother says, “you know absolutely nothing about the heart.”

In the wild, a mother elephant and her daughter will stay together until one or the other dies.

When the land blossoms and the rivers run flush again, the mother and daughter reunite. It’s a celebration, a fanfare. There is trumpeting, roaring, touching, stroking. It’s like they have never been apart.

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