Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have just closed my eyes. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absentmindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green grass.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain.

But there’s a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they turn into the big, bleak, white nothing I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.

When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world.

There is much documented research about how an elephant calf under the age of two will not survive if it’s orphaned. There’s nothing written, yet, about what happens to the mother who loses her baby.

I can’t believe I’ve asked that until the words are hanging between us, like curtains that keep us from seeing each other clearly.

It feels like velvet and muscle at the same time, just like the tip of an elephant’s trunk.

don’t really want to see the whole landscape of the future. I mean, if I could, what’s the point of living?

No one ever bitches to Serena Williams or Adele for capitalizing on their talent, do they?

because disappointment feels like slamming into a brick wall.

For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.

You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours.

When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.

“They’re mad,” I whisper. “They’re scared,” she corrects. “It sounds the same.”

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.

Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.

I would argue that there is a special empathy elephants have for mothers and children—either their own species’s or another’s. That relationship seems to hold a precious significance and a bittersweet knowledge: An elephant seems to understand that if you lose a baby, you suffer.

“There’s a conflict between body and soul, sometimes. That friction is free will.

When you’re a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you’re in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can’t see a fourth dimension doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means we haven’t reached it yet.”

“There’s no biological advantage to grief. In fact, in the wild, it can be downright dangerous

“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.”

What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.

The term given to the way babies are brought up in elephant herds is allomothering, a fancy word for “It takes a village.”

In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.

She may not be very happy, but she is happy to be.

Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy. They told me humans make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Children are the anchors of a mother’s life.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of. If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother?

Staring at Kagiso, I realized that she hadn’t just lost her calf. She had lost herself.

I would be her herd, and remind her that she still had to live, even if her calf couldn’t.

One of the most amazing things about elephants mourning in the wild is their ability to grieve hard, but then truly, unequivocally, let go. Humans can’t seem to do that.

Against all odds, I fell immediately into a deep, velvet sleep, my daughter’s tiny hand caught like a fallen star in my own.

Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased.

In Tswana, there is a saying: Go o ra motho, ga go lelwe. Where there is support, there is no grief.

It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.

We are cuddled under a blanket that smells like Tide and Indian food,

Resolve is like porcelain, isn’t it? You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces.

I had not seen that man for a very long time. But was it because he’d disappeared? Or because I’d stopped looking?

I understand why Jenna needs this: Otherwise, it’s not a complete circle, it’s a line, and lines unravel and send you off in directions you never intended to go. Endings are critical.

“I don’t know if you can miss someone you can barely remember, but that’s how I feel. I used to make up stories about why you hadn’t been able to come back to me.

I asked him if it was normal after the disappearance of a child to still hear her crying in the night, and to wake up to that imaginary sound. I asked him if it was normal to wake up and, for a few glorious seconds, to believe she was on the other side of the wall, still sleeping. He said, It is normal for you, and that’s when I stopped seeing him. What he should have said is: Nothing will ever be normal again.

But really, all I wanted to do was learn from the animals, which made it look so easy.

The philosophy is very basic, actually: When an elephant calf loses its family, you must provide a new one.

After all, we raise our own children to live without us, one day. It’s when they leave us too soon that nothing makes sense.

The worst part of my day is when it is over. If I could, I would be a caretaker, sleeping in the nursery with the calves. But someone needs to be the public face of Msali.

I do not like to sleep, and if I must, I want it to be thick and dreamless. For this reason I usually work myself to the bone, and pass out for two or three hours each night. I think about Jenna every day, every moment,

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, letting myself come back to this world slowly. Reality is frigid; I have to dip one toe at a time and grow accustomed to the shock before wading in further.

I had come here hoping to find someone else who was a survivor, someone who might be able to take the worst night of my life and help me shoulder the memory. Instead, I found Thomas so trapped by the past that he can’t accept the future.