Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

Elephants are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants.

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.

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,

I’ve always been a loner, and I’ve never really felt like I belong here. I’m like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door.

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. I know that sounds incredibly depressing for a thirteen-year-old, but it beats being forced to accept that the common denominator must be you.

But over the years I’ve come to realize that maybe there are things I’m not supposed to know, and besides—I don’t really want to see the whole landscape of the future. I mean, if I could, what’s the point of living?

Dreaming is the closest the average human gets to the paranormal plane; it’s the time when the mind lets down its guard and the walls get thin enough for there to be glimpses to the other side. That’s why, after sleeping, so many people report a visit from someone who’s passed.

There is no question that elephants understand death. They may not plan for it the way we do; they may not imagine elaborate afterlives like those in our religious doctrines. For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.

Even if elephants come across the body of another elephant that has been long dead, its remains picked apart by hyenas and its skeleton scattered, they bunch and get tense. They approach the carcass as a group, and caress the bones with what can only be described as reverence. They stroke the dead elephant, touching it all over with their trunks and their back feet. They will smell it. They might pick up a tusk or a bone and carry it for a while. They will place even the tiniest bit of ivory under their feet and gently rock back and forth.

I know there are two ways to live: Jenna’s way, where you hang on to what you have in a death grip so you don’t lose it; or my way, where you walk away from everything and everyone that matters before they can leave you behind. Either way, you’re bound to be disappointed.

There are also some people who cannot forget. People with PTSD may have smaller hippocampi than ordinary people. Some scientists believe that corticoids—stress hormones—can atrophy the hippocampus and cause memory disruptions.

You hear, anecdotally, that an elephant never forgets, and I do believe this is true. Up in Kenya, at Amboseli, researchers have done playbacks of long-distance contact calls in an experiment that suggests adult female elephants can recognize more than a hundred individuals. When the calls were from a herd with which they had associated, the elephants being tested responded with their own contact calls. When the vocalizations were from an unfamiliar herd, they bunched and backed away.

As a female elephant gets older, her memory improves. After all, her family relies on her for information—she is the walking archive that makes the decisions for the herd: Is it dangerous here? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to drink? How are we going to find water? A matriarch might know migratory routes that have gone unused for the life span of the entire herd—including herself—yet somehow have been passed down and encoded into a recollection.

Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.

A female elephant whose baby wasn’t a baby anymore by any means still returned with a fury when he was in distress. Once a mother, always a mother.

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.

Elephants are often seen checking in with others in their herd by rubbing against an individual, stroking with a trunk, putting that trunk in a friend’s mouth after that individual has suffered a stressful experience.

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.

We both stared at each other, further adjusting our expectations. I noticed that Thomas had green eyes, and that there was a ring of orange around each of his irises. When he grinned, I felt as if I’d taken a dart of M99, as if I was caught in the prison of my own body.

“My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.”

“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.”

“Alice. Who have you lost?” I froze. This wasn’t about me. I wouldn’t let him make it that way. “Is that why you push people away?” he whispered. “So they can’t get close enough to hurt you when they’re gone?”

This virtual stranger knew me better than anyone else in Africa. He knew me better than I knew myself. What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.

I have never seen a better mother than an elephant. I suppose that if humans were pregnant for two years, the investment might be enough to make us all better mothers. A baby elephant can do no wrong. He can be naughty, he can steal food from his mother’s mouth, he can move too slowly or get stuck in mud, and still, his mother is patient beyond belief. Babies are the most precious things in an elephant’s life.

Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy.

This is how it felt when Thomas touched me—as if I had swallowed light.

Hope is a balloon, always just a breath away from being deflated.