Gorilla Mother, Human Grief

Elizabeth Uppman

In a German zoo, a gorilla named Gana is having trouble letting go.

Gana’s baby, Claudio, died some weeks ago, presumably of a heart defect. I say “presumably” because nobody knows for sure what he died of—Gana won’t relinquish his body to the zookeepers. She carries it around with her, strokes his hair, shakes him slightly as if to wake him.

Gana made the news because she appears to be grieving, and because grieving is supposed to be a human activity. Zoo visitors watch her and weep.

Perhaps they see in her an echo of their own losses, of times when they, too, have delayed their understanding of certain brutal facts.

For weeks after my 3-year-old son died, I woke up frantic every the morning because I didn’t know who was taking care of him. I knew Gabriel was gone; I knew I wouldn’t find him in his bed by the window. But I couldn’t fix in my mind the understanding of what gone meant. The thought that he had disappeared—vanished—evaporated, like a splash of water on a hot sidewalk—was too big for me.

So I unconsciously defined “gone” as “somewhere else.” But where? And with whom? Were they nice? Did they have all his medicines? Did they rub his head when they gave him his bath? It always took me a few groggy minutes to remember that gone meant dead, and that dead meant Gabriel no longer needed anybody to take care of him.

Over time, researchers say, gorilla mothers like Gana become less and less attached to the bodies of their babies, until finally they abandon them. We can only guess what’s going on in their heads, but it looks like a slow realization: the baby is never going to wake up again. Something like that happened for me, too, over a period of months and years. The true meaning of gone sunk in deeper and deeper, until one day I woke up, not frantic, but knowing.

It’s a good thing, of course, to rejoin the world where people think and act clearly and deliberately. Still, once in awhile I miss those days, when in the confused moments between sleep and waking I could still believe that Gabriel was alive.

Elizabeth Uppman