A Ring of Endless Light

Since I was a teenager, I have re-read Madeline L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light every summer out of sheer love of the story. I am not sure how, but I don’t think I ever realized until now how much this book is about death. It has been helpful to re-read this book with the perspective of grief because of how L’Engle copes with the problem of death. It is quite a beautiful book. But, in reading it this time, this particular passage stood out to me:

Enid was swimming in slow circles, carrying a tiny, motionless dolphin on her back. The two midwives swam beside her, pressing close against her as the two dolphins had swum with Adam.  I did not need to be told that Enid’s baby was dead, or that Enid, swimming with a perfect little dead body on her back, was hoping against hope that the stilled heart would start to beat again. 
And then she must have had a stab of hopelessness: the realization that her baby was dead. Because suddenly, she streaked ahead of the two midwives and began beating her body wildly against the side of the tank. 
“No, Enid!” It was Jeb, who, with a great cry, plunged into the water and swam to the distraught dolphin, trying to put his arms about her without dislodging the dead baby, trying to keep her from beating herself against the side of the pen, in complete disregard of his own safety.
Putting himself between Enid and the side of the pen, he was calling out to her and tears were streaming down his face.  And Enid, perhaps because she would not hurt Jeb, stopped her wild beating.  It seemed that Jeb was shedding for her the tears that she could not shed, a wild sobbing such as I had never heard from a grown man.  

You find out shortly after this that Jeb lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident while he was driving the car. Throughout the course of the book, you additionally deal with the death of a dear family friend, a little girl with cancer, and a grandfather dying of leukemia. L’Engle also discusses attempted suicide, cryogenics, and fishermen killing 1,000 porpoises to save their community, as well as the concept of dying stars.

I’d like to think I’m not developing an unhealthy obsession with death, but at the same time, I have to be honest and say that each time I encounter an anecdote, story, or movie that deals with the problem of death or relates how someone has coped with death, it helps just a little. Like a centimeter of help. But when you’ve lost your child, even centimeters of help make a tiny difference.

After I read this passage, I looked into cetacean grief. Apparently grief does exist in the animal kingdom but has been better studied and measured in land animals. Grieving behavior has been documented in chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants, and is usually seen in highly intelligent animals with a well-developed social structure. Water animals, by contrast, are harder to witness and study, but it seems that grieving behavior has been increasingly documented, especially in dolphin communities and in some species of whales.

This subject is easy to google and all articles relate back to a single study: “Giovanni Bearzi of Dolphin Biology and Conservation in Pordenone, Italy, and his colleagues at other institutions analyzed 78 scientific reports from 1970 to 2016 of these kinds of displays—which they labeled “postmortem-attentive behavior.” They found that just 20 of 88 cetacean (dolphin and whale) species engage in them.” – https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/do-dolphins-feel-grief

The grieving behavior in dolphins is usually manifested by a female, and very often it is seen in a mother carrying around her dead baby on her back, sometimes until the point where the carcass has decayed almost completely.

And you can say what you want about us anthropomorphizing animals too much, but this behavior, as well as L’Engle’s imagined attempt of Enid to beat herself against the wall of the tank, seems to me to be perfectly comprehensible.

Self-sacrificial maternal behavior and general protective maternal instinct is seen across animal species. There exist, in fact, species of animals who spend their whole lives optimizing reproduction and then die shortly after giving life to their offspring. And these species are not just limited to mammals; there is a particular species of octopus that does this.

I personally take all of this to mean that the maternal-infant bond is so strong that it transcends species. It is embedded into the structure of nature, of biology itself. What this means is that the world and we, as primary creatures in the world, were created in such a way that the mother-infant bond is so strong that it defines and determines the mother’s behavior more directly than almost anything else.

For me, knowing that apes, elephants, whales, and dolphins evidence grief at the death of their babies helps me. Just a little. I feel some sense of connection with these animals, with these other forms of life that are so different from myself. Because the twin feelings of wanting to die and wanting to carry the dead body of your baby around with you because you cannot let go are two feelings I intimately understand.

I remember wanting to roll into Lizzy’s grave as I laid beside her lowered coffin and sobbingly begged to be allowed to die with her. I understand wanting to die. I understand not being able to let go. And it seems like the natural world understands it too, and understanding, perhaps mourns my baby with me.