In The Year of Magical Thinking’ (2005), Joan Didion writes of the year loss came home to her with the deaths of her husband and daughter: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In the gut wrench of bereavement, she tells herself how wild things do not suffer such heartbreaks and seeks comfort in that. Only, it turns out, that they do. At Sydney’s Sea Life Aquarium, when Sphen, the gentoo penguin known for his devotion to his same-sex partner, died last week, grief became a song. When Magic, Sphen’s younger partner, with whom he had raised two chicks, was brought to say his final goodbye, he broke out in what could only be described as a dirge.
Sphen and Magic had spent six years together but grief seems to be an emotion that transcends sentience. Elephants have been known to grieve the loss of their partners, parents and cubs; bald eagles and black vultures mate for life; dogs remain emblematic of a rare kind of fealty to their owners — for nine years until his own death, Hachiko, a Japanese Akita dog, waited at a railway station every evening for his master to return from work. He had never gotten over the loss of his owner, an academic at Tokyo Imperial University. But if grief is pervasive across species, there are also lessons in resilience from the animal kingdom.
Dealing with the shock of the untimely death of her father, writer and naturalist Helen McDonald channels her anger and hurt into becoming a falconer. In H is for Hawk (2014), she writes of the lesson that the fierce and unyielding goshawk teaches her that grief would not allow her to see: “You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”
