We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee

Author:Benjamin Mee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2011-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

The New Crew

After Katherine’s death, I felt as if I might not give a damn about the zoo. But actually I did. Technically, I could see that the zoo was still possible—inevitable, in fact, or we were bust and the animals would be dispersed or killed—and this fact was bolted to my mind. And as far as I was concerned, other people who couldn’t see this could simply fuck off.

Grief, apparently, according to the widely accepted Kübler-Ross model, generally has five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining (where you try to make a deal with God or fate, or in lesser circumstances, the person who has left you), Depression, and Acceptance. I feel as if I skipped the first three and went straight to depression and acceptance simultaneously. But the idea of anger intrigued me. I didn’t feel anger as such—there was nothing and no one to feel anger toward for this random biological event, apart from some small-minded mishandling by some of the healthcare people involved, and they were just institutionalized cogs in a flawed machine. Besides, I didn’t have the energy for anger.

But I did feel a strong sense of disbelief that people could be so petty. I didn’t mind seeing people arguing in the street, or not appreciating each other or frittering their valuable time in some other way. I could understand that they had drifted into this perspective and it was quite normal. What really got me, though, was the pettiness of many of the people at the park, particularly when there was such a clear and obvious common goal to reach for. I sat in on meetings and listened to endless silly bickering and power plays: “I can’t work with so-and-so”; “He said this, so I said . . .” I stood out in the park in the rain impassively, awash with keepers’ complaints about things like leaking wheelbarrows when they already knew that replacements were on order, and I wondered how anything in the world ever gets done. But these tiny, seemingly irrelevant preoccupations, I realized, were the stuff of life. People’s daily experiences, what they had to deal with on the ground, were what it was all about—and that was somewhere on which I had to refocus.

Being part of the zoo had definitely helped, even in the most extreme times. Looking out of the window and seeing young keepers laughing as they worked, aware that someone was ill in the house and obviously sympathetic, but still knowing they had a job to do looking after the animals and getting on with it. Keeping the park going was participating in the cycle of life. Things were born, like piglets or a deer, and things died, like Spar the Tiger, or one of the owls. And Katherine. But no matter how devastating for me, the children, or Duncan and Mum, life goes on. It was like being on a farm, where it can’t simply stop because one person isn’t there.

For now, there was work to do: new repairs to make, new staff to hire, and most important, getting our license to trade as a zoo.

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