A History of the Human Brain by Bret Stetka

Author:Bret Stetka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Good Grief

The counter to love and attachment is grief, our response to loss. Some see mourning as an evolutionary side effect of attachment. When we lose someone or something so important to us—whether a relationship built on romantic love, social enjoyment, or an altruistic commitment to community or cause—how can we not feel deeply shattered? Love isn’t necessarily an addiction, but it shares the tendency toward obsession and compulsion. When we lose someone, it can look a lot like withdrawal from an addictive drug. The pain, emotional and physical, is real. In a letter to his mourning cousin, Darwin wrote, “Strong affections have always appeared to me, the most noble part of a man’s character and the absence of them an irreparable failure; you ought to console yourself with thinking that your grief is the necessary price for having been born with such feelings.”

After I’d grown up and moved out of my parents’ house, they lived for a few years next to a cattle farm in Barboursville, Virginia. I still remember being home for various holidays and hearing the plaintive, guttural cry of the mother cows when their calves were taken away and sold to another farm. There’s no telling what the moms were thinking, but I’m convinced they were feeling some form of sorrow and mourning. They missed their babies.

Chimpanzees have been observed demonstrating something close to grief, which may inform the biology behind human mourning. There’s the well-known instance of a Zambian chimp community’s reaction to the death of a nine-year-old group member, taken too soon by a respiratory infection. Researchers studying the group had named the young male Thomas. Within minutes of his death, twenty-two members of his forty-chimp community had convened around the body, sniffing and touching his corpse. They were eerily calm and quiet for chimpanzees, sitting and contemplating the death, even when presented with food. At one point an adult female ran over and slapped the body, as if asking, “Is he really dead?” or maybe telling, “Look, he’s dead! Let’s get on with things.” An adult male called Pan, who’d cared for Thomas for years as an adoptive father, was distraught, frantically running around screeching and guarding the body from the others. A chimp named Noel moved in and cleaned Thomas’s teeth with a blade of grass.

It’s hard to say for sure if the reaction to Thomas’s passing is definitely a form of grief, or if the chimps in his group were, for certain, mourning. But chimps are known to take far more interest in the remains of their friends and families than those of other members of their community.

Barbara King believes many animals demonstrate grief, and that a large brain size and lots of cognitive power is not necessary to rue loss. Elephants show intense interest in their dead, with members of different families traveling to the bodies of deceased elders, engaging in a sniffing and touching ritual similar to that of Thomas’s community. The well-reported saga of the orca J35 has also been interpreted as a mother in mourning.

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