This morning while on the train I was reading from my latest book choice, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. In a short chapter ‘Holding Back, Letting Go’ on the subject of interspecies communication and understanding, I came across a particularly moving passage. In it, author Carl Safina shares the reflection of zoologist, botanist, and anthropologist Lyall Watson’s “extraordinarily poignant encounter” while out whale watching on South Africa’s seacoast. 

It reads:

“The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself…The whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge…where my heart stopped…

Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant…staring out to sea! A female with a left tusk broken off near the base…I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself…

She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The under-rumble of the surf would have been well within her [hearing] range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the life sounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing. 

My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vison of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place…

The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the high investment of few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. 

I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for mere man…”

As I read this account, I found myself holding inner awe, amazement, and deep compassion for the impulse that drives the living towards one another, to seek out the company, if but only from a distance, of other living souls. 

In one week, it will be fifteen months since my husband Nelson passed and six months since I’ve been living in my apartment alone. Since arriving, I notice I will often get on the train to just sit in public spaces in the city. On occasion, I’ll buy a cup of something decaffeinated to sip on while I read, write, or just contemplate this life situation of mine. Sometimes I’ll sit and do an IFS parts work session or engage in some research related to neuroscience and brain retraining. But mostly, it’s about being with fellow humans, even if it is just wordless presence in a public space. 

I’ve known loneliness before, but the loneliness of grief is qualitatively different. Both haunting and piercing, I experience it as a cellular knowing that Nelson is forever out of reach, gone into the ether, never to be found. 

In her book The Grieving Body, professor and psychologist, Dr. Mary Francis O’Connor says, “the death of a beloved is an amputation.” I return to this analogy often as it is as complete a description as I have ever come across. I think to myself, “Yes, it’s an amputation. Nelson has been removed from the world of the living. The end.” 

After reading Watson’s account of his encounter, a part of me sighed with relief. I felt seen in a way I had not up until now. Ever since I moved into my current apartment, I wake up daily in a perpetual state of unease. Grief whispers lightly in one ear while another part urges healing, wanting me to hurry up and figure out how to get my nervous system to regulate, fall in line quicker despite rewiring tools and practices, wondering when I will finally hit the Mount Everest of rewiring and claim myself fully recovered and symptom free… while another part is ashamed; judging and inwardly persecuting me for not being able to do more, better, and faster on my own – for feeling lonely. 

But then I reread that passage again and all of sudden I feel like I was – I am, simply put… okay. I think to myself, “surely if a female whale and a lone elephant matriarch can be so intuitively and innately drawn to seek each other out amidst their solitude on the seacoast of South Africa and find some solace or comfort in each other’s distant presence, then certainly me taking train trips into the city to go and spend whatever time my system will allow to sit in the company of strangers can’t be anything less than normal.” I’m alright. I’m not weak. I’m not broken. I’m not failing at grief. My healing is still happening. I’m just feeling the loss of my beloved. How oddly comforting it is to know that whales and elephants get lonely. 

There is something in our culture that insists that we are the ones we have been waiting for, that you only need you. It is born of the myth of rugged individualism that commands we pull ourselves up by our boot straps and soldier on. But I beg to differ. Living beings need the company and community of other living beings. It’s is the life force energy within us, calling us up and into itself to a place of belonging. We commune, collaborate, create, and comfort each other. In relationship we grow, heal, and thrive. That is love. 

My husband died and I feel lonely. But it’s okay. I am alive. And being alive sometimes means I will feel lonely.