At least that’s what Cassie told me before the end, when neither of us could admit what we both knew to be true. We were eating at the table away from screens, a futile effort to reconnect. She told me about how herds in India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa have been observed staying with the body of their deceased, keeping vigil. Mothers, she told me, will carry their dead calf with their trunk, or cradle it by their tusks, for days. This behavior isn’t seen when the baby is alive, which means the mother understands what is happening, grieving in her own way. 

Cassie said elephants, normally ambivalent, or at least gently curious about humans, have charged at scientists observing these rituals. Leave it to us, she said, to fuck up an elephant funeral. But most interesting of all, she said, her green eyes alight, elephants have been spotted playing with the bones of their dead. Somehow, they recognize their own, and perhaps in celebrating this way are aware of their own mortality. 

Then, Cassie began to cry. She pushed away her food, put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. She looked up at me and said, Isn’t that beautiful?

I agreed it was, told her it was one of the things I loved most about her: her boundless empathy. Leaving my mouth, the words were a eulogy.

Within a month, she’d moved out, five years of life reduced to a half-empty apartment. There was no single moment, no infidelity, no fireworks. It was a slow death and we’d both let it happen, standing by as our love fed on itself and we grew apart. 

We’re going to stay in each other’s lives, Cassie told me on our last day. I just know it. 

It’s been six months and we haven’t exchanged a word. No emails. No texts. I can still picture the mole on her left shoulder blade. I may never see her again.

Occasionally, I’ll find things she left. Lipstick capsules rolling in the back of a drawer. Hairpins. A framed photo of us smiling on a hike, stuffed in the back of the closet. I’ve made a little pile of them, something like a gravesite. The other day, I called up YouTube to see if she was telling the truth. Sure enough, there was a video from a Botswanan expert, shaky footage of two elephants, a mother and her baby, nosing a pile of bleach-white bones in the baking clay, picking them up now and again with their trunks with a sort of mammoth tenderness. Cassie was right: It was beautiful to witness the enormity of their mourning. 

When the video ended, I gathered up her leftover items, the last remains of the life we shared, brought them to the kitchen, and threw them in the trash. Then, I went back to my laptop to rewatch the clip, pausing, rewinding, studying it for clues, hoping that one day I might be capable of such grace.

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Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, Maudlin House, HAD, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, I’ve Given This a Lot of Thought, is available now via Bottlecap Press. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July ’24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.