A magnificent killer whale named Tahlequah gave birth and caught the world’s attention. Her calf died only thirty minutes after being born, each of those blessed minutes a sacrament to the progeny of love.
But the real reason journalists, photographers and millions of viewers followed this mother’s story, was her willingness to grieve unbidden, to become a thing utterly governed by kinship.
After a year and a half of growing this enormous life inside of her belly, and the immense feat of labor, and a half an hour of looking into one another’s eyes, Tahlequah proceeded to carry her dead baby on the tip of her nose for seventeen days, traveling more than a thousand miles, all throughout the Salish Sea.
Some people think that grief is not inexplicably beautiful. But perhaps it’s because those people (who are us people) no longer see grieving enacted publicly, as a plea for sanity, as a way of feeding that which grants us life.
There was no real grieving at my mother’s funeral––sniffling and shoving tears back up into our eyes, yes, but no keening. No collapsing into the bottomless cavern of one another’s trembling arms, no crying out into the insufferable heat of that late-summer day, and certainly no carrying my mom’s dead body as a holy procession all throughout the places she ever knew and loved.
So I continued to carry her mostly on my own. I wailed in the privacy of my own home long after the funeral was over, with only the hurting eyes of my husband to behold me––a kind of holding that was never meant to be done alone. I imagine that if killer whales were not endangered, Tahlequah would have swam those seventeen days with a grand procession of many other glistening, black and white giants all across the ocean.
Or perhaps she swam for one thousand miles to personify the loneliness of her grief in a world spiraling toward oblivion. Our savagery for not swimming alongside her; for taking pictures, for watching her exquisite ceremony on our little screens as if it were pure entertainment, as if that couldn’t be any one of us, carrying our dead children out into the dark and emptied streets.”
From ‘The Progeny of Love’ by April Tierney
Artwork by Lori Christopher 