On Death and Elephants

Some of us, because of the makeup of our psyches, require as though to stay alive, the occasional beating of a dead horse. Or, let's not even bring horses into this. They are the wrong symbol, and I don't want to bring injury of an animal into this.

Let's instead put it this way: in that article, years ago, in the NYT magazine about elephants, there was a passage about how elephants bury their dead, hold elaborate funerals and occasionally return to the graves of those they loved, to honor them or remember them.

So the metaphorical path was in the right vein, not the injury of an animal, but the death of an animal was where I was looking to go, but through a different lens, a different angle of the story.

Do you get what I mean?

Things don't die. Not even elephants. They exist, albeit in some other form. And we must honor them, because for some reason, we are compelled to.