Elephants Teach Us About Love and Grief

An examination of spirituality and the afterlife.

Photo by Neil and Zulma Scott on Unsplash

Elephants hold space for each other’s grief, no matter how long it takes.

A talented author with a gift for weaving together complex themes, Jodi Picoult has written a masterwork about love and loss and elephants and family relationships.

On the surface, Leaving Time is a novel about a teenager trying to solve a crime, as the protagonist searches for clues surrounding an old murder and an unresolved missing persons’ case.

But there is so much more to this story.

Jenna tries to remember the tragic events of the day a long time ago when her mother left. She combs through her mother’s research on elephants in an attempt to learn more about her.

In the process, we learn a lot about the complexity of elephant relationships and how they live together in both the wild and in captivity.

• Jenna’s mother Alice studied elephants in Africa, then moved to the United States to work and live at an elephant sanctuary in New England.
• She went missing under unusual circumstances after a tragic accident at the sanctuary where she was injured and another woman was killed.