Picking up the Elephant Bones

The clunky cube of the TV sits on top of a small side table, only as wide as its base. If I press my nose to the glass, I can see the video’s pixels, less than the sum of their parts.

If I take a few steps back, pull myself onto the edge of the bed, and cross my short legs under me, the pixels form the shape of elephants—an Animal Planet documentary I chose from the blue TV channel listings.

Giant, treading creatures make their way through the savannah, easily stomping down the dry, yellow grass. Their trunks swing side to side, surveying the ground in front of them. A young elephant—relative to her mother, teeny-tiny; relative to me, larger than life—trots alongside the herd, short stature demanding quicker steps. Elephants form matriarchal groups, led by an elder female, I’m learning.

The Matriarch stops. The movement of her trunk becomes more deliberate, the prehensile tips feeling around something hidden by the grass. Her trunk lifts, and the documentary narrator sounds a little breathless. She’s come across the bones of another elephant. She gingerly lifts and sets down each one. The herd joins her, each taking patient turns to acknowledge their fallen sister.

Elephants grieve for their dead. Even the dead they never knew while living. They remember each other even when the rest of the earth forgets.

My 10-year-old brain is forever changed. I start collecting elephant things. Keychains, stuffed animals, magnets. A lot of those things are lost to time now, but I still have a wooden carving of an elephant a friend gave me several years ago, tucked away in a memory box. We don’t know each other anymore.

Even at age ten I felt connected to the elephants touching the bones of their dead, hanging their heads low, rumbling reassurances to each other. I was too young to understand what I felt then; fifteen years later, I understand it too much. Always rubbing worry lines into the bones of my dead.

—

I moved around a lot as a kid, but if you ask, I’ll tell you I grew up in and around Salem.

One thing about a teenager in Salem, Oregon: she wants to live in Portland. For her, Salem feels like a rest stop you pull into because you have to pee, or the gas is low; Portland is a place where people live—feel alive, even.

I can’t be surprised, several years after graduation, that I run into former classmates on the street. One at the OMSI ticket counter; another at the coffee shop around the corner from where I work; yet another, stopped at the crosswalk on a bike as I walk by on foot.

Sometimes: Is that you, Casey? Or: Did you go to West Salem High School?

Yes! It’s so good to see you! I tilt my head a little, trying to place them. It’s not that I don’t remember; it’s that we’ve changed so much in the intervening years. We came out of the closet, transitioned, broke through soil to reach the sun.

When I step away from these brief reunions, I want to revise the old memories—call them by their new name, update their style, let their shoulders relax. Grant a retroactive peace to their younger selves.

As adults, we laugh about frog tattoos and carabiners and undercuts, and while there’s some truth to those stereotypes, our recognition of each other began long before the ink or the keys or the haircut. Something innate in the way we held ourselves, whispering a secret we could only hear if we were hiding it too.

A friend who’s orbited my life since we were teenagers, holding our secrets just behind our rib cages, recently moved to Portland. Not too long before she arrived back in town, she sent me a message on Instagram, inviting me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. Aw, I think. It’s been so long since we shared space, and yet, she remembers. I remember, too.

Fast forward a few months, it’s election night. My partner is out of town, and I can’t weather a third Trump v. Not Great Democrat election alone. I text my friend: If I bring a few bottles of wine over, can I crash at yours? Immediately: We’ll see you tonight!

I don’t usually drink all that much; I’m drunk by 9pm. Our little scraps of hope slide down our throats with the wine and get broken down by our churning stomachs.

There’s something cyclical about it—being teenagers, sitting in an empty classroom, crying about the state of the world; being twenty-somethings, tucked away in a studio apartment, crying about the state of the world. But then, we didn’t know ourselves. Now we do.

I’m witness to a moment. My friend turns to her future wife. We should elope. Like, tomorrow. She posts on a couple queer message boards and then turns off the lights. I’m trying not to hyperventilate on their futon, and I can hear them crying softly in their bed. We are only pretending at sleep, so we can face whatever comes tomorrow.

In the morning, we’ll wake up to a reply. Someone from the message board owns a queer bookstore and is an officiant. How’s 3pm today?

It’s a stroke of luck that feels miraculous. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some kind of energy in the universe that pushes us toward the right people at the right times, when we’re able to sink into the current of it.

At 3pm, we’re standing in a corner of the bookstore. They look so beautiful, white suit jacket and white dress, hands clasped around borrowed bouquets and eyes lined with tears. I’m crying too; so are the strangers browsing the shelves. I buy them sweatshirts printed with the name of the bookstore, and crack a joke that I’m the stand-in mother of the bride today. Then I go home and cry some more.

—

My friends and I tag-team playing the role of the Matriarch. I remind them to take their medication, sit in on their dentist appointments, and force-feed them water when they’re drunk. They listen to my swirling thoughts, read my writing, and deliver homemade soup when I’m sick. We care for each other the best we can, then pass it on to the next person.

One of the elders who taught me how to live this way was Kate, a woman who offered me her spare bedroom before ever meeting me.

Kate wasn’t her given name. During her divorce, she decided instead of changing her last name, she’d change her first and middle names. She picked Kate R. The R stood for Rosa Parks.

I had just come out to a couple friends at an In-N-Out Burger and hadn’t told anyone else yet. I didn’t know she was a lesbian when I showed up on her doorstep with a suitcase in hand and my heart between my teeth, but as soon as I laid eyes on the framed photos of her wedding to her now-deceased wife, the confession tumbled out of my mouth. I’m gay too!

She was in her 70s. Decades before, she was married with two children, but so deeply unhappy she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. After weeks of working with a therapist, she realized her torment had to do with her long-repressed sexuality. Her therapist, she said, was relieved. I was waiting for you to figure it out, he told her.

She laughed recounting this part. How can others know us so long before we know ourselves?

Kate collected lost souls all her life, picking them up wherever she encountered them and wrapping them up for safekeeping. I felt special in her gaze nonetheless. She stayed up with me late at night, stroking her cat Ethel, and listened to my anxieties overflow. I mentioned I loved chocolate peanut butter ice cream; the next day, a pint appeared in the freezer. She woke up early to drive me to the MAX station every morning, so I could get to my internship on time. She cared for me like a granddaughter—I’d met her only weeks before.

After I moved out of her spare bedroom, I called her regularly, seeking her insight. I was so excited to introduce her to my partner. We’ll come up to visit soon, I promise!

I never got to. When I found out she died, I walked up the hill and sat on a park bench with my journal. I wrote her a letter and let my tears smudge the ink.

Every now and then, I turn over her memory in my mind, gingerly feeling along the curves to see what she still has to say.

Casey Chaffin is a writer from Portland, OR. She published an essay about psychosis and mental health crisis response in the Oregon Humanities Magazine last year, and also shares essays on her Substack blog, the manic hermit crab (caseychaffin.substack.com). She lives with her partner, Sydney, and a large orange tabby cat, despite being allergic to him.