The other day I was driving my daughter to the store to buy school supplies. At a stop sign at the top of a steep hill, I looked to my left and standing no more than 10 feet from my car was a large doe. As I paused at the stop sign longer and longer, she just kept standing there and I wondered if something might be wrong.

Then my daughter said, “Dad, look!” Our eyes looked down in front of the doe and there was a dead fawn, no bigger than an adult German shepherd. We kept staring at this scene of tragedy, a mother standing over her child waiting for something or anything to happen.

Later that night, my imagination kicked in and I placed my brain inside the mother deer and wondered if she might have been grieving the loss of her baby. Could she factor in any consequences? Did she know that a dangerous “animal” making loud noises came running by and killed her baby or was she waiting for her child to wake up from being asleep? One thing my daughter and I did know. A mother’s devotion was on display that afternoon at the top of that hilly road and she was risking her own well-being for the sake of her child.

There are countless stories of animal mothers standing close to their babies in tragic situations. In 2018, an orca whale stayed in the same spot in the water for two weeks next to her floating dead baby. For those who might think that awareness of mortality is only a human trait, the idea that other animals grieve for the dead might be hard to imagine. Indeed, some scientists remain skeptical. But a growing number are questioning our human monopoly on grief. They’ve identified mourning like behaviors in elephants, giraffes, chimpanzees and other primates and, possibly, turtles, bison and birds.

In “When Animals Grieve,” Barry Yeoman says some scientists question whether a creature can mourn without a notion of mortality.

Yeoman tells a story about Zoe Muller, a University of Bristol wildlife biologist who founded the Rothschild’s Giraffe Project in Kenya. She came upon 17 female giraffes running haphazardly and looking distressed in a part of the jungle that they don’t normally frequent. An injured giraffe calf had died, and the adults stayed with her mother for two days, nudging the dead animal with their noses.

Muller returned on the third morning. Hyenas had fed on the calf’s carcasses. The mother was still standing over the body “even though it was half-eaten.” Though giraffes feed almost constantly, she wasn’t eating or drinking.

I come away from all this with an understanding that many animals live parallel lives to we humans. They do what they need to do to survive. They try to protect themselves from danger and I believe they have the capability to grieve the loss of a child.

This doe we saw standing by her baby was enough proof for my daughter and me and that had me recall another time when I was driving around a squirrel perched in the middle of the road next to another that had been run over by a car.

I can’t speak for an animal’s length of sadness following the loss of a family member, but I know that grieving is something that’s never ended by the click of a stopwatch. Psychiatrists, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler drew this conclusion. “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

Is there some way we can learn not to have our hearts broken after the death of a loved one? Novelist, E.A. Bucchianeri has the words that answer this question for me.

“… when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”