Digging Up the Root

Each and every one of us can recall losing someone or something in our lives that caused us much grieving. What controls how much or to what extent we grieve when something is taken from our lives? Jane Goodall discuses this topic in her essay Digging Up the Roots. She says, “the depth of our grief depends on the nature of the relationship that we had with what we have lost, not on who or what that person or thing actually was.” Depending on the situation we may grieve more over the loss of a cat or dog than that over the loss of a person in our lives. Goodall takes us on a trip through her life, explaining the relationships she has had with different animals in her life. She states that she has lost several dogs in her life which she deeply loved. After losing these dogs she had difficulty doing certain things in her life that she used to do with that companion.
She then goes on to explain to us that she has spent much of her life studying the activity of a community of Gombe chimpanzees. “The nature of my relationship with the Gombe chimpanzees is very different from that with my dogs,” Goodall claims. The reason they differ is simply because of the different ways that they influence and depend on her life. Whereas a dog relays on a human companion for help during sickness and expect human interaction, chimpanzees do not. They life their own life and do not necessarily need humans to survive. The chimpanzees do not show joy after a long absence of a human visitor as do dogs, cats, and other pets. Goodall closes her story with an interesting prospect that she has grieved more over the loss of the Gombe environment than that of the loss of the chimpanzees that lived there.
I thought that this was a very interesting essay. The level of truth that her writing carries is amazing. Not many times do I read a piece of writing like this and not totally disagree with what the author is writing. I was also able to directly relate to a great majority of the examples she...