Where’s My Elephant

I could spend an hour and write something very truthful and emotional, but instead I think I’ll quickly tell a cute story. MaryAnn loves to play with the dog pieces from our game, Walk the Dogs. She lines them up, then knows them down, throws them on the floor, then picks them up. Yesterday she was playing with them, and kept asking, in her cute 3 year old, sometimes hard to understand voice, “Where’s my elephant.” Of course, she usually knew where it was, because she had hidden it, sometimes in the middle of the dogs, sometimes in the other room.

Maybe that is way I woke up this morning thinking about this poem, and it has been on my mind all day long.

I’ve seen several different endings to this poem – but I think I will leave those for you to seek out.

While searching for the poem I also found this great article exploring the poem in more detail in the Hospice of the Piedmont’s Living with Loss Newsletter. Summer 2011.

I have an elephant, do you?

There’s an Elephant in the Room
by Terry Kettering

There’s an elephant in the room.
It is large and squatting
so it is hard to get around it.

Yet we squeeze by with,
“How are you?” and “I’m fine.”
and a thousand other forms of
trivial chatter.

We talk about everything else –
except the elephant in the room.

We all know it is there.
We are thinking about the elephant as we talk together.
It is constantly on our minds.

For, you see, it is a very big elephant.
It has hurt us all, but we do not talk about
the elephant in the room.