Harambe

b. May 27, 1999 — d. May 28, 2016, of a management decision

Harambe died on his seventeenth birthday. The day after, technically — but close enough that it felt like the punchline was already written, and none of us were in the room when it happened.

A three-year-old came over the wall of his Cincinnati Zoo enclosure. What happened next depends on who you ask. The boy's mother says he dragged the child. Witnesses say he was guarding him. The zoo said they had ten minutes to decide, and they used all ten.

Then the internet found out.

What mattered next was the specific weather of summer 2016. Dat Boi had arrived weeks earlier — a frog on a unicycle with no origin and no thesis, spreading through exactly the corner of Facebook that had stopped making sense to your coworkers. Hotline Bling Drake was behind us now; the new fluency was dumb sincerity weaponized against irony's exhaustion. Into this walked a dead gorilla, and the internet made him its grief object, its protest symbol, and the year's most structurally complete non-joke simultaneously. "Dicks out for Harambe" was formally perfect: offensive in shape, harmless in content, utterly untranslatable to anyone outside the moment.

He received write-in votes in the presidential election. Songs were recorded. Vigils were held. The mother who had looked away — who had, to be clear, looked away — became Mother Ignoring Kid Drowning in a Pool, a meme format built directly on her moment at the zoo, which meant the grief had spawned an ecosystem with its own taxonomy. Harambe had children now. The children were punchlines. It was both too much and exactly right.

By winter, invoking him was a tell. The meme died the way they all do — not with a ceremony but with a quiet collective agreement to look away, which was, in retrospect, a terrible choice of metaphor. Roll Safe arrived and told you how to think past your problems. Expanding Brain told you how smart you could be if you just kept going. The whole architecture of late-2016 irony was built, in part, on the question Harambe had posed and never answered: is this real grief, or is it a bit? You could feel the inheritance in every Post-Ironic meme that followed — the knowing wink that also meant it.

Here is what is true: he was a Western lowland gorilla, critically endangered, seventeen years old. A child came over the wall of his enclosure, and ten minutes later there was a decision. Here is also true: for one summer, his name was the closest the internet came to a shared religion. The theology was absurd. The feeling underneath it was not.

He did not know what a meme was. He was standing in his enclosure, and then the boy came over the wall, and then the zoo made its call.

Dicks out. Rest easy, big guy.