Original subtitles

-Do you think this is navy? -No.

I would say it is, actually, yeah.

Jesus, really?

Yeah.

No, honest to God, I think it's black.

Never would I have said navy.

I think Lucy recognized that there were chimps

and that chimps were a different category,

but I don't think she put herself in that other category.

I think she saw herself as a human.

I was 25 when I first met Lucy.

I was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma.

Norman was a really nice little university town.

I was really happy there,

working in the primate studies group

that had many chimps,

and we used those chimps in our research.

This animal study complex

is where chimpanzees are being taught to communicate

with the same sign language used by deaf persons.

Aww.

Oh, excuse me, I don't mean to laugh at your face,

it's a very sweet face.

I was just looking for some part-time work

to help put myself through school.

I thought it was appropriate

that it would have something to do with chimps.

She had a little bit of a reputation of being aggressive.

I had already heard the story

about her jumping through a glass window

at the previous person who had had the job

that I was going to apply for.

Before we can go any further,

there are a few rules about this job

that we have to make clear.

We know that you would have had--

Jane and Maury both made it crystal clear to me

that this job was not to get to know Lucy,

that if I thought it was something like that,

I was in the wrong place.

You would be here to clean Lucy's cage and to feed her.

That is all.

We cannot allow any physical contact with Lucy

such as leaning against her cage

or putting fingers through the wires

because she is dangerous.

There wasn't any niceties in her greeting with me.

I would say she was formidable.

Our little girl...

will be fine.

If she'd had physical contact with me,

she definitely would have put me in my place.

She would have mashed me down there.

Well, she was born at a roadside zoo in Florida

where the main attractions were chimps

they trained to box with humans.

Jane went down to collect her

when she was only two days old.

The mother was fed some Coca Cola,

spiked with a strong tranquilizer

and when she'd fallen into a deep sleep,

the baby was taken from her arms and handed to Jane...

who named her Lucy.

They flew home on a commercial airline

and covered by a blanket,

Lucy slept the whole way on Jane's shoulder.

And once Lucy got home, our scientific adventure began.

Being so young, she couldn't have learned

any animal behavior from her real mom.

We wondered how chimp would she turn out to be...

...or how human.

Would she be well-behaved or rebellious?

Clever or stupid?

What human emotions would she have?

Would she, perhaps, be able to tell us that she loves us?

I very rarely had contact with the Temerlins.

95% of my time, when I was there, no one was there.

There was always a note left for me on the table.

Oh, clean this, do that, Lucy's gonna have this for lunch.

It was just a normal list that probably a maid would have

or somebody that was taking care of your kids for you.

Lucy had been part of the sign language project

and she had 120 words in her vocabulary.

She did try communicating with me...

...but my sign language was not up to the point

where I could understand.

Um...

I mean, I had some isolated words.

You scared?

Blanket. Hungry.

Apple. Food.

Oh.

But I couldn't really put them together.

Um...

Lucy was pretty well-known

in the sign language world.

She was a very precise signer.

She was a little bit of a perfectionist.

Okay, slow.

So when I asked her to repeat it...

...you know, she'd kinda like roll her eyes

like I was really dumb.

She was very arrogant.

Just very, um, condescending.

And then I called my major professor.

So she's saying Lucy is cold.

Lucy wants a hot cup of tea.

Oh.

Raising Lucy,

we've given her every human comfort possible.

After eight hours' sleep

on a king-sized Beautyrest mattress,

she'll have breakfast of coffee, oatmeal with raisins

and a glass of orange Tang.

Sometimes we'll drive around town, going to Dairy Queen

and one time, we went to a drive-in movie

that was playing Planet of the Apes.

Lucy paid no attention whatsoever.

In the evenings,

she'll sit around studying herself

with her favorite mirror...

...and occasionally fix a gin and tonic,

squeezing the lime with her teeth.

Although raised human,

Lucy still shows some natural behavior.

She grooms us...

...the way chimps in Africa do.

Her way of saying that we're special.

It's as important that we groom her back...

...solidifying the bonds between all of us.

It wasn't long before Lucy

was no longer our experimental subject...

...but our daughter...

...and we were all a family.

On the day-to-day basis that I saw her,

I just accepted everything was on Lucy's terms

and I never knew what was gonna happen.

Very gradually, she started making movements...

...as if she wanted to groom me.

I knew this was a no-no.

Maury and Jane had said, "Do not lean against there,

she will grab you."

Many people who study chimps

have lost joints of their fingers.

I remember thinking,

"Do I trust my own judgment right now,

or do I do what they say?"

I must have just decided I was gonna go with it.

Then when she asked me to groom her,

it was a very special moment for me...

...and had nothing to do with theories of psychology

or learning or anything.

It was our moment.

Sure, I was cleaning up shit in the cage,

but I also was getting to know Lucy.

It was exciting me just the little bit that I got.

I cherished it for what it was as long as I could

because I assumed, once Jane and Maury knew about it,

I would be fired.

Dr. Temerlin's book, Lucy: Growing Up Human

is indeed, a fascinating study.

It's a definite first, isn't it, Doctor?

I think so, never done this long,

to raise the chimp past sexual maturity,

starting so early.

Lucy, give me my glasses.

Lucy,

give me my glasses.

Give me my glasses.

Hormones have changed Lucy.

Leave that alone, please.

She regularly turns our living room

into pure chaos within minutes.

And if she gets our keys,

she can easily select the right one

to open the door and escape.

Lucy, where are you going?

Won't you come back in here, please?

One time, she was eventually

discovered going through the neighbor's refrigerator.

Come on, Lucy, sit down here and have breakfast,

come on.

Come on, Luc.

When Lucy comes into estrous,

when a wild chimp is ready to mate,

she shows interest in any human male outside the family.

It started affecting her social life

because friends and family

have become intimidated by her size and strength.

Most have stopped visiting all together.

We have only a few more moments.

Why did you do this and do you think you've missed anything

as a result of concentrating so heavily,

your life, your family life, with a chimp?

I think Lucy may have missed something,

not knowing chimpanzees, but I don't think we have.

The grooming sessions between us

became a regular event

and it was kind of a norm for Lucy and a norm for me.

There was this overwhelming fear

that I was gonna have to tell Maury and Jane

that I couldn't keep this a secret forever.

So the best thing for me to do was be upfront and tell them.

Maurice, there's something

I've been wanting to tell you about Lucy.

It was much easier to talk to Maury

about what I'd done than Jane.

I mean definitely, it wouldn't have been Jane

to discuss this with.

I'm really sorry that this has happened

and I hope that you won't think I've been disrespectful to you.

He listened to me without interrupting,

without saying a word.

But please don't fire me, I really wanna keep the job.

He said that he was surprised,

happily surprised, and then he said--

Do you wanna meet her outside the cage?

I never dreamed that he would say something like that.

I mean, grooming through the wire,

that is totally different

than a face-to-face with an adult chimp.

I'll be right there, so if anything starts to go wrong,

I'll put Lucy right back into the cage.

It'll all be fine.

I don't know.

I never thought that there was

anything positive to come of this.

I don't know.

He just talked me into it.

Maury did nothing that he promised that he was gonna do.

I was scared to death.

I couldn't breath because her mouth was covering mine.

All I could do is pray that it wasn't gonna go any further.

And then she sat to the side, panting,

and really frantically grooming me.

I think she was very excited by the opportunity

for us to have full physical contact.

She was happy, she was really happy.

I became the friend from outside of the nuclear family.

And she brought me in.

It was at a time in her emotional development

that she needed more than just her mom and dad all the time.

One day when I went to work, there was a note.

In all the months that I'd been there,

there had never been a request to see me, never.

The last few years have been difficult for us.

Having to put our daughter into a cage...

Maury's the one that did the talking.

He spoke very emotionally

about what they had been going through with Lucy.

Fully grown,

Lucy has become unpredictable around strangers.

No no, no, no, no no, sit down.

Lucy, sit down.

Lucy, sit down right here.

-Lucy-- -Lucy, sit down.

Recently, she bit someone and threatened others.

Is this her nature, overtaking our nurture?

We no longer go anywhere there could be people.

And she's spending more and more time in her cage.

Growing up, we gave Lucy a loving family home...

...but it's now an impossible place

for her to live as an adult.

Jane and I have had to make

one of the toughest decisions of our lives...

...to find Lucy a new home...

...one where she doesn't have her freedoms taken away

and can be her own person.

It'll mean losing our daughter.

But it's the best thing for Lucy.

They were in a predicament of their own making

and they were fully aware of it,

but at the time that they brought Lucy home

and conceptualization of this program,

I don't think that anyone knew the downside of it.

I know they didn't.

We've been searching all over Europe and the U.S.

to find her a new home,

but nothing has even come close to being good enough.

He recounted all the pros and cons of each place.

Nothing was satisfactory.

And then his whole demeanor changed.

He got a little bit of a sparkle back in his eyes

and he said that they had heard about a project.

That takes chimpanzees and teaches them

how to live in the wild.

And so, we're taking Lucy to Africa.

It kind of hit me,

gee, Lucy's gonna go all the way to Africa?

And it just seemed so far-fetched

and so out of left field.

We're gonna go over with her to settle her in

and we want you to come with us too.

It was a real shock to me, a big shock to me.

Um...

I had never been to Africa.

It wasn't on my list of places to go either.

But there was no way that I could say no.

I needed to go to give Lucy the support.

Maury and Jane were gonna stay for two weeks,

and I would stay one week after they left.

Packing for the trip, everything was about Lucy.

I was overloaded with dry fruit,

her mirror

and all of her stuff was priority.

I took a couple of outfits to wear,

three paperback books,

and I feel like I had a flute.

I do recall one of the cabin attendants coming up

and saying that people in first class

were hearing Lucy screaming.

I think she thought that she was enhancing our journey

by telling us that, but I just can imagine

Maury and Jane, for sure, would not wanna hear that.

Here, in the Gambia, West Africa,

is the Abuko Nature Reserve where captive chimpanzees,

both young and adult, are being returned to the wild.

No one had taken a chimp

that had been born in the States

and taken it back to the wild,

and particularly one that had been deprived

of growing up with chimpanzees.

The hope was that she would be free,

she would be part of a chimpanzee community

and bond with them,

but many, many steps and many, many hazards

between the idea and the reality of that.

They had found an option

that they felt had high risks,

but you know, if it worked, it was paradise

and that's what they wanted for her.

And so that's the road that they took,

but it doesn't mean that it was an easy road for them.

Often they couldn't speak.

Words couldn't come out even if they wanted to

because, you know, the emotion was all the way up to there.

And I'm sure they were counting the days

until the final goodbye.

We were saying goodbye to a daughter.

She was a very intimate part of our lives for over a decade.

A long time.

Maury and I were going to leave

and we said, as we always did, "Goodnight, Lucy."

And she said her goodnight,

which was a lovely low, soft panting.

It was a loving goodbye, it was.

She didn't realize she wouldn't see us in the morning,

but we did.

I can still hear that.

Lucy had a million physical reasons

for being depressed

and then she had the whopping emotional one

of, "What in the world am I doing here?"

"What is this about, where is Maury and Jane?"

And I had no way to explain this to Lucy.

So, I mean, why act like life is great?

It wasn't for her.

She didn't have any friends,

she was clearly dependent on me.

So I extended by two weeks...

...and still, she was not giving indicators

that we were even moving in the right direction on this.

Not long after that, I remember...

...setting my last extension to three months.

After that, I really had to get moving

with my own life's plans because

I had an assistantship at the university, I was teaching.

I had a dog.

I had a boyfriend.

So that was to be the final decision.

Not long after that, finances became an issue.

And I moved from the hotel...

...into a tree house in the Abuko Nature Reserve.

I think everyone had the expectation

that I knew what I was getting myself into

and that I had experience.

But I didn't know anything.

I don't think I ever really used matches before

that I can remember.

Everything was always electricity.

A lot of things that I didn't even think about

until I was presented with a situation.

It never even occurred to me that there was no water.

But the strong point was,

I was gonna be 100 meters away from Lucy...

...and I could be going back and forth at great ease.

She lost tremendous amounts of weight,

mostly because of parasites,

and started to lose patches of hair.

I think a lot of it had to do with

the unfamiliarity of the food and the climate.

She was just like barely hanging on.

Lucy only had me and her memories.

So I tried to stay with her as long as I could.

And we would play these little games

where I would go Lucy's nose, Janis' nose,

Lucy's ear, Janis' ear, and you know,

she would sit there very in tune with what I was doing

and concentrating like it was the most important thing to her.

And I became the focal point for her social contact

and she was, for me.

I think that we began to know each other

as people during that era.

There was no more chimpanzee, human...

...it was Janis and Lucy.

It was clear, at that point,

this is gonna be a much longer,

much more difficult task than any of us imagined.

A growing understanding of what I'm asking of her...

...to give up her life in the States

and the path that she was on

and stay there under those circumstances.

I pleaded with her to come back.

But she was steadfast.

She wouldn't do it.

I wasn't even aware

of the depth of my feeling for Lucy

until I was faced with the question,

was I able to leave her in that kind of a situation?

Or did I have an allegiance

to my love for her to stay with her?

Which, that's what I decided to do.

Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

Our special report today takes us to the Gambia

where the fundamental elements of survival,

which were never learned by these chimps,

are being taught to them now

in a very comprehensive program by Janis Carter.

They must be taught the essential skills

such as how to find food and water,

how to recognize and avoid predators,

and even how to communicate with another chimpanzee.

I wasn't a professional, nobody had taught me how to do it.

It was just trial and error,

learning whatever I thought a chimp would have done,

I would try to do that myself.

Already, Dash has reacted to my food grunting

and has accepted the idea of this new food source.

When I took the smaller chimps out,

I would take a bag with me

and I would collect extra

and I would take it back for Lucy.

She couldn't go out of the cage

because she was much too large and potentially dangerous.

And tourists walked through this reserve.

The idea was, it would be a gradual transition

from a diet that she was familiar with and that she liked

to a diet that she would be eating in the wild.

Mm.

But even with me eating it,

and giving really exaggerated food grunts

like I just loved it...

...she would pretend like it wasn't there.

She just wasn't willing to try and

my concerns that, you know, the next stage was gonna be

the real world for Lucy and what was that going to be like

if she couldn't even adjust at this stage.

I knew that this was the next step in the whole process,

but I really loved Abuko.

I couldn't imagine leaving this beautiful Garden of Eden

to go up to this wild area.

It frightened me, it really did scare me.

While the majority of the journey is by Land Rover,

the final stage is by boat, handled by the director of

Gambia's Wildlife Conservation Department, Eddie Brewer.

I was dropped off, alone,

and initially, I didn't even have a boat...

...and not a radio, nothing.

I felt abandoned then.

But I couldn't really show this in front of the chimps

because I was supposed to be the brave one

and I was the leader,

but I did not know what we were doing.

We were gonna be in a world that we didn't know...

...that we had to begin to get to know together.

There's always something spiritual about a forest.

Sometimes my skin gets kind of tingly,

depending on what I'm walking through.

The periphery of the island was gallery forest.

Then there was woodland savanna and the interior was swamp.

I had snakes around me all the time,

a lot of cobras and puff adders.

There were hippos and there were hyenas

on the island as well.

Well, I don't think anyone told me about the leopards.

I had a cage that had been constructed

by the British Army.

It wasn't for me to be protected from the environment,

it was so that my things could be protected from the chimps.

In the beginning, it was a bed,

a mosquito net,

the gas burner for heating water and cooking,

which I rarely did.

It didn't occur to me that I should have filtered water.

I would just take water from the river and then

the dirt would settle down to the bottom

and that's what I drank.

One time was a rat

and I had been drinking out of that bucket.

At night, the chimps, they were going to sleep outside,

I was going to sleep inside.

But they wanted to be as close as they possibly could to me,

so they slept on the roof, just above my bed.

For all of us, there were a lot of vocalizations

that we hadn't heard in Abuko.

Every time there was some foreign sound

that woke them up,

they would immediately urinate or defecate.

And it would come down on my bed.

There was no way that I could stop them.

I just had to accept that this is the way it was going to be.

I did think to myself, "Jesus, what am I doing?"

I did advertise for somebody to come to work for me.

And a couple of people answered.

Neither one of the people ever even got out of the boat

on the jetty, the chimps just went nuts.

This was a stranger to our little world

and they didn't want anyone there at all.

That left me alone,

completely alone with them.

There was no one that could kinda take over in my absence.

There was no way that I could even think about going away

for an extended period of time.

It was emotionally difficult.

I suppose part of what made it harder

was that I didn't have anyone to confer with.

Everything was on me and my gut.

In terms of written communication,

it could be six months before I would get a response

with the feedback from someone to reassure me that, "Yes,

you're doing the right thing."

She was clear about the struggles.

She was clear about how hard it was.

You know, waiting for every letter from her.

What's going to be next?

Is Lucy gonna be hurt? Is Lucy gonna be sick?

How about Janis,

is she going to be overwhelmed by what she's dealing with?

I worried about her health and her well-being every day,

every day.

The others were okay.

I knew that they would make it.

They would forage, they would go off together.

But Lucy was a different case altogether.

Well, Lucy's smart enough to respond to modeling behavior

and she knew what I was trying to do.

Lucy,

food, get.

She just wasn't gonna bend an inch,

it seemed like, and forage for herself.

Lucy, food, get.

Her accepting that wild fruits and leaves

were going to be a major part of her diet

was really important.

Lucy, food, get.

She needed to do this in order to survive

and in order for me to leave.

Lucy, food, get.

Where I really began to ponder...

Lucy, food, get.

...we've gotta find some other kind of option for Lucy.

This isn't gonna work.

I wrote to the Temerlins, saying that,

you know, she just won't, she won't do this.

She's just, I don't know what we're gonna do about it.

And do you think, in the back of your mind,

you're thinking, "I've come all this way,

I've given up everything for you

and you're not doing what--"

I never thought, it never went through my head,

"You owe me.

I've given everything up."

That idea never went through my head at all,

through any of it.

I knew that she could do it

and I just couldn't figure out

why she wouldn't just give in and do it.

And this went on and on and on.

Lucy, eat the food!

Understand!

Lucy, eat food.

This particular day,

I had gotten angry at her and yelled at her.

Lucy, eat food!

I probably expressed exasperation

like I had never expressed it before.

Mmm, mmm, mmm.

I'm not even gonna try anymore,

just forget it.

Lucy, eat food!

I don't know if I just passed out

or if I actually went to sleep.

But when I woke up, the world had changed.

She was eating leaves.

Lucy knew me very well.

She was very sensitive to people's moods.

It's possible that she understood

I had reached my limit that day.

It was, perhaps, a breaking point for her

that she finally had to give in.

It was an immense relief.

I had lost hope, but it really gave me hope.

It strikes me

that relief was the turning point.

But it was only on the feeding front,

it wasn't on anything else.

Even if Lucy acquired her foraging skills,

she couldn't have survived on the island totally alone.

She had to integrate socially

with the rest of the chimps.

But she wanted all of her emotional needs

and social needs met by me and it prevented her

from interacting with anyone else in the group.

So I had to withdraw for her to feel empty

to the point that she would look to somebody else

to fulfill those needs.

I knew how it was impacting on Lucy,

that she was feeling ignored and left out

and forgotten and unloved.

But if I gave in,

she wouldn't be able to realize what we had all hoped

that she would, which was to be independent,

free and have choice.

I had been so afraid to go to the island,

but the longer that I stayed, the less I wanted to leave.

It was the perfect paradise that I was so lucky

to have found that.

But it was a different kind of paradise.

There were some unusual things that happened at night.

I would see a light.

It would go back and forth and back.

I could feel this really strong pull,

trying to pull me into it.

And it always happened the same way, just like that.

I believe that there were spirits

that were taking care of me when I was there

and that's why I survived it all those years.

I was never harmed.

I suppose those are the layers of mystery

that really enhanced how I feel about the island.

I tried to keep a balance

between communicating with the outside world

and living a life that I was on the island.

But it was very difficult.

I would read letters with great excitement

and be happy with it.

And then in a very short period of time,

it was like some sentence was kinda highlighted,

going across my brain, what's this mean?

"Maybe now we can start thinking about

returning to your life back here."

Could it mean this? Could it mean that?

And I was really preoccupied with it.

It was actually making me unbalanced.

"Back here now."

There was just no way that I could be totally immersed

in this world with the chimps

and also immersed in a human world.

I couldn't live in both worlds.

I just gradually drifted away

from family and friends.

I stopped writing

and I stopped receiving letters as well.

I don't remember being lonely.

I remember sometimes feeling like I had too much

human stimuli from the chimps and I would just scream,

"Can't you just leave me alone for a minute?"

They fulfilled all those human needs

that I had for social contact.

Lucy and I had more of a friendship.

My feelings for Dash...

...it was more mother-offspring type of feeling.

He manipulated me, just like all little boys do

with their mothers.

Especially if they're an only child.

But we just loved each other's company.

So you were sort of

reaching another level of being with them.

Were you, essentially, one of them?

I don't know, I don't...

I don't know if I ever became

a chimp, so to speak.

But I do think that our personalities

and our cultural tendencies all met together

at some point and we were just who we were.

And things changed for Lucy as well.

She developed a different kind of aura about herself,

one that was more peaceful.

She didn't have patches of hair missing anymore

and she didn't express such neediness

as she had in the early years.

She could go out and forage with the group without me.

She interacted with the other chimps.

I just thought of us as beings,

that it was Dash and Janis

and Lucy and Lakey,

not Janis with a group of chimps.

And we were on a mission.

I learned a lot more about families...

...living with the chimps than I think I did

with my own human family.

Sunset was a really important moment of reflection

for all of us.

You know, we would always go out on the jetty.

No matter who was mad at who during the day

or who had bitten who or was holding a grudge or whatever,

it all washed away as the sun went down.

And we'd hang our hands in the river.

I don't know why that makes me emotional.

It just seemed...

...so genuine.

Every second of it was just so genuine and we were...

appreciative of what life had given us that day.

Feeling that all of these vile forces of civilization

just did not impact us.

It was...

...just us.

I didn't think about going back at that point.

Time had a different schedule for me then.

I mean, I would have indicators of seasons

by the date palm putting out its new fruits

and you know that a whole year has passed.

I was...

I suppose you call it living in the moment, don't you?

I was living in the moment.

This particular day, it was a hot day.

We were all walking the forest.

And I was in the back and I probably wasn't even thinking

about what I was doing.

I suddenly heard everybody scream and scatter.

And there was Dash, he had his hair up.

He was all pumped up and he was like bouncing on his toes.

I was gonna get it that day.

I was the leader in the beginning.

He was young when we first went there,

but he respected the dominance hierarchy.

But he was the oldest male,

so it was inevitable that he was going to be the one

that was gonna take over leadership of the group.

But for some reason,

I never thought that this was gonna happen.

I just stood there and he charged me.

This is it.

He grabbed my leg.

And he just dragged me everywhere he was going.

And then he dragged me through this thorn bush,

and my body got caught.

I was no longer the leader, I was number two,

but a number two that wasn't gonna be tolerated.

Dash would have slammed me if I tried to stay.

This was his place now.

It was very strange, leaving the island.

I wanted the feeling that I was a part of something

and I didn't have it.

I really missed the fullness of my life

and kind of purpose that I felt when I woke up.

She had a hard time adjusting.

How do you go back to living

primarily in a world of human beings?

And you're having to live an everyday life,

negotiating human structures,

human customs, human food.

It was incredibly stressful for her.

I knew that she was getting better,

but there was still this,

the overall concern on my part that Lucy was not going to

be able to survive without me there

kind of orchestrating or monitoring what was going on.

I took some of her human objects

that had been so important to her before.

She picked them up, looked at them

and put them back down again.

Nothing that had been important to her before,

that mirror was just like her very favorite object,

it meant nothing.

After that, we groomed each other and talked a little bit.

And then she suddenly,

um, really without any indication, grabbed me...

...and just pulled me really tight.

It was very intense,

it was not like any other embrace we had ever had.

It signified the life that we had shared together.

At the end of it,

she just got up, turned around

and walked back to the other chimps.

I was really, really surprised

that she initiated the separation.

Honestly, it had been so hard for so long,

I just never thought that she would walk away from me.

But Lucy had finally made it.

She was comfortable within herself

and that she was in control of her own life,

which is what we'd all wanted.

Lucy still loved me, that was very, very clear,

but she didn't need me in the way that she had

for so many years.

Eventually, I felt comfortable enough

to take my first real vacation,

leaving Lucy behind in her new life.

I always had wanted to go to Bali.

I had this dream one night

about Lucy getting on an airplane

and she had a bag with her

and she was going up the ladder of the plane.

I knew that she...

...she was dead.

There was no indication

of what might have been the cause of death.

But the more that we talked about it,

the more it just remains a mystery what happened to her.

I wanted her buried on the island.

So she's there on the island.

That's the right place

for her to be, though, isn't it?

Yeah.

That was her final home.

I was always just waiting.

When were we gonna get the call?

And it was a very, very difficult thing to hear.

It was a terrible loss for all of us.

I was so grateful to Janis

for giving Lucy this chance after her time with us.

She had some really good years.

And she had freedom and she wasn't in a cage.

She was protected, she was loved.

She had Janis.

But I wouldn't take a chimp

from its chimpanzee mother again.

Lucy's death had a certain finality

to the rest of what I was doing with my life.

I did go through a lot of thinking

as to whether I had achieved everything

that I had set out to do.

Was it time to start thinking about returning to the U.S.?

Do I need to be here anymore?

For years, after I left the island,

I used to have a ritual of watching the sun go down.

It didn't really matter where I was.

It was a sacred moment.

I guess that was the beauty of that period of my life

was that I did have that feeling.

I mean, how often do you get a chance

to live like that today?