Why encountering a beached whale profoundly changes so many people

On Exmouth beach looking out to where the river meets the English Channel, Peter Riley tells me about the death of his mother. “It was lung cancer. She was a very healthy person; she’d been walking in the Lake District the previous month. Then, over the course of 10 days, I watched her die. I’d never seen a human do that before.” Riley steps over a rusty sewage pipe and stuffs his hands in his pockets. British beaches are perfectly miserable in autumn.

Riley’s mother came to the UK in 1978, fleeing her repressive Black Forest upbringing. In her new home, she cultivated an adopted accent pulled straight from the British sitcom, ’Allo ’Allo! “Right at the last moment she opened her eyes and said something. I don’t know what. Then she fell back . . . tried to get up one more time and then she finally died in my arms . . . Outside, right at the moment of death, the bird feeder collapsed.”

A few weeks earlier, Riley had seen something lying on the pavement, a little brooch in the shape of a humpback whale. He picked it up and put it in his wallet. The next morning his mum called to say she was feeling unwell. After her death, Riley took up a post at the University of Exeter, where his students know him as Dr Peter Riley, senior lecturer in American literature specialising in Herman Melville and 19th-century poetry. But I know him differently. To me, Riley has become a guide, with whom I share a peculiar, burgeoning curiosity.

It all started last summer when I spoke to a marine biologist, hoping to cover a mass stranding of about 50 pilot whales in Scotland. Apparently, one of them had experienced a prolapse and beached herself on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Then, in a strange show of fatal solidarity, the rest of the pod followed her on to the shore. It was grief beyond human capability. I wanted to understand.

There’s a common misconception about strandings. People think the whales die of suffocation when really…