Obituary

Harambe was 17 years old, 450 pounds, and had never asked to be famous. He died at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, and was reborn as a meme roughly forty minutes later. For a summer, he was everywhere: the patron saint of goodbyes, the subject of a Change.org petition with 500,000 signatures that changed nothing, and the answer to a question nobody asked. The internet mourned him by refusing to stop joking about him, which is the internet's only known form of love.

Portrait: Jason Miklacic · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Born

May 28, 2016

Died

2017

Cause of death

Memorialized to death

Last sighting

A Cincinnati Zoo memorial gate, summer 2017

Resting place

Section B, Row 1 — the big plot

Category

animal