Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.

The alien does not know it’s an alien.

crunching tires

For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.

finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.

Sometimes, when I haven’t slept or the news of the world, already bad, suddenly becomes much worse, the weight of belonging here is a heaviness I can’t shake.

Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole.

To me he looked like a blood-red, hollow-boned embodiment of grace.

when I sat and listened to an orchestra play all six Brandenburg concertos, all I could think of, in the midst of that unfathomable beauty, was a line from Lear: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?”

Never mind. Mind only this tree in winter and this redbird, this tiny god, all fiery light leading to him and gathered in him, this lord of the sunset, this greeter of the coming dark.

Only at twilight can an ordinary mortal walk in light and dark at once—feet plodding through night, eyes turned up toward bright day. It is a glimpse into eternity, that bewildering notion of endless time, where light and dark exist simultaneously. When the fields gave way to the experimental

The aim of the course, at least so far as I could discern it, was to liberate literature from both authorial intent and any claim of independent meaning achieved by close reading. “The text can’t mean anything independent of the reader,” the professor, a luminary of the field, announced. “Even the word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean

I’m not speaking in metaphors when I say that my neighbors were surely as lost as I was: mostly immigrants from somewhere much farther away than Alabama, they couldn’t communicate with each other or with me—not because we couldn’t agree on the meaning of the words, but because none of the words we knew belonged to the same language.

My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.

A red wasp chases a brooding bluebird from the nest box, and I rub soap into the wood of the birdhouse roof. It’s humiliating, all the ways I’ve interfered.

I can still feel my burning cheeks and my thumping heart. But no matter how joyful, how hopeful, I suddenly felt—no matter how desperately I wanted to—they were singing a song I didn’t recognize, and I couldn’t add my voice to theirs. I could not sing along.

Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.

In the stir of too much motion: Hold still. Be quiet. Listen.

considered the alternate future he was laying before me: a life of poems. It was a lifeline to a life. Revelation The fog comes on little cat feet, as everyone knows, but the fog does not sit on silent haunches except in poems.

but the world belongs to the fog for now, and the fog is busy masking and unmasking, shrouding what we know and offering to our eyes what we have failed to see.

the bachelor mockingbird sings all night long. He will keep on singing until someone accepts his song.

But then he asked the question that made me want to lie and lie again and keep lying forever: “I will die?” he said, his voice quavering. “I will be dead?”

What I couldn’t bear was any more suffering.

Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.

By the time my nest was truly empty, I thought, there would be precious little left of me. When she died so suddenly, still issuing

end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief. Even as he recovered from open-heart surgery

An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation. It was a gift to hold that lovely, dying creature in my hands. It was wrong to feel its death as a gift. I didn’t know it was dying. I knew

During those early days of carrying a child—whether in my body or in my arms—I came to feel like one-half of a symbiotic relationship.

All these years later, motherhood still thrums within me like a pulse, and I catch myself swaying whenever I’m standing in a long line, soothing the ghost baby fussing in my arms. I look at my sons, all taller than six feet now, and sometimes I can’t quite believe I’m not still carrying them around on my hip, not still feeling their damp fingers tangled in my hair or clutching the back of my blouse. Sometimes at supper, when one of them brings a glass to his lips, I can still imagine a sippy cup gripped in his fingers.

coreopsis and coneflower and sage and lavender and bee balm and a host of other wildflowers.

What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.