Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.

The cycle of life might as well be called the cycle of death: everything that lives will die, and everything that dies will be eaten.

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

“He just made up his mind to die, I guess,” my mother always said. “He lasted barely more than a month.”

“It’s too big, and I’m too little.”

Did they see the shadow of the moon traveling across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, or did they conflate the experience of reading about an eclipse with actually seeing one? Could it have happened so fast that an ill-timed blink meant my brother missed what my sister-in-law saw?

Then there was my own unvoiced question: When it’s all over, will I know what I saw? Will I be able to tell the difference between what I saw and what I had merely been primed to see?

All these images are absolutely clear, but I know better than to trust them. I have turned them over so often the edges have become soft and worn, their contours wholly unreliable.

I could not believe that something so beautiful, so otherworldly, had been conceived by a human mind and brought to life by human hands. So many of the other details of that day have fallen away—surely there was a class discussion, though I don’t recall it—but that high, haunting violin in the second movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 in F Major is something I will remember till I die.

“When I was hiking in Colorado, I saw a whole bunch of ladybugs, so I checked Google to see if there’s a name for a group that gathers in one place,” she said. “It’s called a ‘loveliness.’”

The earth has faded, but the sky will not give up its right to color, doubling down in the west with reds and oranges and yellows.

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.

I had been there about ten minutes when a man came to the door and asked about some oil for his car. Thomas asked him whether he wanted the can with the red label or the can with the green. The man went out to his car and came back with a rifle.

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.

You can always come home, Sweet,” he said. “Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home.”

These were words of loving reassurance from a parent to his child, a reminder that as long as he and my mother were alive, there would always be a place in the world for me, a place where I would always belong, even if I didn’t always believe I belonged there.

But I wonder now, decades later, if my father’s words were more than a reminder of my everlasting place in the family.

everything that followed a single season of loss, and only because I listened to my father. Because I came home.

But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.

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.

“All birds die,” he repeated. His eyes filled up with tears.

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?”

I was forty years old—a writer, a wife, a parent—but I still thought of my father’s love, of his unshakable belief in me, as the surest protection against my own inconsequence.

Being in the presence of death can transform otherwise reasonable people into augurs, bargaining with the cosmos: “If I stop being blasé about my health, will you promise not to kill me?”

“The family plot is full, but y’all can take a posthole digger down there in the middle of the night and stick me and Daddy in the ground near Mimi and Granddaddy,” she said. “I want to go home.”

The last words my mother ever spoke: Thank you. The last words my father ever spoke: Stop it. The words I spoke in the rooms where my parents were dying: I love you. It’s OK. Don’t worry. It’s OK. I love you.

When you pull out the eggs and the butter and the flour—plain, not self-rising; you will never make that mistake again—and the absurd quantities of sugar, remember to set the recipe card in a safe place. There are things you cannot keep safe, that you have already failed forever to keep safe, but you must remember to protect this one card written in your grandmother’s hand and saved in your mother’s recipe box. There’s a child in your house who won’t eat icing, and today is his birthday, and he will not always be a child, and you will not always keep him safe.

I saved all five giant boxes of OxiClean, and oh my God why did you never tell me about OxiClean? At 156 loads per box, our socks have been white for all the years you’ve been gone.

I wish I had known how much you loved blueberry muffins. I wish I had made you blueberry muffins every day of your life.

But what I couldn’t save weighs on my heart like a stone.

My dead don’t seem to know they’re dead.

Hush. Be quiet. The long summer day is coming to a close, spooling up its lovely light, but there is nothing to fear from the night. There is nothing to fear from life giving way to death, for that matter, or from any dark thing.

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.

There’s an art to helping people without making them feel bad about needing help.

I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.

They are an absence made palpably present, as though their most vivid traits—my father’s unshakable optimism, my mother’s irreverent wit, my mother-in-law’s profound gentleness—had formed a thin membrane between me and the world: because they are gone, I see everything differently.

But these are willed thoughts, a hedge against an atavistic instinct to read omens and signs into a giant black vulture that has staked out my home on a day when the federal government has announced its intention to claim my child.

At least half of all birds who fly into windows will ultimately die of internal bleeding, even when they seem to recover and fly away, and this stunned cedar waxwing was in no shape to fly.

It’s your birthday, which always seems to fall on the most splendid day of October. Even if it’s a workday, you must find some time to set aside your whirring machines and your contentions.

“Rye?” a neighbor asked, watching me scatter seeds. “Clover,” I said. She looked at me. “You’re planting clover?” “For the honeybees,” I said. “Last summer there was a big ball of bees up in the crepe myrtle next to my garbage cans,” she told me. “It took a whole can of Raid to kill them.”

Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

When I poured just a drip of cream into my cup, it erupted into volcanic bubbles in a hot spring, unspooling skeins of bridal lace, fireworks over a dark ocean, stars streaking across the night sky above a silent prairie. And that’s how I learned the world would go on.

An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, “It’s benign.” Someone was saying, “It’s a boy.” Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!”

If there’s anything that living in a family has taught me, it’s that we belong to one another. Outward and outward and outward, in ripples that extend in either direction, we belong to one another. And also to this green and gorgeous world.