Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

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. How foolish it is for a mortal being to need such reminders, but oh how much easier it is to pay attention when the world beckons, when the world holds out its cupped hands and says, “Lean close. Look at this!” This leaf will never again be exactly this shade of crimson. The nestlings in the euonymus just beyond the window will never again be this bald or this blind. Nothing gold can stay. And yet in winter the bare limbs of the sycamore reveal the mockingbird nest it

sheltered all summer, unseen barely a foot above my head, and the night sky spreads out its stars so profusely that the streetlights are only a nuisance, and the red-tailed hawk fluffs her feathers over her cold yellow feet and surveys the e...

I had driven south with two friends to join in the rally, to hear the speeches after the march was all over. But far outside town, just past Prattville and the sign warning travelers to GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU, the northbound lanes of I-65 had been closed to automobiles and our side turned into a two-lane thruway. Drivers in both directions were confused, or just curious, and traffic was hood-to-trunk, hardly moving. Clearly we were never going to make it into Montgomery for the rally, so we pulled over and parked. Just then the first group of marchers arrived on the other side of the road, heading into the city. They

More than three decades later, I can still exactly recall the smile on one older woman’s face as she reached out to grab my sleeve and pull me into the throng of marchers. I can still smell the damp clover in the median. 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.

I peek between the branches of the holly bush, and the redbird nestling looks straight at me, motionless, unblinking. 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.

This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It’s all nonsense. 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. It is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the

world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won’t even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones. You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. 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 las...