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.

People want to believe that something extraordinary has happened to them, that they have been singled out for grace, and who am I to rob them of one sheen of enchantment still available in the first-ring suburbs?

Still the snow moon rises and sets as it must. It has never burned, and it will never darken: all its light is borrowed light. Its steadfast path is tied to ours.

Be a Weed 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. But then I think of the glister of a particular morning in springtime. I think of standing in the sunshine and watering the butterfly garden, which is mostly cultivated weeds punctuated by the uncultivated kind that come back despite my pinching and tugging. I think of the caterpillars on the milkweed plants, unperturbed by the overspray, and the resident red-tailed hawk gliding overhead, chased by a mockingbird and three angry crows, and the bluebird standing on the top of the nest box protecting his mate, who is inside laying an egg. I think of that morning—not even a morning, not even an hour—and I say to myself, Be an egg. Be a mockingbird. Be a weed.

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.

I grew up playing in the woods, and all my life I’ve turned to woodland paths when the world is too much with me, but I am no scientist. It took a lot of nerve for someone so ignorant of true wilderness to fashion herself as a nature writer, but the flip side of ignorance is astonishment, and I am good at astonishment.

What I wanted, I think, was some sort of closure, some reckoning of what it means when a thing in nature makes what it needs from only what it has on hand. But as with all other matters in nature and in life, I entered this story in medias res: unaware of its beginning and owed no right to witness its end.

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.

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.

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.

Revelation The fog comes on little cat feet, as everyone knows, but the fog does not sit on silent haunches except in poems. In the world, the fog is busy. It hides stalking cat and scratching sparrow alike. It blunts sharp branches, unbends crooked twigs, makes of every tree a gentler shape in a felted shade of green. Deep in the forest, it wakes the hidden webs into a landscape of dreams, laying jewels, one by one, along every tress and filament. The morning sun burns in the sky as it must, 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.

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.

Unmoored, I could not stop weeping. Caring for elders is like parenting toddlers—there’s a scan running in the background of every thought and every act, a scan that’s tuned to possible trouble. And there’s no way to shut it down when the worst trouble, irrecoverable trouble, comes.

the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.

In any crisis I always seem to find myself suspended between knowing and not knowing, between information and comprehension.

Why did I spend so much time watching for the next milestone when the next milestone never meant the freedom I expected? There will be years and years to sleep, I know now, but only the briefest weeks in which to smell a baby’s neck as he nestles against my shoulder in the deepest night.

With my own nest emptying, metaphors of loss are everywhere.

Already they are packing the minivan we bought when the youngest was in second grade. The house that all summer has been loud with life will fall almost silent. My husband and I will drive them to their dorms on the other side of the state, take a few minutes to unload, and then turn around to head home again. I will lift a hand as we pull out, though I know they will already be turning away, turning toward their beckoning new life. It has been years since the last time they looked back after leaving a car. They long ago stopped waving goodbye.

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.