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?

we humans are acutely attuned to difference and tend to prize any rare variation from the norm.

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.

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?

Spring came to Alabama, but it did not come to our teacher, whose hair was gone by then, her voice barely more than a whisper.

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.

Thanks to that natural human urge to share something wonderful, even with a stranger, I have learned this lake’s terrain over the years and know where to look for the well-disguised secrets I would miss on an unfamiliar path.

“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.’”

To a person who has wanted since the age of fourteen to be a poet, a classroom in which all the words of the English language have been made bereft of the power to create meaning, or at least a meaning that can be reliably communicated to others, is not a natural home.

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.

I think most of my own happiness, of all the years with a good man and the family we have made together and the absorbing work—everything that followed a single season of loss, and only because I listened to my father. Because I came home.

The loss you don’t know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.

Human beings are storytelling creatures, craning to see the crumpled metal in the closed-off highway lane, working from the moment the traffic slows to construct a narrative from what’s left behind. 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.

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?”

During the two and a half years Dad was sick with cancer, Mom left his side only long enough to walk from their room to the kitchen for anything he thought, however fretfully, might settle his churning stomach, and when he died she was lost. Her children, her friends, her church, her flower beds, her sewing projects—none of them offered comfort in the face of cavernous grief.

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.

I knew my kids would one day leave for lives of their own, but Mom’s needs would just keep growing. By the time my nest was truly empty, I thought, there would be precious little left of me.

Then we lost my beautiful mother-in-law too. I think of her, and of my parents, every single day. 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.

In a contest between knowledge and instinct, instinct wins every time.

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.

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!”