Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

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.

I understood that I understood nothing at all.

I caught my breath and walked on, with a rising sense that glory was all around me.

“You talk about that job all the time. Why did you decide to stay home?” “I didn’t decide,” she said instantly, with a bitterness I had never heard in her voice before. “I didn’t choose.” She had been forced to resign as soon as she was visibly pregnant with me. By law the mothers of children too young for school could not work for the state of Alabama.

Back on the caregiving roller coaster, 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.