Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

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.

There’s nothing “natural” about offering wild birds food and water and housing, even in an area where human beings have systematically destroyed their original nesting sites and food sources. With that invitation comes an obligation to protect and defend the creatures who accept

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

My mother was twelve when Mama Alice died. Papa Doc sat down on the porch and settled there, staring at the rambling rosebushes growing beside the road. “He just made up his mind to die, I guess,” my mother always said. “He lasted barely more than a month.”

It is the sound he made in his youth whenever an ambulance passed on the big road at the edge of the neighborhood, but he can’t hear so far anymore. Now he is howling in despair. He is howling for his long life’s lost companion, the dog who died last year and left him to sleep alone. He is howling for his crippled hips, so weak he can hardly squat to relieve himself. He is howling because it’s his job to protect this house, but he is too old now to protect the house. He is howling because the world is empty, and he is howling because he is still here.

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?

My grandmother’s third child was born too soon, so early he had no name. She never told anyone else about him, but she told me, years later, when I could not stop weeping after my own miscarriages: “I had him in the chamber pot on the floor next to the bed,” she said. “Nights I cried for a long time after that. Days I went to work like always.”

The hospital in Montgomery is better than the hospital at home because the hospital in Montgomery knows how to help a mother who can’t stop crying. Your mother’s tears are not your fault.

I am a creature of piney woods and folded terrain, of birdsong and running creeks and a thousand shades of green, of forgiving soil that yields with each footfall. That hot land is a part of me, as fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.

With other human beings, though, we aren’t so understanding. Children with any sort of physical or cognitive or emotional difference are invariably bullied, and mental illness carries such a stigma that my mother would never speak of her bouts of depression, even after I’d wrestled with depression myself.

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.

“Your mother tells me you became a woman today,” he said. He was holding my hand—at thirteen I was still holding my father’s hand with half my body even as I was bleeding with the other half—and reflexively I pulled away. Are there any words more appalling to a girl savoring the privacy of new transformation? If a volcano had erupted below my feet in the heart of Alabama, I would gladly have gone up in ash.

The ancients believed an eclipse would bring the end of the world, but the end of the world did not come for me. I didn’t wait for the sun to wax full again before heading home. I had to get out of there without talking to any of my fellow mortals, without hearing any of their earthly concerns. I had to leave while the air was still full silver. And all the way home, tiny crescents bespeckled the road, a path of fractured light that led me back to my own place in the world, right to my very door.

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.

Maybe it was hormones at first, but weeks passed and still I cried. I cried because it hurt to nurse. I cried because I had no instinct for baby talk and felt foolish trying. I cried because I missed myself. I would look at my puffy face in the mirror. What has happened to me? What happened to me: depression, mastitis—raging infections over and over again—loneliness, a baby who needed to be held all the time, and it never crossed my mind that he was simply cold.

The doctor leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. “The best mother is a happy mother,” she said. “Give that baby a bottle.” Overnight my baby stopped crying, surfeited for the first time in his hungry life. He would drop off to sleep, his whole body at ease, arms and legs as limp as a rag doll’s. He slept and slept.

By the time I reached them on the sand, they were smiling. No tragedy had touched us, no catastrophe but the near loss I still carry—the shadow that, even now, I cannot set down.

When I didn’t die, however, and then didn’t die some more, I came one day to understand: I wasn’t dying; I was grieving. I wasn’t dying. Not yet.

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.

My mother had three children between thirty and thirty-six, and I had three children between thirty and thirty-six. Now my body is an exact replica of her own. I see her in my own thickening waist. I watch as her feet propel me through the world. I feel her in the folds of my neck and the set of my brow and the slight curve of the finger where I wear the ring my father gave her. The ring she never took off but had to leave behind. Ashes, Part Three LOWER ALABAMA, 2017 After her own death, I suddenly understood Mom’s reluctance to consign Dad to the ground.

I haven’t forgotten how exhausting it was to be the mother of young children or how often I was frustrated by the close rooms and constricted plans of those days, the way my boys were always in my arms or at my feet. I haven’t forgotten how repetitive those days were, how I often felt unable to draw a deep breath. And yet I sometimes let myself imagine what a gift it would be to start all over again with this man, with these children, to go back to the beginning and feel less restless this time, less eager to hurry my babies along. 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.

Every monarch in North America is hatched on the leaf of a milkweed plant, and almost all of them spend winter on fir-covered mountains in central Mexico, in clumps so thick that tree branches can crash to the forest floor from their weight.

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.