Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

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.

The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.

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

least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found

There’s nothing “natural” about offering wild birds food and water and housing

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’s a tiny bandit with flamboyant red wingtips and a brash streak of yellow across the end of its tail feathers. An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.

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

Everything surprised me. I understood that I understood nothing at all.

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.

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 earth with such stillness I could swear it wasn’t turning at all.