Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss - Margaret Renkl

Margaret Renkl is the author of 'Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss' capture the cycle of life  that will make you want to stay put, reread and savor ever thing about the moment. ....her life story and her life's passion intertwine, like a fence post and a trumpet vine, as well as paintings by her brother.  

Renkl was born in Andalusia, Alabama, and moved with her family to Birmingham, Alabama as a child. Renkl spent much of her childhood out-of-doors, with frequent visits to her maternal grandparents, who remained in Lower Alabama.

"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 Way You Looked At Me

“My parents and my grandparents and my great-grandmother, all of them, have gathered to watch over me. They are looking at me as if I were the sun, as of they had been cold every day of their lives until now.

I am the sun, but they are not the planets. 

They are the universe.”

~ Margaret Renkl, ‘Late Migrations’

This could have been me. No, it was me indeed. Another place, another time, similar characters. sepiatoned

"In the Storm, Safe from the Storm," Renkl recalls summer thunderstorms when she would sit on her father's lap in a chair placed in the open front door of their little house. She says:

The rain comes and I feel it with the tips of my toes, but they are the only parts of me that get wet, for I have drawn my knees up to my chest under my nightgown, and my father has unbuttoned his corduroy jacket and pulled it around me, and wrapped his arms around me too. I lean into him. I feel the heat from his body and the cool rain from the world, both at once.

But, all too soon, Renkl is writing about leaving home to go to graduate school, kissing, marrying, having children, watching them grow up and away, and taking on the role of caregiver as her parents age and die.

Not all is loss. After her father's death, Renkl says her 71-year-old mother, who'd grown up on an Alabama peanut farm and "had no feeling at all for stories as a source of pleasure or solace," discovered the novels of Jane Austen and then became such a voracious reader she went on to devour racy Jane Austen fan fiction! But all too soon, Renkl's mother succumbs to a cerebral hemorrhage. About her humble mother's last ride from house to hospital, Renkl writes: "She left in a state much larger than herself — two fire trucks, an ambulance, a rolling stretcher pushed by big men."

Late Migrations is a book about grief, yet within that grief lies beauty, wonder, and love. It is also a book about nature and family, and it is self-conscious enough to understand that the wild world and the domestic one exist in a braided ecosystem that hums with meaning. Reminding Us Of Life's Beauty And Fragility.

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 the deepest hiding place. 

Some stories, so resonated with me; felt like my story: Grieving, and diagnosing a lump in the breast when father is undergoing chemo and dying. For me it was like a competition, both of us lying side by side. Mother being our care taker. He did go. I wasn't dying. I was grieving. I wasn't dying. Not yet. 

Chapter 'What I could save' ends with - 'I saved all these things. But what I couldn't save weighs on my heart like a stone.'

Stroke like Strike, for the Essay competition when at Veegaland say:

"Earth and air won't cease their quarrel. tornadoes take up their form in the Midwest, a writhing cone of sol and breath and bite. 

Hurricanes shoulder and churn off the Gulf coast, each one a gray ferocity, a roaring violence of roiling water. 

Volcanic ash rises in the Philippines. Air becomes mass; dust becomes rock; the sky is raining fire and no hissing rain will come to cool it. 

The ocean floor cracks open in the Pacific, heaving waves of nausea across the surface of the sea. 

A scar down the middle of the Mississippi River unzips and fills the world with livid water.

In Nashville, a brain breaks open. 

In the universe, a star folds in on itself. 

And God said, 'Let there be darkness. 

There is chapter on 'Lexicon' with last words and interactions - 'I love you' & 'Thank You' and there are letters with my parents. 

Derek Walcott quote at the end really summed it up - “So much to do still, all of it praise.”.

Writing about mothers favourite home she thought it to be 'a gift to her, understanding', brother doubted that it would make her feel bad, and . When her mother saw it, 'One day she banged open the door of my office and slammed a copy of the magazine down on the desk. "What is this?' she yelled, her face so flushed the scalp showed pink beneath her clean white hair.'

Dreaming about our loved ones no more; we do wonder, 'It was just a misunderstanding. You're alive.'

Indeed 'There's an art to helping people without making htem feel bad about needing help. It's an art I was learning but hadn't wholly mastered with Mom. '......The end of caregiving isn't freedome. The end of caregiving is grief.

Part 2 of the book is called Ashes. 

You'll never know how much I love You :  Basic fear, the fear of loss. How we look at our loved ones. To know they are breathing and fine. 

With own nest emptying, metaphors of loss are everywhere. "Why did I spend so much time watching for the next milestone when the next milestone never meant the freedom I expected?"

The house that has been loud, fall silent. No more good bye. 

All through as I had been reading the book, kept wondering how and why this title? Was it because family moved? Then comes the essay, almost at the fag end, on Late Migrations. On how Renkly planted 'zinnias' to attract bees and butterfly. These attracted Monarchs. "Monarchs migrate as birds do, but it takes them 4-5 generation to complete. ......Entomologists don't yet understand what makes successive generations follow the same route their ancestors took....'

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.”

And then in conclusion:

 This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It's all nonsense. 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 is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape., the muscles that are doing your work in the world. .......Like other...it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won't even see it happening. 

'You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. 

What I mean is, 

 ~ time offers your old self a new shape. 

~you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. 

You are both and you will always be both. 

There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime and look; the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year's leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall. 

Holy, Holy, Holy ~ the world will go on. World flaring up in celebration. Someone hearing "It's benign."; "It's a boy' ; Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

~ Margaret Renkl, ‘Late Migrations’ Again from a post by Bindu Manoj. Thank you