Love and Its Twin

by Fran Withrow 09.2024

I don’t think I have ever read a book quite like Margaret Renkl’s “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.” Her beautiful essays alternate between autobiographical memories and observations about nature with unflinching honesty. Families are flawed yet cherished. Life is filled with both beauty and brutality. We all experience both passion and bereavement. Renkl says, “…the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.” The juxtaposition of life’s delights and heartaches permeate this book.

Renkl’s personal essays trace the lineage of her family from her great-grandparents to her grandparents to her mother and then to her. She does so through little vignettes: her grandmother’s story about her favorite dog, or her description of the birth of her daughter, Renkl’s mother. Other essays are lists such as “Things I knew When I Was Six.”  Renkl chronicles her growing up years in Alabama as she discovers she can read in the local Piggly Wiggly, wanders near the creek with her brother, or feels embarrassed watching her parents dance on a Tuesday afternoon. Her mother’s need for “little blue pills” is just an everyday part of living. All these snippets of her existence create a treasured patchwork quilt of life.

And there are other memories many of us can relate to: being homesick in college, kissing her husband for the first time, struggling with breastfeeding. The heartrending realization by her three-year old son that everything dies. “‘I will die?' he said, his voice quivering. ‘I will be dead?’”  Later Renkl fears she has breast cancer, until she discovers she is actually grieving for her father. And grief can often feel like dying.

I laughed when I read the list of words Renkl was allowed to say as a child. (Just know they are all curse words). The one word she was not allowed to say in childhood was “snot.” Equally delightful is her dad’s sense of humor as he shares his favorite joke: “Oh, sh*t. I stepped in dog doo-doo.”

This little book abounds with nature observations too: bluebirds and the snakes that eat them, hawks and butterflies, the “outrageous roundness” of the moon on a night walk. From observing nature, she learns the best way to be in the world: “Hold still. Be quiet. Listen.”

Nature is beautiful even in decay, Renkl observes. She notes the bluebird’s feathers drifting down after it is caught by a hawk, or how the nest of a cardinal can only be seen after the rose petals fall away. 

In the last powerful essay. Renkl, mourning her beloved mother, realizes from just the way the cream hits her coffee that the world “would go on.” While one life is ending, others are beginning. While someone is sorrowing, someone else is finding joy. 

And that is the underlying premise of this book: how gloriously imperfect life is, how grateful we should be for love, wherever we find it, how majestic and mysterious is our natural world. And in the end, it is all so unutterably, briefly, incredibly glorious. The way Rankl reminds us of this in her exquisite book is truly a gift.