MARGARET RENKL

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Age: Fifty-eight. Residence: Nashville.

Book: Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Milkweed Editions, July 2019), a collection of essays, including illustrations by the author’s brother, that offer a lyrical portrait of a family while tracing the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Agent: Kristyn Keene Benton of ICM Partners. Editor: Joey McGarvey.

MY SISTER-IN-LAW’S new bangs are so cute, and I am not at all cute. It’s 1998, and we are at a family reunion at my in-laws’ house in the country. My youngest child is six weeks old, and I am a leaking, lumbering mess. But, look, here are my mother-in-law’s sewing shears, and here is a mirror in a tiny bathroom where no one is tugging at me or howling. A few snips couldn’t hurt. Just a few feathers of softness around my tired eyes. The trick is to make it even, to have the ends brush each eyebrow in just the same place on either side of my face. Oh, but that’s a difficult trick, an impossible trick. I look like a drunkard has cut my hair.

My mother-in-law smiles when I return her scissors. “Perfect! It’s so smart for a young mother to have bangs!” I don’t understand. “Because you spend all your time looking down,” she says.

I’ve thought about those ugly bangs and my mother-in-law’s kindness so many times this year as people have asked again and again—sometimes overtly, sometimes in a veiled way—how a person who has always been a writer had somehow reached her fifties before ever publishing a book. The answer, I think, is that I was finally looking outward again.

That baby was still in diapers when my gentle mother-in-law was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and my father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. For the better part of two decades, my husband and I lived in the deepest throes of caregiving. We did our jobs— he’s a teacher; I’m a freelance writer—and we raised our children, and

we helped our parents struggle with mortality and grief. I gave almost no thought to the idea of writing a book. It was all I could do to make my deadlines for the magazines and newspapers that were paying my share of the bills.

The children were growing up, needing us less and less, even as our parents were needing us more and more. Ten years ago I took a job as an editor and gave up writing altogether. As stress made my own words harder and harder to come by, it was a pleasure to focus on other writers’ words, to feel I was still living at least part of my life in the realm of language, far from doctors’ appointments and pillboxes and ER visits. I wasn’t looking down anymore, but I was still a long way from looking out.

One day I was telling another writer about the latest emergency with my mother-in-law, whose heroic struggle with Parkinson’s was coming to an end after eighteen years. “Would you ever want to write about that?” he asked.

I don’t know why the thought hadn’t crossed my mind before. Maybe I’d grown accustomed to thinking of writing as a professional endeavor, forgotten what it had meant to me in the beginning: a source of solace, a way to make sense of the world, to order chaos. If ever I needed a way to make sense of the world, it was in that moment, when the duties that had governed my days for years were reaching a crescendo. Of course writing was the answer. Writing would help me find my way through grief.

Writing would help me remember who I am.

I started with all I had: a few minutes every morning, before the rest of the household was awake. Just fifteen minutes most days, but slowly, slowly, the pages added up. Slowly, slowly, I came to understand the error of my own thinking during all the years when I told myself that I would write a book once my life finally settled down again, once things finally got back to “normal.” Life was never going to offer an unbroken expanse of time for writing, much less an untroubled mind to devote to a big project, but that didn’t matter. There was light beyond the trees.

Writing a book isn’t all that complicated, it turns out. You just sit down in whatever bits of time you can find, and you put words on a page. You do it, day after day, until the pages pile up, until your thoughts coalesce into ideas, and your ideas begin to sort themselves into themes. One day it dawns on you that you are finally looking out again, and nothing at all is blocking your view.