Howdy.

I’m in a hammock with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk open in my lap, inky underlines tattooing each strange, breathtaking page of it.

Strange, because it is entirely about her training a hawk. But breathtaking, because it is really about so much more. For as she explains, It is really hard to write about the natural world without writing about grief.

I’ll explain.

LEARNING THE WORLD OVER AGAIN

In an interview, Macdonald explained that the title of the book is meant to be elementary. It is meant to hark back to those early years of learning the letters by which our world is categorized through, sitting around in a circle reciting the alphabet like little sponges, soaking it all in.

Yet, at various points in our lives, grief comes and wrings everything that we thought we knew out of us. It squeezes us so hard, for so long, that we find all of those early ideas and lessons have fallen to the floor around us. It then becomes our job to get down on our knees, a return to the crawl of an infant, pick up the pieces, and learn how to make sense of them once more. It happens to everyone, she writes, but you feel it alone.

For Macdonald, this occurred in the wake of her father’s death, the beating heart of pain through which the pages of her memoir run. She explains that after his death, she had to learn how to categorize the world all over again. Hence, H is for Hawk.

GRIEF

Within that recategorizing, she explains something that I recognized immediately from my own experiences of grief—the utter disorientation of it.

She writes:

“When we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there…We leant over Portland stone and looked at the water below. I smiled for the first time…partly because the water was sliding down to the sea and the simple physics of this made sense when the rest of the world didn’t.”

“Planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped and talked and worked. None of these things made any sense at all.”

“I still have a red dress that I will never wear again. That’s how it goes.”

-Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk

I too have a red dress that I will never wear again and I too know all too well the feeling of wrongness that accompanies the ongoings of the world in the wake of your own, personal grief. I vividly remember looking out of the window after suffering a loss and watching in disbelief as people continued to walk their dogs.

What are they doing? Don’t they know what has happened? Isn’t anyone going to do something? Why are they just standing there, utterly indifferent to my pain?

Because, of course, we are always somewhat indifferent and unaware of each other’s internal feelings. One of my professors calls it “epistemological nihilism”, or the idea that we can never, ever, come to fully understand the inner workings of another person’s mind. We know this, but grief exacerbates it. Grief makes it so painfully obvious that we are alone in our experiences, even if others are going through something of the same.

They are not you. You are not them. You can hold hands all you want, but you will never be the same.

That is rather haunting and wonderful all at once.

FULL OF HOLES

So, yes, it is about, in a rather tedious way, the training of a hawk. But if my English degree has taught me anything, it’s that it is never just about the hawk.

There is real magic in her prose, real magic that makes ideas appear on the page that extend far, far beyond the confines of falconry and right into my own life. You don’t need to know what it feels like to train a hawk to understand what she’s saying, but rather simply, just what it feels like to have lost your grasp on the world. To be free-falling as the old world leans in and whispers it’s farewells as you slowly climb back into life after loss.

For example, in processing her grief, Macdonald writes:

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

-Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk

That line.

That line about life becoming a thing made of holes. It’s just one of those lines that you don’t ever forget. It leaves an immediate imprint on your mind, forever changing the way you think about something. Or rather, giving you a synthesized vocabulary by which to think about the things that you already feel, have always felt, but maybe cannot quite explain.

Life becomes a thing made of holes.

You know when you’re a kid and you lose a tooth and you just keep running your tongue over the bloodied empty space where a piece of you used to be? And it’s so strange, and so chilling, and you think you might never feel whole again? That’s what this idea reminds me of.

Maybe as we go through life, we’re constantly just reaching out for things that are not there anymore. We’re constantly feeling the shock of that empty space, the one that our tongues are not used to encountering.

We learn to navigate anyway. We relearn the world. H is for Hawk.

OPTIMISM NOT SO YOUTHFUL

Yet, as beautifully fleshed out of a metaphor that this is, I don’t think the world ever needs to stop being full of new things, as she insinuates. I agree that our lives are hole-filled things, freckled and stained with loss and grief, but I refuse to believe that they ever have to stop being full of newness too, no matter how small. Yes, the shiny patina might wear off, just as young skin grows old, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

I don’t think that it matters how old you get or how much you have experienced, the world is a living, breathing, dynamic being that is always being born again, presenting newness. There are always new people to meet and new things to learn, aren’t there? I think that when you stop believing in the novel, exciting things, you stop living. It’s kind of like hope, isn’t it?

I know the saying is “youthful optimism” and that I perhaps don’t have much credibility considering that I am, well, youthful. Point taken. But I’m thinking of my grandparents and my neighbors and all of the elderly people who deeply inspire me, and what they all have in common is a raw excitement for life. They have all been through tragedy and despair, and yet they still retain this wonder for the world and for another day upon it.

I’ve been told that’s the secret.

GHOST SHIPS

Another little line that chilled me read:

“We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”

-Helen Macdonald

It reminds me of Cheryl Strayed’s concept of “the ghost ships that didn’t carry us” in Tiny Beautiful Things and how for all of our lives we are constantly just looking out and waving at them, at those lives and at those selves that could have been, from the shore of the life that we did choose. Or, perhaps the one that chose us.

To read more about Helen Macdonald, for she is quite eccentric and wonderfully, wonderfully brilliant, click here or here.

Love, m.

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