Bereavement

Bereavement is the force that first sends Helen Macdonald fleeing toward wildness and then exposes the danger of treating the wild as a cure. After Helen’s father dies suddenly, grief shapes her attachment to Mabel and her return to T. H. White’s story of Gos: she tries to escape human sorrow by becoming like a hawk, and imagines the lost and dead waiting in another world. The movement toward understanding begins when she recognizes that Mabel has been suffering too, and reaches a different kind of resolution when grief becomes, not disappearance or recovery, but love.

Grief and the promised cure

On the train home from her father’s memorial service, Helen looks back on her decision to seek healing in nature. Books had taught her to expect wild places to soothe affliction: their grieving protagonists followed elusive animals, walked remote landscapes, or sought wildness close to home. John Muir’s writing had given that expectation a memorable form. Helen now calls it a beguiling but dangerous lie. The force of this recognition is not a rejection of the natural world, but a refusal to make it responsible for curing human loss. The air of wildness, she understands, can corrode a person rather than restore one.

That conclusion changes how she sees the life she has been living with Mabel. Helen had given herself to hawking as if human feeling could be escaped by narrowing life to the bird and the field. Her correction is sharply relational: hands are meant to be held by other human hands, not used exclusively as perches. Grief had made withdrawal feel like a solution; the memory of ordinary human touch reveals what that solution had cost. Nature may matter profoundly, but it cannot replace human connection or reverse a death.

Misreading Mabel

The insight about grief is followed by a more painful recognition. During the weeks on the hill, Mabel had gained muscle and was flying at a higher weight than before, but by the end of that period her weight had fallen too low. She was hungry, and hunger had made her aggressive. Helen had interpreted the hawk’s behaviour without seeing its bodily cause. Looking back, she recognizes that her own misery had made her blind to Mabel’s misery.

This failure takes on a wider significance because Helen recognizes it as a pattern. After her father died, she had fallen for a man she hardly knew, making him serve her bereavement and turning him into everything she needed. He had run away. With Mabel, she had repeated the same error in another form: rather than attend to the hawk as a creature with needs of her own, she had made it reflect her inner state. She had fled toward becoming a hawk, but in grief had made the hawk into a mirror. The recognition does not erase her attachment; it changes its terms by making Mabel’s independent condition visible.

The next evening, Helen gives Mabel a whole dead pigeon. They sit beneath an apple tree in the cool grey evening, while blackbirds sound in the hedge and the kitchen window casts a square of light into the garden. Mabel eats every scrap, filling her crop until she can hardly stand. This concrete act answers the earlier failure of attention: the hawk’s hunger is met as hunger, not interpreted as an emblem of Helen’s loss. The house, which had seemed unfriendly, no longer feels that way. Care for Mabel and the domestic world around them coexist; neither requires Helen to disappear into the other.

Gos, the lost, and the wish to return

As Mabel plucks and eats the pigeon, the work of uncovering its body prompts Helen to reconsider why White’s book had stayed with her. In the childhood reading she recalls, Gos does not die; he is lost. Even though White believes his hawk dead, the possibility of return remains open in the book’s ending. Helen remembers imagining Gos still in a forest, gripping rough bark and watching from the dark branches. The lost hawk had remained available to the child’s mind in a way that a dead animal, finally beyond return, could not.

That old imaginative possibility becomes inseparable from Helen’s bereavement. She had wanted to cross into the forest where lost things go and bring back White’s hawk. Beneath that wish was another: her father had died so suddenly that she had no time to prepare and could find no sense in what had happened. In the logic of myth and dreams, he too could only be lost, somewhere in the tangled wood with the dead. The spring dreams of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air were therefore not simply fantasies of becoming a bird. Helen understands them as a wish to fly with the hawk, find her father, and bring him home. The imagined journey gives grief a shape, but it also reveals the impossible task grief has assigned to the imagination.

Helen connects this wish to an older memory of attachment. Melanie Klein’s account of childhood mourning suggests that early forms of grief can return when losses occur later in life, and that adults may respond to new bereavements using ways of managing earlier ones. Helen recalls a drawing of a kestrel made when she was six: the pencilled jesses had been worked over repeatedly, as if the knots and lines could guarantee safety. The image makes visible an old desire to keep what might otherwise fly away. In adulthood, that desire reappears as the hope of following Gos through the border between worlds and recovering both hawk and father.

Patience and the transformation of grief

A later memory of her father offers a different relation to loss. As a child, Helen asks whether a cardboard image is a house; he answers that no one knows, but that it is very old. Holding the card years later, she feels the scale of her grief as though she were holding a mountain. Yet time has altered what she holds. The grief has become something different: love. She returns the card to the bookshelf and whispers her love to her father.

The change does not mean that her father has been brought back, or that grief has become a problem nature can solve. It marks a shift away from impatient waiting for the lost to return and from the attempt to use Mabel, a lover, or the imagined forest as instruments of recovery. Her father’s remembered advice about waiting for what one longs to see acquires a new meaning: patience is not the same as forcing an answer from the world. Bereavement remains bound to absence, but it can be carried without turning another being into its substitute. In that distinction, Helen’s account moves from the wish to vanish into the hawk’s world toward the quieter recognition of the person who waits beneath the tree.