Grief

Grief is a force that alters both what Helen Macdonald can see and who she understands herself to be. Her father’s death turns familiar objects and places into measures of absence, while training Mabel gives her a new way to comprehend T. H. White’s earlier devastation when Gos disappeared. The memoir does not present mourning as a clean passage from pain to recovery: it returns through photographs, family rooms, remembered books, and the falconry story, changing the meaning of each as Macdonald’s understanding deepens.

The loss of her father

A small spotting scope stands on a bookshelf, still in the green Cordura cover in which Macdonald had borrowed it from her father for birdwatching. She had forgotten to take it back on her last visit. He had answered that there would be a next time, with good-natured exasperation; after his death, the scope becomes an ordinary debt that can never be settled. The inability to return it or apologise gives mourning a material focus: love persists in an object whose intended return has been made impossible.

The recognition of that impossibility arrives on a train journey with her mother and brother, as they travel to look for her father’s car. Macdonald remembers the coarse seat upholstery, trackside clinker, buddleia, a green gasometer, and the view of Battersea Power Station. Only as they leave Queenstown Road railway station, passing beneath its white wooden canopy, does she understand that she will never see her father again. She stops and calls for him; the word no breaks into a howl. Her mother and brother hold her, and the three cling together in tears. The scene moves from the effort to locate a car to the irreversible fact of the person who will not return.

Her father is remembered as a quiet man in a suit, carrying a camera and setting out to photograph what was new: stars, storms, streets, and politicians. He had gone to photograph storm-damaged buildings in Battersea on the night his heart failed. The camera returned to the family with its photographs still on it. Macdonald saw the last image only once: a blurred, low-angle view of an empty London street, sodium-lit at dusk, with a wall tipping away beneath a sallow, stormy sky. She does not want to see it again, yet cannot stop seeing it. The photograph records a scene without its maker, making the father’s habit of stopping time collide with the permanence of his own absence.

Mourning in the present

Grief repeatedly interrupts Macdonald’s sense of ordinary identity. During a summer lunch, the sight of people gathered around her hawk gives way to a feeling that she is no longer a historian or Helen but the hawk woman, and even that self seems distant. The table and its formal setting appear like an image from another time; the wasps circling Mabel and the hawk herself remain insistently present. Macdonald feels hollow and unhomed, as if she were an empty paper nest. The passage makes mourning not only sadness but a disturbance in the reality and continuity of the self.

The rupture becomes speakable after a meeting with Stuart. On the train home, sunlight on the window recalls spider silk that had been present in a field without being seen. Macdonald considers that the world’s apparent bareness and wrongness might be an illusion: things may remain real and beautiful beyond her perception. The memory does not erase her father’s death, but it accompanies a change in her emotional state. The anger that had covered months of silence has lifted enough for her to tell Stuart that she is not coping well and thinks she is depressed. He answers by naming the loss: she has lost her father. His response places her distress within bereavement rather than treating it as an inexplicable personal failure.

Laughter, too, marks the difficulty of bringing death into the forms of ordinary life. At the memorial, business cards and the mundane office setting provoke a broken cough of laughter. Macdonald remembers laughing with her mother while choosing a coffin: a laminated catalogue offered designs decorated with football colours, Spitfires, golf courses, saxophones, and trains. The small loves and habits represented by those objects cannot be reconciled with the fact of death. The laughter is neither relief nor disrespect; it is the involuntary response left when no available sign of everyday life can contain the loss.

The family home and the books of loss

Returning to her parents’ house, Macdonald knows it is now her mother’s house. She has come while preparing to move from her college home, and the prospective loss of that home makes the visit difficult even as she feels grateful for a friend’s offer of a place to stay. She and her mother drink tea, reminisce, and speak about her father while Mabel rests and preens on the sunny lawn. The visit holds laughter and affection, but familiar chairs and cups intensify the absence: these are things her father should still be using. His careful handwriting on a note by the back door overwhelms her, and she retreats to her childhood room, curling up on the small bed as pain tightens in her chest.

There she finds the animal books she loved as a child and now resents for their endings. Tarka is killed by hounds; the otter in Ring of Bright Water is beaten to death; the deer in The Yearling is shot, and the animals in Old Yeller, Charlotte’s Web, and Watership Down also die. As a child, Macdonald dreaded the diminishing pages because she knew that loss was coming. She recalls having expected Gos’s disappearance with sad resignation, as though it were another of those inevitable endings, but calls it dreadful all the same. The books provide an early pattern for anticipating death; they do not prepare her for the knowledge of loss that comes from living through it.

White, Gos, and belated understanding

The remembered story of White and Gos changes after Macdonald has trained a hawk herself. In White’s account, Gos is blown away in a gale as he tries to descend to White’s lure. His feathers have been soaked, and the wind carries him beyond White’s reach. White tries to draw the hawk close with a pigeon, but cannot make himself sacrifice the bird he has tamed and come to regard as a companion. Instead, he returns with a ladder, rope, torch, and the salmon rod he had used before to retrieve Gos from a tree. When a farmer’s lad arrives, Gos takes fright and slips into the darkness. These failed efforts leave White with a loss that neither skill nor persistence can undo.

As a child, Macdonald had loved the passage in which White visits Chapel Green and imagines kinship with the people buried beneath it, a vanished community for whom a goshawk might still be familiar. She had understood the scene as a communion with what was lost, but not the depth of White’s attachment to Gos. After her own father dies and she has trained Mabel, she can recognize the force of White’s grief. Sitting in her old room, she feels the blankness that, in White’s account, had seemed too vast to hurt or even to be understood. The parallel does not make the two losses identical; it gives her an experiential route into a suffering she had previously read from the outside.

The memoir’s movement between these losses is therefore a movement in knowledge as well as memory. Macdonald’s father cannot be recovered by the photographs he made, and Gos cannot be brought back by White’s attempts to lure or retrieve him. Yet the act of returning to White’s story after training Mabel changes what that story can mean. Grief remains an absence, but it also becomes a form of recognition: the living can come to understand an earlier loss differently when their own lives have taught them what such absence costs.