One of the most extraordinary memoirs that I read while writing my book about therapy and memoir is H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.[i] The appeal of the book lies in its utter strangeness: Macdonald’s response to her father’s sudden death is to adopt a goshawk, a type of raptor that is notoriously hard to train and known for its lethality. As she concedes, “goshawks are ruffians: murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, factious, and foreign… Bloodthirsty…Vile (p. 23). Macdonald chronicles the ups and downs of this outlandish venture in detail, as she also monitors the slow, circuitous path of her mourning.
It helps to know that Macdonald was a research fellow at Cambridge at the time and happens to be an experienced and professional falconer. Still, sending away to purchase a goshawk (they are extinct in the UK) symbolizes a radically different choice from the more predictable one of adopting an animal to mitigate a loss, a being to whom one becomes attached and who reciprocates that attachment. Macdonald’s relationship to the goshawk is not without gratification, but it requires a huge amount of work, not to mention lots of frustration and danger.
Another layer of the memoir is that Macdonald becomes obsessed with the life of T.H. White, a man who also tried (and failed) to train a goshawk and wrote a book about it, and who became better known as the author of The Once and Future King.[ii] Macdonald’s book was published a decade ago and met deservedly wide acclaim (and won several prizes). There is something magical in Macdonald’s struggle to come to terms with her father’s death, which becomes unlocked or at least altered through the unlikely challenge of training Mabel (the goshawk’s name, deriving from the word “amabilis,” means “loveable or dear”).
Macdonald’s memoir is beautifully written and contains exquisite passages describing nature and our relation to it (I encountered at least 15 unfamiliar, nature-related words in reading it). She is unabashed in characterizing her sense of being completely overwhelmed by her father’s death-- how disorganizing it is for someone whom you love suddenly to disappear from the world, taking all their knowledge and love with them. We do not pay enough attention to the sense of being unhinged by death; an end that does not seem credible as an end; where stages readily become mixed up together; and the only clarity is the recognition of no longer being the person you had been. I know there is research that seems to contradict this; so perhaps we can simply observe that for some people,[iii] grief is more intensely painful (without that meaning that it is pathological). What Macdonald says about grief is worth quoting in her own words: “The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane” (p. 16).
The quality of Macdonald’s relationship to her father is important to comment about, even though it is not portrayed fully. They seemed to be close, and she recalls lovely memories, like scavenging through old bookstores together for books about hawks. He was a professional photographer who died on the job and had an avid interest in aviation from the time he was a boy. Macdonald is aware that her professional choice follows his in demanding patient observation. She names her father as “my friend and a partner in crime” (p. 14).
She is well-aware that there is a complicated dynamic between moving toward Mable and coping with her father’s death, although she humbly notes that it took her a while before she realized this. Of course, the choice is not easy to interpret, as on the face of it, her father’s personality seems quite opposite to Mabel’s. Macdonald digs deeper and confronts how the violence Mabel introduces in her daily life serves to shake things up. She also notices perplexing things like that although she became extremely accident prone in the aftermath of her father’s death, this somehow did not occur with Mabel. Her relationship to Mabel forces her to come up against something hard, something that has limits but is not limited Their relationship evolves, and there is even a delightful highlight when she makes the discovery that Mabel enjoys playing ball together. Macdonald explains that in none of her extensive reading about goshawks was there any mention of their love of play.
What is the impact of the unfolding relationship with Mabel is on Macdonald’s capacity to mourn? Could it be that there is something arbitrary and not so directly related about the connection? Lots of people embrace fetishistic interests as a response to loss, a way to distract themselves from the overwhelming process of accepting the disappearance of a loved one. Macdonald comments that, after all, you can pick new selves, but not new dads (p. 58). There is a lot going on under the surface that Macdonald does not necessarily share with us. At one point, she suggests that hunting with Mabel brought her to the edge of human experience. She lives alone and retreats further into herself. However, she eventually emerges from this state and suggests that, as a result, she feels more human. Ultimately, she makes the painful but necessary decision to give Mabel to a friend during molting season.
There is an inspiring absence of romanticism in Macdonald’s narrative. The violence of the hawk, the violence of death must be honored and experienced, not obscured or denied. We are too tempted to seek meaning where there is just nature being nature. But the well-worn path of escaping into nature only works to an imperfect degree. Fortuitously, we are not doomed to remain in a constant, distressing state of mind after a loss. In the context of recalling the memory of a childhood visit to Stonehenge with her father, Macdonald observes that she started to know “the shape of her grief” (p. 268). She compares this grief to “the size of a mountain in my arms,” but ends up voicing the feeling of being loved and softly reciprocating “love you too, Dad” (p. 268).
The appreciation for Macdonald’s memoir has been ample, given its subtle, candid, and even perverse depiction of how convoluted the process of mourning can be. Macdonald went on to do a PBS series in 2017, not to mention adopting another goshawk (https://wamu.org/story/17/10/31/new-pbs-special-goes-into-the-world-of-goshawks/). I have read many reviews of the memoir, all of them admiring, but none of them noticing what strikes me as a crucial psychological detail in her account. She does not say much about it, but what she says must not be ignored. Early on in the memoir, Macdonald mentions that she was born a twin, and that her twin brother died just after birth.
This key passage is introduced as Macdonald introduces a paper by Winnicott that she read, where the infant holds a string tight in fear of being abandoned by his mother.[iv] She shifts to herself in an incubator, striving to hold onto life: “full of tubes, under electric light, skin patched and raw, eyes clenched shut” (p. 49). Macdonald then drops the bomb that she survived; her brother did not. Moreover, her parents were encouraged to move on with their lives and not to dwell on the loss Internalizing Winnicott, Macdonald comes to recognize that there must be ongoing percolations of her brother’s death within her. More to the point, she informs us that “I’d always felt a part of me was missing; an old, simple absence” (p. 49). She links this to “holding tight” in response to her father’s death. It is not so clear how Macdonald understands this, although a later passage sheds additional light.
Macdonald mentions psychoanalysis several times, mostly associated with T.H. White’s infatuation (he compared training a hawk to psychoanalysis). She recalls being a student and reading Freud and then finding various transferences in her falconry books. Out of desperation, she tries an anti-depressant to no great effect. However, Macdonald never seems tempted by psychotherapy, declaring that she does not need an analyst to interpret her dreams. Dreams figure prominently throughout the memoir and dreaming of hawks led to her decision to adopt one.
In narrating her father’s funeral, Macdonald invokes Melanie Klein’s view that mourning in later life has its source in early life experiences of loss, and she connects this to a drawing of a kestrel she did at 6 years old, noting the close attention to “the safety of knots and lines” (p. 220). While Klein’s focus is on what happened, Winnicott’s was on what was not originally experienced. Still, Macdonald identifies with the notion of holding on by a string, implicitly recognizing that in wishing to stay connected to her dad must replay the wish to stay connected to her brother. Her inclusion of the death of her brother is insightful, but it deserves more consideration. After all, psychoanalysts are not only interested in patients’ dreams!
There is recent research on the implication on the surviving infant of the death of a sibling. In the largest, population matching, cohort study of co-twin loss at birth to date, singletons and twins with living siblings were compared with twins whose sibling died within 60 days after birth, using a Swedish database from 1973-2011. Results suggest that siblings whose twin died have elevated risks for psychiatric disorders, especially before 25 years old.[v] The study is interesting in terms of suggesting clearcut consequences for the surviving twin, but I would be cautious in applying this to Macdonald. Her experience led her to create a work that resounds in universal meaning—for all of us who have lost a love one.
There is also a wise commentary on how traumatic it can be to lose a twin by a Boston pediatrician, Karen O’Brien, who focuses on the importance of encouraging parents to grieve the death of a twin infant—to take photos, hand and/or feet prints, and any other rituals.[vi] As Dr. O’Brien eloquently puts it, “But—and this is perhaps our most important lesson—we must all understand that the life of one twin does not eradicate grief for the sibling who died. There were as many dreams for the twin who passed away as for the twin who survived.” Values change, but it is hard to miss how profoundly this message differs from what Macdonald reports. In addition, we might emphasize that the surviving twin deserves attention, not just the parents, and ideally this must happen over over time.
[i] H. Macdonald (204). H is for Hawk. New York: Grove.
[ii] Macdonald spends a lot of time reflecting on White’s attempt to train a goshawk and on him as a person. She reads books he read (like Adler’s unfortunate views of homosexuality), and she even visits the school where he taught toward the end of the memoir. White was unpartnered throughout his life, apparently deeply conflicted about possibly being gay, and tormented by sado-masochistic fantasies about young boys. Macdonald is drawn to him, but it is hard to say whether her curiosity goes further than her empathy spurred by the loss of her father.
[iii] G. Bonanno (2010). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Losss. New York: Basic.
[iv] An account of the boy and the string occurs in Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” in Playing and Reality (1989). New York and London: Routledge.
[v] H. Song, F. Fang, H. Larsson, N. L Pedersen, P. KE Magnusson, C. Almqvist, U. A Valdimarsdóttir (2021) Loss of a co-twin at birth and subsequent risk of psychiatric disorders eLife 10 (https://elifesciences.org/articles/63514#content)
[vi] K. O’Brien (2014). When One Baby Lives, and the Other Dies, WBUR (https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/09/03/one-twin-livesK. OBrien-one-dies)
Thanks, Joan-- hope you enjoy the book.
Elliot
This is a wonderful sensitive column. I just downloaded the book. Thank you!