H is for Hawk

When Macdonald learns of her father’s death, she struggles to understand the news. She insists on keeping the dinner reservation she and her friend Christina have made, even though she can’t bring herself to eat. When the waiter learns the situation, he brings Macdonald a huge, chocolatey dessert meant as a condolence. But she takes one look at the cut sprig of mint that adorns it and can think of nothing but loss. The plant will never grow again.

The next days are full of surreal experiences as Macdonald and her family struggle to comprehend their bereavement. She and her mother retrieve her father’s personal effects from the hospital. Crossing the Thames River on their way home, Macdonald remembers her father’s quest to photograph every single one of the Thames’ bridges, an eccentric weekend side project on which she sometimes accompanied him. They must take his death certificate to the impound lot to retrieve the car he inadvertently abandoned when he collapsed.

After the funeral, Macdonald goes back to Cambridge, caught in the inevitable madness of grief. With retrospect, she knows that her manic search for meaning was her mind’s way of trying to build a new life in the wake of her father’s death. But since she lacked the usual sources of grounding—a partner, children, a nine-to-five job—she latched onto wild, unhelpful things. She decides that a summer of apocalyptic rainstorms means that the world is grieving with her. She looks for answers in stacks of books on grief. She wants someone, anyone to fill the hole in her heart.

It’s in this phase of Macdonald’s grief that she begins dreaming of goshawks, specifically one that she saw while volunteering at a bird-of-prey center. Someone had brought the concussed animal in for a checkup. Luckily, she was unharmed. More than that: she was perfect, majestic. Intimidating. Macdonald remembers feeling that the bird was bigger and more important than herself. The dreams make Macdonald’s own hawk inevitable.