Grief is the Thing with Feathers

“I could’ve bent him backwards over a chair and drip-fed him sour bulletins of the true one-hour dying of his wife. OTHER BIRDS WOULD HAVE, there’s no goody baddy in the kingdom. Better get cracking. I believe in the therapeutic method.”

Porter frequently uses all capitals script to simulate Crow yelling, a visual decision which gives Crow’s speech a fundamentally different shape than the speech of the other characters. Crow’s screams interject his own speech somewhat randomly, giving the impression of an erratic, uncontrollable personality.

“But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.”

The metaphor of the home as a nest is one that appears throughout the book, although it shifts in meaning. Here, Crow is an invader to that nest, intent on doing violence, and his characterizations of their home as “ripe, rich, and delicious” adds a predatory element. Later, however, he will become the defender of the nest.

“She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.”

The language used to describe Mum’s death throughout the novel is intentionally ambiguous, keeping the focus on the effects of her death and not the death itself. What lingers most clearly for Dad and for the boys is the abruptness of her departure from life, which throws them into the grieving process more roughly than if they had had time to prepare for her being gone, developing the theme of The Emotional Turmoil of Grief.

“I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him. I think he thinks he’s a little bit Stonehenge shamanic, hearing the bird spirit. Fine by me, whatever gets him through.”

Crow’s mutable behavior and personality make him a particularly difficult character to interpret. Here, he acknowledges this mutability as a form of performance, a therapeutic method that taps into Dad’s Love of Art as Escape From Pain. The fantasy of Crow as a primordial, neolithic spirit pulls Dad away from the unbearable suffering of his present moment.

“I refused to lose a wife and gain chores, so I accepted help. My brother was incredible, give me food, let me shout, with the boys, with the bank, with the post office, the school, the doctors and our folks. Her parents were kind, with the service, with the money, with their people, give me space, give me time, give me sense of her, let me apologise, let me find a path outside simple fury.”

Dad’s begrudging acceptance of help from the outside world, in this instance his brother and in-laws, is central to the book’s theme of Caretaking During Bereavement. Readers are not offered many glimpses into the caretaking done by outside family members, but here, their assistance makes room for Dad to retreat into his own world, as demonstrated by the italicized asides, contrasting with Crow’s treatment.

“She told us that men were rarely truly kind, but they were often funny, which is better. ‘You would do well to prepare yourselves for disappointment,’ she said, ‘in your dealings with men. Women are on the whole much stronger, usually cleverer,’ she said, ‘but less funny, which is a shame.”

The gender politics of the boys’ grandmother have a subtly misogynistic bent; although complimentary of women, she seems to favor men, whom she perceives as funnier. This conversation provides backstory into the instances of misogyny elsewhere in the book, such as Dad’s disgust for anything having to do with Sylvia Plath.

“There was very little division between my imaginary and real worlds, and people talked of sensible workloads and recovery periods and healthy obsessions. Many people said ‘You need time’, when what I needed was Shakespeare, Ibn ‘Arabi, Shostakovich, Howlin’ Wolf.”

Love of art as escape from pain is Dad’s primary method for coping with grief. Here, the narrative illustrates the indignation with which he responds to other suggested methods for working through his pain. By choosing to absorb himself in fiction, Dad inadvertently distances himself from his sons, who are also struggling to cope with the loss of Mum.

“She is Mrs. Laocoön, sitting on the beach with her arms crossed, saying, ‘Look at those bloody boys,’ and we are fifty feet out to sea being chewed apart by sadness.”

In this quote, Porter makes an allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid. Laocoön is a Trojan priest who is punished by the gods for suggesting that the Trojan horse be burnt down. He and his two sons are ripped apart by sea serpents at the bequest of Poseidon and Athena. Here, Dad imagines himself as Laocoön, suggesting that his grief is some sort of divine punishment, although it remains unclear for what sin.

“Comprehension Questions:

• Do you think the brothers in this excerpt are realistic?
• Does the rural setting of the story change the way you engage with the characters?
• If the boots are a metaphor for the ability to cope with grief, who do you think has died?
• Write the next paragraph of the story, focusing on the themes of man versus nature, boots, brothers, and the Russian revolution.”

Porter features experimental, metafictional forms throughout the text. Here, he includes a set of reading comprehension questions within the story itself. Readers may choose to either treat these questions as earnest prompts or as a satirical aside that anticipates an academic over analysis of the novel.

“Various other things slipped. We pissed on the seat. We never shut drawers. We did these things to miss her, to keep wanting her.”

The boys intentionally neglect chores around the home in response to the loss of Mum, who previously was responsible for those chores. This detail raises questions not only about caretaking during bereavement but also about who does the caretaking in times of normalcy, and why. With the loss of Mum, the family is suddenly entirely male and unwilling to take on domestic tasks that are frequently designated to maternal figures.

“How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her. Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet.”

Dad’s metaphor, likening his sadness to a city, demonstrates his complete absorption into the process of grief; it has become his environment. Any sense of profundity that this metaphor might have, however, is undercut by Crow’s disgusted commentary, which provides humorous relief from Dad’s pain.

“My friend said, you have to stop thinking this way, involving her. There’s grief and there’s practical obsession.”

External expectations of what grief should look like do not line up with how Dad wants to grieve. Whether this is because Dad’s grieving process is unhealthy, or because the expectations of others are unhealthy, or a little bit of both, is left unclear, but the exchange also highlights how grieving is individual yet often judged by others, especially if it appears unconventional.

“He was young and good and sometimes funny. He was silent then he was livid then he was spiteful and unfamiliar, then he became obsessed and had visions and wrote and wrote and wrote.”

This passage uses polysyndeton (repeating “he was”) to reflect the constantly, and sometimes violently, shifting emotions that accompany Dad’s grief. The boys’ observation of their father’s obsessive tendencies echoes the concerns of the friend in the previous quote. His preoccupation with his own writing is another example of love of art as escape from pain, only this time the fiction is of his own making.

“I acknowledge that I could have been accused of showing symptoms related to unfulfilled maternal fantasies, but I am a crow and we can do many things in the dark, even play at Mommy.”

Crow brands himself as an actor at several points in the text, here imagining himself as performing the role of a mother. The language of psychiatric self-diagnosis also evokes his other self-description as a therapist. His comment also evokes the issue of Dad’s mental health, which is in question for the duration of the story.

“She’ll be way back, before you. She’ll be in the golden days of her childhood. Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.”

Crow reimagines ghosts as haunting their own pasts, instead of haunting their surviving loved ones. Ironically, Crow is the one who is haunting Dad, serving as a constant reminder of Mum’s death. His reference to the “ready-made iconography” of safety adds a metafictional layer to the passage, calling attention to the narrative’s intertextuality.

“As soon as the terribly beautiful woman answered they knew they weren’t ready for her to be anything other than a mother, so they scurried home, wee wee wee, up the hills, across the frozen woodland, into the house, up the stairs, into bed—eyes squeezed shut—and when they woke up their father was cooking breakfast.”

Mum’s death stunts the boys’ relationship to women, as demonstrated in this fairytale, told by the boys themselves. Unable to see the woman as anything other than the mother they lost, they have a fearful reaction to her presence, again alluding to issues of misogyny that exist within the family.

“Up we shot, all three of us. A standing ovation. ‘GO CROW!’ we yelled.”

The birds of prey flying show is a pivotal moment in the narrative, marking a shift toward healing for the family. The unity of their movement and cries, emphasized by “all three of us,” indicates a togetherness that they have not experienced since Mum died.

“He had bang-up-to-date views on Hughes and Plath. One of those views was that it was all over. It was time to shed all that crap and assess the poetry without partisan biographical bickering. He was pro-Ted, our papa.”

Dad ironically takes the side of Ted Hughes after asserting that discourse about his work should be nonpartisan. This hypocrisy is one of the many self-contradictions that the narrative explores through the characters. It also, again, focuses on Sylvia Plath’s husband and criticism of him in the wake of her death, supporting the focus of the narrative on Dad and the boys, rather than Mum.

“And our Dad forgot what he asked, and Ted Hughes died, and so did our Mum, and my brother tells the Oxford story differently to me.”

Ted Hughes’s death is presented as equally important to Dad as the death of Mum, revealing the depth of his parasocial devotion to the poet. The subjectivity of each character’s perspective is also reinforced by the boy highlighting that his brother has a different version of the Oxford story.

“We were careful to age her, never trap her. Careful to name her Granny, when Dad became Grandpa. We hope she likes us.”

Like Dad, the boys start to think of Mum as a ghostly presence who moves with them through life. Here, they present her as capable of having opinions about who they have become, although those opinions remain a mystery. They also keep her alive in their minds by ageing her at the same rate as Dad, indicating that their relationship with her is still evolving.

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”

Dad’s conviction that grief is a long-term phenomenon suggests that the ending imposed on the narrative is an artificial cap on what will really be a never-ending process. Nevertheless, Dad and the boys are exponentially closer to achieving closure than they were in Parts 1 and 2. Dad once again asserts the individuality of the grieving process, refusing to do it according to anyone else’s rules or ideas.

“I feel that if my wife’s ghost had ever haunted me, now would be the time she’d start whispering, ‘You need to ask Crow to leave.’”

Harkening back to his discussion with Crow about Mum’s ghost haunting the family, Dad imagines her speaking to him for the first time in the book. These are some of the only words offered in her voice in the text, although they are, of course, figments of Dad’s imagination. This adoption of her voice suggests that she has become a part of Dad, acting as his conscience.

“In its point-blank refusal to be constructively critical either of Hughes or his poems, it will certainly delight true fans of both.”

The sarcastic review of Dad’s book reveals that his ideological commitment to defending Hughes does not play well with the broader public. Despite his complete preoccupation with writing a good book about Hughes, he fails to get the enthusiastic reception he desired. This underwhelming payoff emphasizes his emotional neglect of the boys while writing it, and it also highlights the narrowness of his perspective, mired in his own grief, suggesting that he felt a kinship with Hughes that affected his objectivity.