Grief doesn't move in a straight line toward healing

Macdonald resists the familiar arc of grief memoirs — shock, mourning, gradual acceptance, resolution — and instead depicts her own mourning after her father's sudden death as disorienting and non-linear, at times worsening rather than improving as weeks passed, and manifesting less as sadness than as a kind of numbness and detachment from ordinary life.

She describes losing interest in food, friendships, and her own future plans, retreating instead into obsessive preparation for training a goshawk — a plan that on its surface looked like a hobby but functioned, she later recognizes, as an escape hatch from having to process the loss directly.

Her honesty about grief's messiness — including behavior she's not proud of, like deliberately isolating herself from people who wanted to help — is part of what distinguishes the book from more consoling grief narratives. Grief rarely resolves in the tidy stages people expect; sometimes it gets worse before, or instead of, getting better.