A Garden's Story

They say that transformative art is "the personal made universal". 

I have just finished reading Joyce Carol Oate’s A WIDOW’S STORY, the tale of her first year of (sudden) widowhood after many decades of marriage.  Despite never having had (thankfully) a dead husband, I was struck by how much her grief resonated with me.  In truth, grief and despair, no matter the source or trigger, is grief and despair.  Battling illness can mimic the same. 

The descriptions of her journey through widowhood including having only energy enough to change television channels, juggling a public work persona which carries on but depletes one of all energy, the deep pain of loneliness that keeps one asking ‘why bother’ when whether one has had a good or bad day it's all the same once arriving back at an empty house, the sleeplessness and then the challenge (as she describes it) to slowly blow oneself up like a large balloon each morning, and mostly intensely, the sense of such delicate threads of family and friends that are holding one down, tethered to earth, rather than simply cutting them and flying free in all the forms that might mean, all hit close to home for me.   Her personal had become universal. 

Ray Smith, her husband, had been a gardener.  The back yard was his domain.  As that first Spring arrives and the garden awakens, she understands that her choice is to let it grow over with weeds or plant her own garden in its place. 

She notes, “A gardener is one for whom the prospect of the future is not threatening, but happy”.

She dons his gloves and his clothes and begins to do the Spring errands she watched her husband do each year, but instead of vegetables which she has no appetite for, she plants things that will bring her some joy – perennials versus annuals.  In doing so, “his” garden is now “their” garden. 

She writes about working in the garden to create something in his memory and says, “… and I am working with my hands, and with my back, and my legs --- for working in the soil is working.  And so, as I am working, I am thinking – but the kind of thinking I am doing isn’t anything like the kind of thinking I would do elsewhere, still less in bed, in the nest.  This is a kind of thinking in tandem with working --- some part or parts of my brain is roused, alive".

Her husband’s garden is what finally begins to connect her back to her life.  It places body and mind together.  I suspect any gardener will say this is true no matter the reason they themselves happen to be digging in that dirt. 

And so, like her tale of grief, she reveals the garden to be its own form of simple, transformative art.  My personal becoming universal...

Daisies for Simon

I have grieved a child.  Really, I have grieved children.  Ones I did not have.  I know the depth of loss "that never was".   It's impossible to explain this kind of grief to someone who has not felt the deep, deep desire for motherhood - to feel the stir of a child within - but has been denied it.  The children I did not have were dreamed of and prayed for and deftly tried to be made manifest with science and money.   They were named in the secret places of my mother heart and kept from everyone - even from the man who was mysteriously and simultaneously winning my lover heart.  Telling him there were no names for these babies of which I dreamed was the only lie I ever told him.   But, as time marched on and no children arrived to claim these names, I reluctantly or graciously or excitedly pulled them out of my heart's secret compartment for others to use for their children and even, secretly, a tiny ginger colored cat that I love.

Arriving at crossroads,  I chose to let go of that dream and give my heart over to another dream of equal desire - to share a life with someone I loved.   So, at the crossroads, I chose a partnership of adventure and desire and companionship.   But, as with every loss - even with such wonderful other things on the horizon and a partner I believed loved me - it needed to be grieved.  And this loss was and is profound.  It rumbles the depths of my soul some days.  And even more so now that the other dream has also washed ashore and I'm left alone....

But, no matter how deep that grief for the children that did not come to me,  I can't imagine the loss of a child actually placed in your arms by God.  A child who laughs and plays and cries and loves you as only a child can love a parent.  A child you committed to be the protector of even when, in the dark truth of reality, that is impossible by any measure.  I can't imagine what that would be each day of ones life to grieve ones child.

What does this have to do with gardening you ask?

Well, a garden is about birth and death and renewal.  It was for me the place I poured my grief into when it had become the elephant in the room and I could not grieve openly at home.  But, how that revelation came to me is for another time.  Now is about a post by my friend Ilaria which can be read here.  She has written beautifully about the loss of a friend's 10 year old son.   A boy who claimed the name Simon.

I did not know him, but my heart sunk for his parents and then lifted again when Ilaria wrote that his parents and his sister would be traveling to places around the world that he had delighted in - even in his short time on earth.  And in each of these ten places, they would plant one tree.  Ten trees for Simon.  One for each year he gave them joy and happiness.  One for each year he was uniquely him on this earth. 

They will be pouring their grief into a garden.  They will plant something that will grow and grow and grow as their son will no longer be able to do.   What courage they have.

And while I can't know their deepest of deepest grief, I know enough from my own desires and loss to know they will water these trees with their own tears.

I can't plant a tree in my 5x12 plot.  I signed a paper saying so.  But, I have already planted Violets for my Nana and Hyacinth for my Poppop.  And tomorrow I will plant orange Gerber Daisies for a boy I did not know named Simon.  I'll do this because my heart breaks for his mother and father and sister.   And for my friend Ilaria who must be holding her own sons that much tighter today.

And with luck and love these playful bright daisies will come up again every year.  And, maybe, in some secret way known only to the Universe, this will help comfort a grieving family who are planting trees around the world in the name of their son.