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...