It begins with death and ends with life – this garden.
On the edge of the Great Plains of Nebraska, a weather-beaten wooden bench sits in dappled light under a large crabapple tree. Fourteen years ago, that tree made a sixty-mile trip tethered in my mother’s pick-up after her oldest son died. Ragged from the ride and the unrelenting Chinook winds, my mother hoped it would draw robins in winter. And it does. Flocks of them come to devour the frozen fruit. Watching robins gives my mother pleasure.
This is not a garden she planned – her grieving garden. Suddenly, unexpectedly the earth calls. You must sink your hands in it; you need to feel, to smell, to taste it, as her son did as a child. You need to till, to sow, and to sit in the shade, to bear witness to the natural order, so out of order after you bury your child.
Here she does not dictate her desires, but allows her garden to take shape as she grieves. She enters the garden with half-formed ideas – grief demands her full attention. Slowly, imperceptibly, the garden takes shape out of the truth of her son’s life.
His favorite colors drew her to plant lavender and yellow tulips in the sunniest corner. Clusters of grape hyacinth skirt the rocks she brought back from a trip to Kansas. It began as a drive just to look at the countryside, like her son did in his old pick-up. But she spotted the rocks on the side of the road and spent the day unearthing and shot-putting them into her truck bed. Grief gave way to the solitary task of her will over their weight. The afternoon’s work brought the handsome buff-flecked rocks to her garden and her fitful nights to an end. She slept without dreams of him: subconscious subdued by sun and wind and hard physical work.
Unearthed remnants from abandoned farmsteads – a passion they shared – are scattered among the rock and flowers. A rusted old cook stove’s missing leg is replaced with an old car’s spoked wheel now ensnared by a honeysuckle vine. A decaying Tree of Glory, severed at ten feet, is retrofitted as an aerial outpost for birds. Topped with a reclining old oilcan and a bent Arizona license plate for a roof, it houses chatty finches. A clay saucer invites thirsty layovers and an occasional odd visitor – a snake was sunning itself up there last week, she said.
And it’s here she moves earth. Though she cannot move heaven or have her heart’s desire. And it’s here she keeps the faith.
“Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.”
(Emily Dickinson)
Last week she began a second grieving garden, for her youngest son, just forty, the baby of the family. The Linden tree she chose is straight and tall and able to withstand Midwest storms – “flexible just like Christopher,” she told me. She planted it within days of his funeral in late March.
And it’s here she dwells in light, in air, in lovely life: Watching a robin and worm in an early morning tug of war, or swallows swoop mosquitoes in the vanishing light. And it’s here she wrests memories of those son’s childhood games, watching their thin boyhood faces fill in manhood, the rhythm of their footsteps on a return home, the smell of their oily skin mixed with sweat as they worked beside her, the quick laugh of one and the certainty of her life without both. And it’s here, between cloudless blue sky and verdant teeming earth, she talks to them.