Over the past 21 months of grief (my 18-year-old son, Evan, passed away in June 2023), I have been hit by many many many many many chaotic bursts of emotion. Sometimes I video myself mid-cry, in a bid to cling onto the past (a new preoccupation of mine, post-apocalypse).
But when I come back to watch the video, in a saner frame of mind, a few seasons later, I often find myself… bemused…at myself.
For example, six months after he died, I recorded this snippet:
And I am bemused because I can’t access those big feelings anymore. This video does nothing for me. I am numb. Or I have changed. I see my old self floundering. I see she was grasping for meaning in a way that feels foreign to me now. In the turbulence, she needed…I needed… to find the thread.
But this hasn’t changed: I am still struck by how apt the gardening metaphor is. (For the sake of this metaphor, we ignore the yellow Dahlia plant.)
I had planted two pink Dahlia plants in the spring of ‘23. Two weeks later, my son died. Shortly after, one of the plants was struck down by a summer storm, and there was only one left standing. It bloomed. In the same way, my daughter was left standing in the wake of the Evan-quake. She is beautiful and bold and strong.
When I made that little video, I remember having such a clear vision of this gardening/parenting connection. You control what you can with the seeds and the soil and the water, but the environment does what it will. Storms come, and some plants, for whatever mad confluence of genetics and environment, are better positioned than others to withstand what nature throws at them. The gardener accepts the outcome, accepts the risk, the devastation. Another growing season comes. The gardener learns what she can from experience, and next year, she sows more seeds.
I am, of course, not going to “sow more seeds”. My birthing days are over. But there is this idea that I should continue to nurture, love, and hope. The searing pain of loss continues to compel me to rage at God while I simultaneously accept His omnipotence and the whims of nature.
I think of all this today because there are more goings-on in my rear yard. We transplanted this Witch Hazel five years ago, almost to the day:
This winter, five years after planting, it has finally bloomed, and abundantly. The reddish orange things aren’t autumn leaves – they are winter flowers. I had planted the Witch Hazel so that we would have signs of life in our yard, in the middle of winter.
I think of the before and after of Evan’s death as a violent transplanting. It’s like I had an arm amputated. Or if I was a plant, maybe I had a limb severed. And then I had to reacclimate to new soil, into a new way of being.
This is my way of hearing God. I remind myself that it’s truly ok that I have slowed down, that I don’t bloom vibrant, showy flowers. It’s ok that I’m healing, that I’m in rehab. It’s ok to be in a season of restoration. And when I need to embrace slowness instead of hurry, that’s ok too.
My gardener, it seems, has elected to transplant me into the soil of loss, and blooms may not be expected for a good five years…or more…and that’s ok.