Green Thumb

I must be the worst gardener on the planet. You probably think you collected that award years ago, but I have news for you. There is only one rotten nurserywoman per century, and she is me. My reputation is so vast that no one has ever even asked me to volunteer with the babies at church. Just mention my name and the word nursery in the same sentence and watch what happens. Mothers run away screaming with their infants and florists lock their doors. Thus, the reason you never received a flower arrangement from me at the birth of your child. By the way, belated congratulations.

Obviously, some confusion has occurred. Let me clear things up once and for all. Babies like me. Plants don’t.

I’ve mentioned this problem before, but since the number of followers who read my blog is less than the total number of surviving plants in my front yard, it may have gone unnoticed. Shocking, right? It doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m a kindhearted soul.  I’ve donated to people in need. Wiped the tears from brokenhearted grandbabies. Thrown my trash in the garbage instead of the street. You’d think I could make plants like me. Help them reach their full potential. Thrive and flourish and elicit rapturous sighs from every visitor who walks into my home believing it to be a virtual Garden of Eden. I think I’ve figured it out.

I don’t care about plants.

They’re just so . . . needy. Look at them over in the corner of the living room, leaves dull and lifeless, holding their breaths until they turn yellow. It’s like they’re dramatically gasping, “Hey, we’re thirsty over here.” Or, “You overwatered us again.” I mean, make up your mind. Underwatering turns the leaves yellow and overwatering turns the leaves yellow and lack of nutrients turn the leaves yellow. The way I see it, it’s easier to grow yellow plants than green ones so I’m just doing them all a favor.

I had some kind of tall green thing given to me as a housewarming present when I moved into this house a year ago, and I want you to know I’m incredibly proud of how long it lasted. It sat on my kitchen island until last week. Pretty good, right? It wasn’t thirsty. It wasn’t drowning. It had all its vitamins, I guess. It was safe inside where I keep the air conditioner at a comfortable arctic setting. It had everything in the world to live for. And do you know what took it down? The pot was too small. I threw that whiner in the trash last week, wrestling its rangy stalks into a kitchen-sized garbage bag while I closed my eyes so it couldn’t accuse me of committing a crime. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told it, gritting my teeth as I tied off the bag.

Last night it reappeared. In my dreams.  I think I’m being haunted by a house plant.

There’s another possibility. I don’t think it’s my fault that I can’t grow things. I come from a short line of women with overly green thumbs. It’s a genetic disorder which, I’m sure I read somewhere, could be caused by consuming too much broccoli. At any rate, they kept all the luck with plants for themselves and I didn’t get any. Which is fine with me. I don’t like broccoli anyway. 

Still, people who brag about “shoving a stalk of rutabaga in the ground and watching it take off” really get on my nerves. They don’t understand people like me. A good friend of mine sat me down once and tried to fix me. She was one of those broccoli lovers.

“All you have to do is water them,” she said about African violets, like it was easy. I stared at her like she was speaking Portuguese.

She nodded, noticing the problem. “Or maybe you could just hang pictures of plants around your house,” she offered weakly, like I hadn't already thought of that.

“Then I’d have to dust them,” I answered.

She bit her lip. “Yeah, vicious cycle."

I thought that was the end of the discussion. But when Christmas rolled around, she gave me a special gift. I opened the wrapping and pulled a small, handcrafted clay pot out of the box. It was filled with potting soil over a Styrofoam base and held a cluster of greenery.

“It’s a Velvet Plant!” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “I made it myself.”

She did. There were seven handsewn leaves crafted of wire and dark green velvet, each securely shoved into the Styrofoam base and artistically bent to resemble a houseplant. I looked at the tiny card protruding from the soil and read its name. “Fictus Phyllos.”

“It means Fake Plant,” she told me. The card also contained care instructions. “Never water. Requires no sunlight. Thrives on neglect.”

A tear escaped my eye. I loved that little plant. But I still had to dust it.

A few weeks ago, one of my granddaughter’s cousins asked me to take care of her snake plant for the weekend while she and her family flew out of state for a wedding. Apparently because my surviving houseplants pretended to be happy, she had the impression I could keep her beloved plant alive for five days.

“All you have to do is keep it in a spot with indirect sunlight and water it on Wednesday and Saturday,” she said, fully confident that those were simple directions. “I’ll pick it up Monday,” she finished. I broke out in a cold sweat but assured her that I would keep it alive. Actually, I didn’t use those exact words. I just smiled and prayed for a miracle. I’m only human, you know.

But I did keep it alive and to my enormous relief, she picked it up as promised on Monday and I never had to look at it again.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand how other people can keep green things green unless they’re buying plastic plants. I don’t know why trees keep growing in the desert and dehydrated roses can bloom and Mexican Petunias look deprived every afternoon yet explode with purple blossoms each and every new morning. The only thing that makes me think I’m not as pathetic as I seem is this time of year, when fall arrives. Every single leaf on the ash tree overhanging my patio is about to turn brown and fall to its death on the concrete below, leaving an expression I can only describe as bewildered consternation on that massive tree in the pasture.

If even God struggles to keep things looking green sometimes, I must be in pretty good company. 

With thanks to Chad Miller for pretending to be a worse gardener than me. Nice try, and thanks for the great picture. The original photo can be viewed here: Everyone in my family has a "green thumb," except me. The… | Flickr

And So I Write

August, 2021

“This is pain,” she says. Hand over heart, or solar plexus or gut, wherever your body concentrates your grief. “May I be kind to myself,” she adds, waiting while I repeat after her. “May I be compassionate with myself, may I accept myself,” she finishes. This is the exercise she taught for when grief surrounds me, heart and soul and mind and body and I can’t breathe or find my way out and think I’ll never survive this loss.

This is pain.

This is grief.

This is hell.

I knew coming home to my temporary apartment might feel like this. Coming home after a big trip is always anticlimactic. But this time I came home alone. Without my right arm. My other half. My everything. I drove into the driveway, five thousand miles after I set out for his memorial service in Florida and sat in the car taking deep breaths.

This is it, I thought. From now on, I’m on my own. Still Rob’s wife, but no longer sharing life with him, shopping for us, planning or dreaming or laughing or loving or even bickering. The echoes of our life together are agonizing. The memories are too much, and my brain won’t let me look at them right now.

Today, everything hurts. Unpacking is always a chore. Today it takes every ounce of energy I possess to pull things out of the solitary suitcase and put them away. What is to become of me? What is my purpose now without Rob beside me? All the courage everyone else sees in me is invisible when I look in the mirror at my tearstained face. 

Who knew courage comes packaged in weeping?

I have lists of things to do. Breathing on this planet requires schedules. Appointments. Shopping. Consuming. Repeat as necessary. It’s been five and a half months since Rob died. Died. I hate that word. The only comfort I have right now is knowing how much God hates it, too, even though pastors insist that 'blessed in the sight of God is the death of His saints.' Jesus wept with loud, obnoxious sobs at the grave of his friend, Lazarus. 

Death was never what God had in mind.

But it’s the human experience. We’re all one hundred per cent terminal. That doesn’t worry me anymore personally. Still, the thought of losing another loved one is too much. “Too much.” That’s what my mother-in-law said as we hugged in her house last week. She’s buried all three sons and her two sisters in the space of three years. Nine years ago, she buried her own beloved.

Death is too much. 

I’d love to be happy again. Some people say it’s a choice. “Look on the bright side,” they encourage. “Be grateful for the years you had together.” And, “Remember how many other people are suffering, too.” Or maybe that’s what I tell myself in the moments when grief suffocates me. I’ll tell myself anything just to catch my breath.

Don’t mind me. This is still early grief, I’m told. That’s not good news. How many more day after days lie ahead of me, missing Rob and trying to absorb the truth that he’s not here anymore and never will be again?

A reality like that is too much.

August, 2023 

“This is pain,” I remind myself, thirty months after he died. I put my hand over my heart again the way she taught me to and give name to what I feel. “This is grief,” I say, for the thousandth time. I glance toward the kitchen that he never saw at the framed word art I hung there. “Be Kind To Yourself” it admonishes, reminding me of what she told me at the end of every session until one day, a few months into this sad space where I live, I blurted out, “What does that even mean?”

“It means to allow yourself to be human, to experience the suffering, the grieving. It means to treat yourself the same way you would treat another person who is hurting. With kindness. Gentleness. Compassion for yourself for all you’ve been through.”

For all I’ve been through.

I have lost so much. Some things I can’t mention here. Significant and difficult but also too personal. As for the others . . .

Two and a half years ago, I lost my beloved. My darling. My safe place. My true north. My best friend and playmate and first love and last love. And with him all the dreams we created together. The life we built. And our future.

In short order, I lost the home we’d just bought. The dream of sitting on our newly finished back deck looking out over the acre and a half that merged into forestry land, scanning the trees for glimpses of deer and elk while drinking morning coffee and cocoa. We never sat out there. Instead, we slept in separate hospital rooms until I was released and he never came home.

There’s been more loss since I drove to Florida to mourn with our family for him. Nearly a year to the day after losing Rob, our dog, Brody, died. The one with the tender heart who came to me and positioned himself against me every time the tears fell. He was six. I don’t know what happened. One day he was happy and playful, and the next day he changed. Within a month I told him goodbye as the vet carried him away, his loving spirit gone forever.

Sometimes there is too much loss. Too close together. Six months after Brody died, the counselor who walked me through the worst time of my life and reminded me to be kind to myself, retired. Some healing strategies were left suspended and incomplete. I bought a book she recommended to use on my own. It’s not exactly the same.

Grief, the feared stranger, came to my house to live. And stayed. I’d rather have my dog.

Long before our last session together, I worried out loud with my counselor about crying in front of my grandchildren. Would they be afraid to be around me? Would my tears frighten them or make them feel that hanging out with only YaYa and no Chief seemed empty? Would it remind them too much of their own loss?

“You are modeling grief for them,” she said. “They grieve their Chief, but there will be more losses in their lives. And when they experience them, they will know how to grieve. Because they watched you do it.”

What a strange purpose to have in this life I live daily but no longer recognize—modeling grief and the freedom to live in sadness and sorrow. “For as long as it takes,” she told me. That’s how long grief lasts.

I often describe this abrupt change forced on me as “feeling shattered.” Sometimes I feel an urgency to put the pieces back together as soon as possible. The pressure to get back to normal only complicates the process. The thing is, Rob and I were one. It’s God’s design in marriage. It took forty-six years of loving each other, goofing up together, misunderstanding and forgiving and trying again to discover who we were both apart and as one and then, somewhere along the way, I knew him better than anyone else on earth, as he also knew me. 

We were a team. We had each other’s backs. Sometimes we had each other by the throat, but those times were rare. We liked each other. We laughed together and cried and dreamed together. We won and lost together. That one hurts the most. The day we lost everything together. We lost the “together.”

You can’t put a shattered life back “together” when half the pieces are missing.

I miss him tonight. I miss him every night and morning and the hours in between. How could I not? He’s in my DNA. I hear myself saying the things he said. When I drive home late at night, I reach for my phone to text him that I’m on my way, but no one is there to read that text and I remember too late to stop the catch in my heart. To my surprise last fall, I began craving foods I’d never enjoyed before, all his favorite flavors. Baked goods like pumpkin muffins and ginger snap cookies.

But not fruitcake. I’ll never crave fruitcake.

Maybe tasting the things he loved makes him feel close to me again. Almost three dimensional, the same way he appears when someone is willing to listen to a memory of what we built together. Yet another reason why I journal about this grief. Telling my story and writing about him and our life nearly makes it tangible again.

Evenings are the hardest. I’m tired. I’m cooking for one on the nights I can convince myself to do it. I eat most meals by myself. And regularly I tell God, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this life that I never wanted and never asked for and was forced into living.”

I had no choice. Did I say that loud enough? I never had a choice about being widowed. He never had a choice about dying. And leaving me and our family. Losing Rob still feels like losing an arm. It was an amputation. A tearing away of the two who became one.

This is pain.

This is grief.

Some days, this is still hell.

This is processing all of that, writing about it here, trying to find my way in the dark, doing the thing I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never been here before and yet here I am.

And so I write.

I have to dump all of this pain out of my soul so I can breathe.

And so I write.

I write because shoving all of these feelings down out of view would destroy me. And that is what I know grief is not supposed to do.

In whatever ways we are alike or very different, we humans have this in common: we will all grieve at some point in our lives. If we let it, grief can connect us, enabling us to have compassion for ourselves and each other. If we don’t, or if we try to fix people who don’t need to be fixed, we all lose.

I, for one, have lost enough.

 

 

“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried. Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.”

 ― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand