Gardening in liminal space

surrender, hope, and holding the life we have in our hands now.

“I think I’m going to have to let the front garden die this year,” I recently squeaked out to my partner between tears, “I just don’t think I physically can water it anymore”. 

No one was more surprised than me when those words came out of my mouth. My garden has served as such a point of pride and healing over the last couple of years and I’ve poured so much of myself into it each season, no matter how many times it breaks me. The dirt stained fingernails, the debilitating back aches, the arduous hand watering… It's never been easy but I’ve pushed through in constant pursuit of tending to a garden, of creating beauty– for myself, for my clients and for my neighbors.

Our house is set up on a small hill, with wide, spaced-apart steps leading to our front door and a steep driveway. There’s a small lawn by our front bedroom window, the last standing dogwood tree that has survived the last couple of ice storms, azaleas, and a camellia tree that saves my mental health every winter with its soft pink blooms. There’s a terraced area which turns into a small rock wall which meets the street level, where there used to be a strip of dirt, home to multiple old and diseased rhododendrons. The first thing we did when we moved in was to have those dying bushes removed so we could put in raised beds down on the street and start creating the garden I’ve always dreamed of– one to share with everyone. It was an ambitious project, and in the throes of shoveling the truckload of compost and soil that we received to fill the beds, I remember thinking I wasn’t sure what the hell we were doing or if we would ever be able to finish. Our grief at the time was so raw and fresh and feral that shoveling shit for what felt like an endless period of time was both comical and cathartic and so damn exhausting– the irony of it all was not lost on me.

Since the first seeds and starts went in the ground, the front yard has always been a place of grounding and healing and sweetness. I started calling everything that I touched in the yard the grief garden, because even though we had a small dedicated area in the backyard for our memorial garden, the concept of grief gardening became bigger and more expansive the more I worked in the dirt. I found that it wasn’t just the garden itself that was the place for grief, but that the act of studying, appreciating and immersing myself with the life cycles of plants and flowers and soil was what was teaching me the most about my own seasons of grief. 

The last few years have profoundly changed me and the way I move through the world. The grief and trauma of the early days of the pandemic, an entire career change, the loss of our baby Birdie and subsequent miscarriages, the destruction of my dream of parenthood, long covid symptoms in a healthcare system that doesn’t care, a chronic pain disorder diagnosis, the crushing weight of capitalism, the continued stress of covid and lack of community care, the collective grief and horror that we witness on a daily basis. The amount of compounding grief and loss and change has been unthinkable. My younger self would want to reassure anyone who is reading this about my innate sense of *~*resilience*~* and push forth some semblance of a silver lining so that it all ties up nicely with a bow. But in my older, wiser and messier state, I’m making more room for the primal screams and the unknown places, the mental struggles and the complicated dance of surrender.

We tend to say goodbye to our gardens in October or November, tucking them in for a winter, looking at all the dried out, barren, decaying parts and holding gratitude for what they were, and what they are. This year, I’m slowly saying goodbye to my garden in July.

I’m surrendering to the fact that I can’t water the garden like I used to. My mobility has changed, my tolerance for heat has changed, so much about my life and my body has changed since 3 years ago. In the past couple of months, when it would be time to go outside, my bones would scream in desperation: “no, no, no”. The desire and urgency in my brain was there, but everything in my body prevented me from getting up and doing it. Each time that I mustered up the strength to drag around 100 ft of hose around the top of our yard, down the stairs to the street beds, around the cars, back up to the house to the terraced area, I felt like I was dying. Each step felt like a marathon, my heart rate would spike, and I’d come into the house out of breath, exhausted and overheated. Every damn time. I even wound up in urgent care at the beginning of the summer, getting scanned to rule out a heart attack or some sort of cardiac distress, because chest pain and fatigue became so familiar to me with each watering session. The tests came back clear, the doctor shrugged it off and said “well I guess this could be long covid, but it’s really too hard to tell these days”, I left with a hefty bill and not much else. Gotta love the American healthcare system! 

It takes a lot of courage to grieve the life we once dreamed of, so we can show up presently and authentically to the one we have now. It takes a lot of heart to examine our relationships and identities and to notice and even embrace their shifts and growths. It takes a whole mess of grief-work to look at the profoundly changed landscapes of our lives and still find beauty in it.

As a death doula, I talk about this often with clients. 

How do we still show up fully to a life that is so different from the one we imagined?

How can we make space for and honor all that has changed?

What do we need to grieve?

How can we be gentler with ourselves in order to meet this new version of us in this present moment?

When I walk through the garden now, even as I watch it dying, I still see so much beauty. It looks different than the years before– I see the color slowly draining from the annuals, the leafy pea tendrils now dry and brittle, the bee balm looking weathered and tired. Amidst the dying and wilting flowers though, the strawflowers and statice are still blooming, despite even the hottest summer weather. A volunteer tomato plant is strangely thriving– leftover from the first year of planting. When I see the empty garden box that didn’t get turned over immediately, I remind myself that it held the garlic for 9 whole months and that it’s okay for the soil to rest and recover. There are ecosystems of support unknown to me, in the molecules of soil and the webs of mycelium under the surface, and there’s something comforting about that, knowing there's still ways of holding and tending to the garden in this season of grief.

Last Sunday I turned 37 years old. I am exactly the same age as my mother was when she held me in her arms for the first time on the day I was born, something that I am still struggling to find the words for the depth of curiosity and grief that I am holding. My life is nothing like I thought it would be when I turned 37; I am nothing like I thought I would be when I turned 37. This is both a tragedy and a miracle and I am continuously learning to love this life within this spectrum of grief and gratitude. 

So I am letting the garden die early this year in self preservation. I am standing in my imperfect life as it is now, and I am looking for the glimmers of hope amidst all the letting go. I am reminding myself of the resilience and interdependence of plants and of humans alike— how we too go through seasons of decay and dormancy and quiet, which oftentimes are ripe with transformation. Maybe next year I’ll put in a drip system to help me bring the garden back, maybe I’ll be able to have more help. Maybe my energy will be back, or my health will be different. Or maybe I’ll have to continue to find new ways to keep plant and flower medicine in my life as it is now, in ways that I have yet to discover and reveal. I’m still saving seeds for another season. I’ll just have to stay curious and open to see what unfolds.