Gardening alone after 41 years

 

Cleaning up our Arizona garden alone, spring and summer 2020

The last five months of Tom's life we spent in Old River, Texas, staying at the rent home of one of my sister's, a home that had once belonged to a great-aunt. The chemo having failed after a year of slowing the cancer, Tom was put on a trial cancer medication. However, the cancer either spread or the trial medication caused swelling and a blockage to his colon occurred. He was in and out of MD Anderson Cancer Center hospital a good part of April and most of May. Surgery finally eliminated the blockage, but there was no cure for the cancer. Told he would live just a few weeks, Tom lived for five more months in which we were able to return to our home in Arizona three times, a week each time. So the spring and summer of 2019, when we would ordinarily be gardening at our home in Arizona, was spent away from the garden we had created there.

When I returned to Arizona in December, a month after Tom's death, I found a weedy, overgrown garden, and in the spring of 2020, I was determined to clean it up myself. I set to work digging out the weeds and turning over soil with a shovel. It was hard work, and I relished it. Grief is a lonely experience, and there in Apache County, Arizona, in the middle of a pandemic, the loneliness increased. The manual labor kept me occupied in a way that no other activity could have done.

Cucumbers and Scarlet Runner Beans covering a trellis that Tom built

My 2020 crop of Sweet Armenian Heirloom cucumbers did very well.

As we had abandoned organized religion years before, our love of the natural world and our transient experiences with it became much more important to me and Tom. So in working in the garden, noticing the change of seasons and the abundance of all that we had cared for--the grapes, the apples, the flowers I had planted and those planted by a former owner that I tended, and now the few vegetables I chose to grow in the weeded garden--I was paying homage to Tom and to our life together.

I planted several kinds of sunflowers that summer of 2020

Cassie and I taking a break from gardening, summer of 2020

The first week of September 2020, I said a final goodbye to the last garden Tom and I had created together. Now I am trying my hand at urban gardening near Atlanta, Georgia, in zone 7b.

My yard here in Georgia is very shady. Two large water oaks in the backyard shade half of the front yard from early-afternoon, onward, and the backyard is shade or part shade. The water oaks are old; violets and monkey grass grow in crevices near the ground, and one tree has a large mushroom growth on it.

 When old water oaks begin to decay, the rot spreads rapidly in their roots, and they can fall more easily during heavy downpours or windy weather. However, a local arborist advised me not to have them cut down, and so I anxiously watch them in every windy storm that passes through.

Now I am trying to figure out how to garden in a partly shady yard, and I have been watching the movement of the sun across the property, a difficult task lately since we have had so many rainy or cloudy days. This will be my first garden without Tom's imprint. I want to make the best of it in honor of him and of our many years of gardening together.

Some of the produce from my 2020 garden in Arizona

 

Tom planting shallots in our Arizona garden, 2016 or 2017

New Home Responsibilities

 

In late August of 2020, I sold our house in Arizona and in September moved to Georgia where my husband and I had lived before, near Atlanta. I have now lived in Georgia three times: first, with Tom and our two children, from 1996-2003; then, with Tom and our daughter (our son being at university in Texas) from 2007-early 2011; and now, I alone have purchased a home where I plan to stay until I can no longer care for myself. That's the plan, anyway.

The move has been difficult, but I have managed it. Within the first month or so of my move, hurricanes landing on the coast of Louisiana brought torrential rain to the Atlanta area, and a portion of my crawlspace/basement flooded twice. The roof also leaked. I was somewhat prepared for the roof; the inspection had indicated its need for replacement. The basement, however, was a surprise. My first priority was having the roof replaced, which was done quickly and efficiently by Rock House Roofing. Then I spent weeks interviewing representatives from basement waterproofing companies before deciding on a company recommended by my friend and real estate agent and her husband, a contractor. I had the basement encapsulated, with a sump pump installed and a de-humidifier plugged in.

The house I purchased, built in 1954, is much smaller than the one Tom and I purchased in Eagar, Arizona. Most of what could not fit in this house went into storage, and I arranged to have shelving and cabinets built to add storage space for books and other items. I had blinds installed in the large windows of the sunroom (once a carport) to add privacy to the room which is now my craft room and exercise room. And I ordered bookshelves for that room to hold my huge supply of craft material. When this pandemic is under control, I hope to locate a creative reuse store to which I can donate craft remainders from projects I have completed (or not). I need to downsize my stuff, beginning with the storage unit. Then I should do a thorough evaluation of all the stuff I have managed to cram into this 2/2, 1300 square foot house.  (Zillow lists the house as having 1092 square feet, but that's incorrect as that square footage does not include the now-enclosed carport.)

I have spent months watching how the water flows from the street, down into my sloping front yard and into my back yard. I am planning a dry rock bed to divert water that flows down the driveway and collects at the front of the sunroom/craftroom. I already removed grass and weeds, laying bare the soil that serves as an outline for the bed of the diversion, and the water now follows that pathway rather than collecting at the sunroom front door. Erosion has already done my work at the side of the house where the slope of the landscape encourages more rapid water flow toward the backyard. The top soil is deeply eroded, exposing roots from a neighbor's tree. 

Now solely responsible for all the tasks that Tom and I once shared, I have risen to the occasion, but not without anxiety. Tom was quite a handyman, and I am not. So when I ordered a shelving unit for the bathroom, I had to assemble it myself, a task that Tom once would have taken on and completed in short order. It took me several hours, but I got the job done. Same with the compost tumbler I bought. There are tasks I do not want to tackle, such as removing and replacing ceiling fans with lights. One ceiling fan/light fixture broke shortly after I moved in; the light and fan pull chains locked up. The fan switch locked up while on; the light switch locked up while the light was off--so I can turn the fan on at the wall switch but not the light.  Another ceiling fan is awkwardly arranged: the pull chain on the fan comes down through a small hole in the glass lamp shade of the light fixture, making it difficult to pull and operate. Once I am two weeks past my second covid shot, I will be looking for a handyman to deal with these issues as well as a few others.

Now that spring has arrived, I have begun planning how to garden in my urban yard. Gardening was an activity that Tom and I shared with great pleasure. Both of us enjoyed the manual work, but now I am feeling my age. I dug a round bed for herbs recently in one of the sunniest parts of a largely shady yard, and my right hip has been hurting since. I also dug a flowerbed near the house where I hope to plant some amyrillises that I have grown from bulbs since 2011 or 2012. The original bulbs multiplied many times, and I gave plants away before I left Arizona. However, the two large pots of several plants remaining I hope can be transplanted successfully outdoors and survive Atlanta winters. 

There are days--actually, every day--when I wonder what purpose do I have to carry on. Tom and I were married for 41 years, and our marriage--though not perfect, as none is--was a happy one and one in which I looked forward to being a part of into our retirement years. I so miss Tom's wittiness, his humor, his love of puns, his intellectual and emotional companionship, his love of the natural world and his knowledge of it. And I miss his ability to perform those many handy tasks that I never cared to learn to do myself. 

But I do carry on. The cats do their part to make sure that I do: every morning between 6:30 and 7:00, Cassie begins caterwauling for breakfast, and Mimi begins crawling all over me while I am trying to sleep. I rise to feed the cats, and the day begins. Purpose being perhaps overrated, tackling and completing ordinary tasks gets me through each day. And one day, after my second covid shot and after my adult children are thoroughly vaccinated, I will once again be able to visit family I haven't seen in over a year and meet for the first time our first grandchild. If only Tom were here to share that last event.

First herb bed in the new home: rosemary, lavender, regular thyme and lemon thyme, chives

the compost bin I assembled

My yard is full of violets

Grief

 My husband was a very private man, and he did not want me to blog our grief as he died of lung cancer. And so I stopped writing on my blog post just before we found out that the immunotherapy trial in which he was participating had not kept the cancer from spreading. Tom was admitted to MD Anderson Cancer Center hospital with a blocked colon, and he was in and out of hospital from April to the end of May, dealing with serious issues associated with a blocked colon. During that time, I learned to change sterile dressings and took copious notes and asked lots of questions of medical personnel. I was his advocate. 

These were difficult months as Tom was discharged from MD Anderson Cancer Center with the prediction that he would live only weeks. He lived five months beyond that prediction.

And now I am alone, a widow, and the months and years of managing my grief have taught me how lonely grief is. I have moved beyond being "a woman of a certain age" (as Barbara Pym, the English novelist would describe it), into my sixties, alone with two cats in a home to which I moved perhaps too soon across the country....in the middle of a pandemic.

How are people coping with grief during a pandemic when social isolation is paramount to prevent the spread of disease? Are they like me, every day getting up to feed the cats and then to scroll for an hour through Twitter for all the latest posts from journalists and political junkies that I follow? Do they then get out of bed, dress for the day, make the bed, and prepare breakfast, sometimes a bowl of Greek yogurt with two teaspoons of the last apple butter that Tom canned from our apple trees in Arizona and perhaps some walnuts or banana? Do they then mentally review the list of things that must be done and choose one or two to be sure to complete? Another day, another check on a list that doesn't seem to get shorter?

Do they find themselves at times wondering if anyone would really miss them if they were gone? 

It's difficult to find a purpose in this grief that grapples not only with losing a lifetime partner and friend but also with losing a father (my dad died in January of this year)--and all in the middle of an isolating pandemic. In the last few months I have tried to capture that grief in words, and one morning I woke up with a phrase running over and over in my head. Later I sat down to write this poem in which I finally capture the best I can the grief I am experiencing from Tom's death.

TODAY I WILL

Today I will arise late

from a bed barely warm with slumber

and count the pills for the morning and evening ritual,

the metered medicine snug in its cages of plastic, 

with lids that snap with precision,

the sound of responsibility, of safety,

of nothing as soft as hope

but rather a hard steely defiance of death.

Today I will unload the dishwasher

and stack in it last night's remains,

the wine glass with its round red stain,

the skillet with its crusty ring of a listless meal.

I will dole out to the cats their own portion

and turn on the kettle for tea and caffeine.

I will wipe cat puke from the crumpled quilt

and vacuum the cat hair on the sofa.

Today I will pour my tea and sit in the sun,

listening to the angry wren scolding at the suet feeder,

warning me away so she can peck in peace.

I will identify familiar songs of birds waking up to spring,

the downy woodpecker, the titmouse, the brown-headed nuthatch

waiting out my presence for their turn at the feeder.

If I sit still and silent long enough,

they will fly from the trees and nervously approach.

Today I will remember to be kind

to those who suggest courage and gratitude

for this day with its promise of spring and renewal,

for the flight of birds and the musical chimes in the breeze.

Today, as every day, I will see stretching ahead

the flickering mirages of weeks that recede

into a future that still, still, forever still,

remains without you.

Anita Dugat-Greene 2021