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I have titled this post "How to Live with Grief," but, actually, I don't have any real advice about living with grief. I only know how I live with grief, for I have discovered, after moving across the country, after therapy, after turning my journal-writing into letters to Tom, that grief, while it diminishes in many ways, never leaves. The most mundane of events can lift a full bucket from that well. Even applying for the widow's benefits of social security elicits emotions of sadness and anger, sadness that Tom is not here to share these retirement years with me, anger that he does not get to enjoy the benefits of his long years of labor.
So how do I deal with grief? By turning to the skills I spent years developing. Gardening is the skill and activity we shared from our early days of marriage, beginning in the early 1980s in an open field near the Texas A&M married student housing. Someone from the university would disk up this field every year, and students in married student housing could choose a plot in which to grow a garden. Tom and I did this for at least a couple of years. After that, we had a garden in every place we lived except for the temporary housing we rented when we first moved to a new area. Over the years we have gardened in Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Georgia, and Arizona, sometimes more than once in these states as we moved around the country.
But I also grew up gardening, or, rather, weeding, for that's the task my dad assigned for his children. My dad was a gardener, his mother was a gardener, and I know that my current gardening skills began with watching them.
When I moved to Georgia (again) after Tom died, I began landscaping my front yard with several beds of flowers, natives as well as non-natives that remind me of my childhood or other places we lived. As soon as the weather permits, I begin weeding those areas and adding mulch, removing dead plants, filling in gaps with new ones. Here are a few photos of my spring yard this year.
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Bearded irises and miniature gladiolas--The next blooms in this area will be Japanese irises, daylilies, and Asiatic lilies. A potted lavender is beginning to push up stems for blooms. |
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| The bearded irises came from an area planted by a previous owner. I moved them to other areas. The amaryllises that are just now beginning to bloom as of this morning, are descendants from a bulb one of my dad's first cousins gave me years ago. |
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| The funky face among the gladiolas and mountain mint Tom made in a pottery class years ago. |
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My son and daughter-in-law gave me this persimmon tree about three years ago. It's a reminder of Tom's enjoying a ripe persimmon plucked from a tree planted by a great-aunt just a few days before he died. I always have a project going, whether it's writing or crocheting or creating a photo book for my grandchildren. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat taught me to crochet when I was a teenager, and lately I have been crocheting in the evenings when I watch mysteries or British comedies streaming on BritBox. How else do I deal with grief? I meet with friends weekly for happy hour, I take music lessons, I play my Irish whistle in the evenings, sometimes sitting on my back porch, letting the notes drift through the neighborhood, I visit my grandsons across country, I call friends and family, I volunteer to write postcards for political candidates I support, sometimes I do phone-banking for them, I plan ways to make my personal space more comfortable and efficient, I clean my house. In short, I go on living, as difficult as it sometimes seems to be, the best way I can. |
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