Death of a child. Renewal.

Growing Season

Arlene Bernstein

Even before the babies died there was a garden.

Michael, my husband, was executive director, because gardening had been part of his childhood. He laid out plants and seeds in proper orderly rows in what had been the cow pasture of the old prune farm we had impulsively bought as a weekend retreat shortly after our marriage. I deferred to his expertise.

Life didn't cooperate in as orderly a fashion as the garden when we started a family. David, our preemie firstborn, died before he came home from the hospital. Jason, born two years later, had a serious heart defect and lived just a bit more than a year. Our next attempt, to adopt a healthy child, backfired. By then, the cow pasture was planted to vineyard and the garden moved near the house. The vines were Michael's domain. The garden was mine, a disorganized jumble of vegetables and flowers. Orderliness is just not my nature. Anything that sprouted on its own that was nourishing or beautiful could stay where it appeared.

Our grieving styles were as different as our gardening styles. Michael channeled his energy into work, keeping emotion at bay with physical exhaustion. I could no more discipline my emotions than I could pull up a perfectly healthy plant just because it was growing somewhere I hadn't planned for it.

I watched his vineyard thrive and his plans for a winery unfold. I watched my dreams of another child wither as he decided he could not face the pain of another loss. How was I to cooperate with his dream when he was unable to support mine? I felt betrayed and trapped and became resentful and enraged. I fantasized escape, though I had neither the financial nor the emotional resources to act on the escape plans. I began having panic attacks in the super market. I thought I was going crazy.                              

Then one rainy winter day, in a state of abject despair, I wandered aimlessly into the vegetable garden, the only place on the twenty acres that Michael didn't control. I surveyed the abandoned mess left from the previous season: a lone onion, a cabbage whose stalk had collapsed in the downpour, the ribs of Swiss chard whose leaves had been devoured by birds, a few leeks, carrots and celery root drowning in the muck. A question formed. In all humility I asked the bedraggled tangle, "What can you possibly offer me in the way of nourishment" I stood in silence, empty of expectation, so I was astounded when the place inside that had formed the question also gave me an answer. "Hot soup!" It was true. If I saw what was before me differently, everything I needed was there.

I harvested the ingredients, and brought them to the kitchen to simmer in broth on the stove. As I ingested their goodness, feeling their warmth spread within, I made a commitment to life, less as I had wished it to be, and more as it actually was, collapsed stalks and all.

Beginning that day, I devoted myself to the little plot of earth, to watching and tending, to being open to what other revelations it might hold for me. I learned to slow down and pay attention to what was right before me and to be receptive to the garden's demonstrations of life and death and renewal unfolding naturally.

I planted spinach and it died. I planted it again and again, and it rotted or was crippled by slugs. Then, months later, after I had given up hopes of spinach, zinnia and cosmos seeds sprouted spontaneously in the spinach graveyard.

As I watched what happened to crowded lettuce seedlings unable to mature without the space to expand, I understood the truth they demonstrated about marriage. No matter how deeply two people care for each other, space is essential to growth as sharing. Maybe I didn't have to leave the relationship to explore new directions.

Lesson came after lesson in that little plot of ground.

I was not the executive director of this garden. Nature was. The garden flourished with what was suited to its particular soil and climate. And I came to realize that the nurturing and caring, love and creativity that I had so longed to shower upon children could be expressed and would bring satisfaction in other ways. I could be stingy and resentful with those feelings because I didn't have to give them to a child, or I could give my heart freely in whatever situations and encounters crossed my path. As I moved further into the world, in my own way, using the garden's teachings, I was also able to meet Michael as an equal partner rather than a dependent.

In time, as my work brought a harvest of vegetables and flowers and Michael's brought a harvest of wine, we could delight in their combination at the table, so in our relationship we came to cherish our differences. We came to respect that there is no one proper way to grieve or to grow, and that the process is not necessarily orderly.

The ultimate harvest came when we could celebrate Jason's twenty-first birthday, including him in spirit as we raised our glasses in a toast -- not just to what would have been his coming to adulthood, but to ourselves for reaching beyond our limits in collaboration and understanding. For flourishing, with hearts open again, against formidable odds.

If you enjoyed these reflections, we invite you to discover other thoughtful and personal writings in the pages of The Best of Pilgrimage and Pilgrimage Vol. 26 and Vol. 27. These can be ordered directly from this website; please click on "How to Order."

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