A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  Jane also became fixated on the moment Peter had died. She questioned me about my memory of that evening, but time had stood still for me after I’d made the call for an ambulance sometime after seven. I had no concept of minutes or hours passing. So Jane took to the phone again, tracking down which department in the hospital would have that record. She got her answer. Peter had died at 8:35 p.m. It was only when she told me the time that I realized how fast everything had happened, from the time the ambulance had come, to our arrival at the hospital, until I held Peter’s hand while he died.

  Time didn’t mean much the first week after his death either. Days dawned. It was rainy or it was sunny in the garden. Nights came earlier as we slipped into fall, I guess. But nights did come and they were the hardest. On the first one, on the night of Peter’s death, I avoided our bedroom. Jane and I lay in the twin beds in the guest room downstairs, but I can’t say we slept.

  After my sister arrived the next day, I let her sleep in that room with Jane and I climbed up to the bedroom I’d shared with Peter. I took my usual side of the bed and left his pillows and his wedge on his side. In the night, I tried to pretend he was in the bed beside me. “Rub my back,” he seemed to say. And I stretched out a hand and rubbed the corner of the pillow, imagining it was his back under his white undershirt.

  I slept little that whole first week. I couldn’t read and, although I wanted to, I couldn’t weep. There’s a French expression I’ve always admired, passer la nuit blanche, which means spending the night without the blackness of sleep. But my nights were not white. They were just filled with a heavier shade of grey than the days.

  And yet I found solace where I could: from Jane’s efforts to cross out items on the to-do lists in her notebook. She worked frantically to notify organizations and businesses; to go through Peter’s email to see what bills needed to be paid; to cancel his many magazine subscriptions and our apartment in Rome, which we thought Peter had done; to turn Peter’s Facebook page into a memorial site. She did it all, not just to keep busy but to take the burden from me. And I loved her even more for that. I also took solace from my sister’s presence. She nurtured us both with dinners out and kindness. And I took solace from the calls, the emails, and the responses to my post on Facebook about Peter’s death. Peter had been admired and loved by many. And although that was cold comfort, it was comfort of a sort.

  And yes, despite my anger, I found comfort in the garden, in the silence of the yard, in the trees that swayed in the wind, in the flowers I could gather any morning I wanted. And with the colours of the vegetables in their last burst of vitality. Throughout it all I ate: restaurant meals and salads from the garden, tomatoes, eggs with basil each morning. Grief didn’t put me off my food. I still couldn’t bring myself to work in the garden, but it gave me all I needed. My Victory Garden became my nurturing garden, although I wasn’t particularly grateful for it. I felt that my body, with its continued need for good food, betrayed my need to hang on to despair.

  Somehow, in my fog, I came to conclusions about how to honour Peter. I didn’t want to ask for donations to the Canadian Cancer Society; I didn’t want cancer to be his legacy. Instead, I chose two places in town that Peter had been supporting as a volunteer. On the day after Peter’s death, I had to call the librarian in town because Peter was scheduled to be the host at their first Wine and Words event the following week. In our conversation, I said I’d heard that the library had been used for memorials in the past and she said they’d be honoured to offer their space. So the library, soon to undergo a renovation, seemed like a good spot for donations.

  Then, the next day, as I was putting out the garbage, a man Peter worked with on a committee for the new park in town stopped his car and got out to speak to me. And I remembered how much Peter had wanted to keep up his work, for as long as he could, to make the park a reality. Although Peter had never been a gardener himself, he was particularly excited at working with an Indigenous group as it developed the healing garden they wanted to include on the lands. As the man offered his condolences, I came up with an idea and blurted it out. Could the committee set up a fund so that friends and family could donate to it for trees in Peter’s name in the new park? He said he’d be glad to arrange it, and although I’d done it all through happenstance, I felt like I’d found two appropriate ways to honour Peter: through books and trees.

  I was, of course, making everything up as I went. Beyond cremation, we had never talked about what would happen when one of us died. I couldn’t help wondering if I should have broached the subject. If on that day on the deck after we’d learned of the second, inoperable tumour, I should have said to him, “I will do what you want to fight this but if you want to talk about your feelings of death at any time, then I am here for that, too.”

  I never got to say that to him and Peter gave no indication he wanted to talk about death or what he wanted to happen after he was gone. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court once shared the advice that her mother-in-law gave her on her wedding day: “In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” But I always found that it helped to be a little mute. It was something I’d developed in those early years of our relationship as I witnessed his gnawing physical pain and quickly learned it was wisest to bite my tongue until later, when the pain might ease and he would be open to listening to my gripes or suggestions. And during our year of cancer, I’d learned to keep many of my fears and negative thoughts to myself because he was so determined to remain optimistic.

  Remembering those truths about us helped me. I slowly began to forgive myself for making decisions about his legacy without his input. And then, even more slowly, began to forgive myself for not asking more questions on the night he died. Even in that crisis, the old pattern of waiting to talk to him later when he was calmer came into play. And, at some level, I felt grateful that I hadn’t probed and caused an angry reaction that night. We hadn’t spoken any meaningful words in the last half hour of his consciousness, but we hadn’t said any words that we could never take back.

  September thirteenth wasn’t a Friday that year — it was a Tuesday — but it had all the hallmarks of that unlucky day. It started out like another in a row of days of getting things done. Jane and I had one more visit to the funeral home in the morning, this time with a male representative. I liked the man’s manner because he didn’t try to pretend he knew our grief. Still, the visit with him shook me. As we sat at a table in the room filled with the sample coffins, urns, and death souvenirs, he slowly cancelled Peter’s life — the handicapped sticker we had for the car; Peter’s passport with its stamps from Argentina, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Madrid; his government identifications — and pulled out a document that would protect Peter’s identity now that he no longer had one. I signed letter after letter to government agencies; the man quickly added a death certificate to each letter and stuffed the envelopes. As Jane watched him lick each envelope shut, she asked him if he’d ever seen the Seinfeld episode where poison in envelope glue kills George’s fiancée. He had seen it, and he laughed a little. It was strange how a joke about death in a funeral home could lighten our mood. Then Jane went to the bank with me, where a kind agent tried to make sense of Peter’s accounts.

  But later that day, while trying to see what monies Peter owed, I discovered he hadn’t paid his taxes for the past year. I remembered clearly, or so I thought, the details of a conversation we’d had in the spring; we had each prepared our tax information for our own accountants and we were dropping them off one day in April when we were in Toronto. But neither the Canada Revenue Agency nor his accountant had any record of Peter’s filed taxes. And that wasn’t a one-off. Around that time Air Canada sent me an itinerary change for the flights to Rome that Peter told me he had cancelled. Again, I remembered the conversation; he’d said that the money from Air Canada was going back onto his credit card.

  Meanwhile, a friend who was checking
our voice recorder for the wedding vows Peter and I had recorded told me there was no such file. I remembered sitting on our sofa recording those vows a week after our wedding, when I’d suggested it.

  “Why?” Peter had asked suspiciously then.

  “So we’ll have them,” I said, “to listen to on our anniversaries.”

  And when I phoned Peter’s Juravinski team to ask why they hadn’t phoned back about his digestive problems, they said he’d never called. I began to wonder if I’d gone crazy and imagined all those discussions. Every possible scenario left me distraught and sent me farther from any sense of reality, farther from him. But I did know I wasn’t insane. Two days after the day he died, Jane and I searched through Peter’s iPad for the outline of the thriller he’d said he was working on and would send to us at the end of the week. We both remembered his words. But there was no outline to be found. It appeared he’d never started it.

  That evening, after I dropped Jane off at the bus to go back to Toronto, I drove to nearby Niagara College for one of the two photography courses I’d signed up for to keep my mind occupied through another fall of treatments. After Peter died, I had thought of dropping the courses, but decided I’d need some structure over the next few months. I sat in the fluorescent-lit room feeling exposed, pretending to listen to the instructor while, inwardly, I railed against Peter for the confusing loose ends.

  At home, I poured two very fat fingers’ worth of Scotch and started going through papers in his office. There’s a reason that sleep-deprived surgeons shouldn’t operate and sleep-deprived pilots shouldn’t fly. And I’m quite sure — now — that sleep-deprived new widows (Was I really a widow?) shouldn’t try to put affairs in order at midnight with a glass of Scotch. I searched that office like a crazed woman. I found a cheque from CBC for freelance work two years earlier that he’d never cashed. And under a pile of mail, the tax information held together with a paper clip and ready to go to the accountant. The sight of it brought me some relief. Peter had prepared the information, at least. All I had to do was get it to the accountant. But I still shook with anger. Why hadn’t he done the things he said he’d done? Had he always been like that and just said what I wanted to hear? Had he not bothered to hit record when we’d done our vows, even though he was an experienced broadcaster? Had the cancer fogged his brain long before we knew it was back?

  I missed him more than ever at that moment. Because I wanted to shout those questions. I wanted answers and I would never get them. I remembered how Peter had said the cancer treatments were harder on me than on him and how I’d never believed it. But that night I felt that getting on with life might just be harder than dying. Like I said, not enough sleep and too much Scotch. And loneliness, gut-twisting loneliness. A toxic emotional cocktail.

  Among the small unpleasant discoveries I made that night and over the next weeks as I sorted papers and received mail back from governments and employers, there were also some pleasant surprises, like cards he’d bought for future birthdays, Easters, and Valentine’s Days, that restored my sense of Peter as a generous, considerate partner. One day, perhaps after some sleep, I saw Peter’s iPad on his desk and remembered he had recorded the vows on it, not on the recorder we often used for interviews. I quickly found them and was flooded with comfort when I heard his booming voice speak of his love. I wanted to apologize for doubting him. In his emails, I found a link he’d sent himself on the day he died about writing letters to loved ones before it was too late. And then, in a corner of his crowded bookshelves, I found an opened package from Amazon. It was Leonard Cohen’s newest CD (and ultimately his last), You Want It Darker. Peter and I had listened to his penultimate album, Popular Problems, on our winter drives to the Juravinski. We both found the maturity and sense of mortality in that album touched something in us, and I became more of a Cohen fan than I ever had been, repeatedly listening to every version of “Hallelujah” I could find on YouTube. I knew Peter had left the package there to give me on my birthday the following month. But I immediately played the CD, finding the end-of-life tones both haunted me and connected me to Peter in a way I hadn’t felt in days.

  I came to know that I would never have answers to all the questions I had, but that my sense of Peter would hold, that someday my memories would leap back over that horrible time to all the good memories of travel, home, and the love we’d shared.

  Around the time I was struggling with all that, I got my first sign. And it was in the garden. Earlier that summer, Peter had said he’d like another Japanese maple tree. I’d planted a small one that a neighbour had started from a slip and offered me after Peter died. I went out one afternoon to take some photos of the tree before it dropped its now vibrantly red leaves. I stopped first to harvest tomatoes and green beans for my supper and then stood by the black raspberry bush I’d planted in the spring for Peter, and I ate its first bittersweet fruit. Then I photographed the maple tree in the glorious light of the slowly setting sun. As I walked beside the flower beds looking for other shots, a butterfly landed near me on the pink flowers of a sedum, a butterfly I’d never seen before in the garden. Its wings were a purply brown with iridescent blue dots at the edge before a yellow border. It stayed on the sedum with its wings open long enough for me to get a good close-up shot. Inside, I searched for the butterfly in Google Images and discovered with a gasp that it was called the mourning cloak butterfly. I still didn’t have Jane’s faith in signs, but it comforted me nonetheless. It made me feel closer to Peter than I’d been able to feel as I took care of his finances and made sense of bills. It made me look around for him.

  The next day, I decided I had to get back to the garden. The Victory Garden had become a mess. Weeds had taken advantage of my neglect and run rampant between the rows. Tomatoes had rotted on the vine. Green beans had grown too long and too tough for eating. I cultivated the rows, picked all the produce I could, but without my usual glee.

  Carrying my bounty into the house I played Leonard Cohen followed by Peter’s favourites, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. I listened to their familiar songs while I cooked batches of tomato sauce and tomato soup for the freezer. I suppose it was all soothing, but I still felt like I was putting on an act, as if I were responding to the old wartime beat of “carry on” because that’s all I could do. That’s all anyone can do.

  I still had no idea how I could ever stand to be on this earth without Peter. I could go through the motions for years to come: tend to my garden, feed myself, shower when I needed to. But where was the victory in that? Where was the victory without Peter? When we’d driven back from Hamilton less than a month earlier, on the day we received the news the cancer was back, and he’d told me this diagnosis should not stop my Victory Garden project, what the hell had he meant? Did he hope he’d be there with me, or did he mean I would have to find my own victory without him? Or did he just know I’d find some peace digging in the dirt? Of all the questions I wanted to ask him, this is what I wanted to ask him most: How can I ever feel victorious again? What the hell had he meant?

  Chapter Fifteen

  GRIEF BECAME MY GARDEN. I had to tend it. Dig through the morass of my emotions to find something to hold on to. Take the time to learn grief’s needs and its rhythms before I’d ever be able to create some sort of unimaginable new life that would allow me to bear my loss and survive without Peter. Trouble was, I had no idea how to go about feeling anything but hopeless.

  Just as I had studied the vocabularies of gardening and then cancer, I now had to study the vocabulary of grief to find my way through it.

  Broken-hearted. Heartbroken. I wondered in the first weeks if I would fall over and die. I missed Peter so much it hurt physically whenever it struck me he was gone, as it did on the day an alert popped up on my iPad screen saying Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature and I started to call out the news from bed to an empty house, news I knew he’d love to hear. I know it’s possible to die from a broken heart. Broken-heart syndrome, or takotsubo cardio
myopathy, describes a ballooning in one of the heart’s chambers following sudden and strong stress. It usually reverses itself in days, except in rare cases when it brings on sudden death. I know it’s possible to die of a broken heart because years earlier I’d witnessed it happen. One week I saw a couple from Grimsby, friends of my parents, enjoying themselves at a party; the next week the husband died suddenly and was followed days later by his seemingly healthy wife. When I didn’t fall dead, I wondered if I’d loved Peter enough. The only reason I was grateful to be alive in the early days was to spare Jane more pain.

  Inconsolable, bereft, despairing. Those were the words of my first month. The only tools I had against them were action, distraction, and the consolation of a few people. I took care of Peter’s taxes, dealt with pensions and banks, fought with the bureaucracies of credit card and phone companies. The details were endless and, while I cursed them, they occupied my mind, as dull as it was.

  Then the celebration of life I was planning for Peter filled the void for a time. I listened to his CDs, picking the softer songs of his favourite rock music for a playlist to fill the library as people arrived. And I went through the thousands of photographs I had on my computer, in albums, and in boxes of our life together and of Peter’s childhood, before choosing some for a memory stick I’d give to my sister, who would print them and organize them on large boards for each side of the podium the library would set up for speakers.

  While I listened to Peter’s music on my computer, I often found my eyes darting to the new photograph of him I had on my desk. It was taken at our wedding, at the end of the ceremony, when he was tired. But he looks relaxed and happy staring with a smirk at the friend photographing him. Hearing the songs that Peter listened to for decades, staring into his wise blue eyes, kept me close to him and dangerously allowed me to hold on to the illusion he would be back soon.