A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  Rituals. The rituals of mourning did nothing to ease my pain. Even as I planned Peter’s celebration of life I knew I was doing it to give those who cared about him a space to pay respect. It couldn’t matter to Peter now and gave me a feeling of closing the door on him. When Jane lent me a copy of A Grief Observed by the Christian thinker C.S. Lewis, a short book he’d written hurriedly in four notebooks after his wife had died of cancer, I found my inchoate feelings about rituals pinpointed in his articulate phrasing. “All that (sometimes lifelong) ritual of sorrow — visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom exactly as ‘the departed’ used to keep it …” he wrote, “— this was like mummification. It made the dead far more dead.… Something very primitive may be at work here. To keep the dead thoroughly dead, to make sure that they won’t come sidling back among the living.”

  Thankfully, Lewis pointed a way forward without ritual. “I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.”

  I wanted to get there even if it would take me a long time. And when Lewis wrote that “passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them,” I took heart that someday the joyful memories of the life Peter and I shared would supersede the harsh memories of his illness and the night he died and he would come back into my dreams as his old self.

  Closure. It was another word that made me squirm. And sometimes scream in anger. As if there would be some magic moment when everything would be all right, when my grief would be solved. Presto. It would never be all right.

  Spiral. Valley. These were the words travellers through grief used to describe the geography of their suffering. I already knew there would be no straight road through my profound grief, that it would be a bumpy, twisting, hilly trail with the ground beneath my feet always shifting. I knew even before Peter died that the stages of grief described decades ago were bogus. Even the word stages made it sound like grief involved going into one sterile room marked Despair, where you’d stay for a while before closing the door on that room and stepping next door into Anger, and finally exiting through Acceptance. But there were no prescribed stages; grief is a stomach-heaving, roller-coaster ride no one wants to be on. Somewhere I read or heard that the stronger the love, the stronger the grief. But I didn’t know whether to take comfort in the love I’d had or lament the grief I’d face.

  There were days, when I was cooking a meal or sautéing leeks or a mixture of other bright-coloured vegetables from the garden, or when I was walking through the woods by the river, or getting the house in order, that I felt I was standing on level ground with grief nothing more than a buzzing sound in my brain. Those days, I’d go to bed satisfied with my progress up the spiral, only to wake the next day as if the previous day had never happened.

  The trigger for the slide downward could be anything from adding one fewer scoop of coffee to the French press than I’d done when Peter was alive or seeing a couple go into the post office together. Each activity I’d shared with Peter, each place we’d been, had the potential to send me to the bottom again. And then the buzzing would become a roar. My chest would feel crushed as though it were in the iron vice on my father’s old workbench, with someone turning the handle tighter and tighter on my heart and my breath. My stomach would feel achingly empty as if no amount of food would satisfy the hollowness. The memory of Peter’s touch or his voice could make me shake with longing. What I wouldn’t have given on those days to be able to do the most banal of things with Peter, stopping for a grilled sandwich at a local diner, even driving back and forth to the Juravinski Cancer Centre. To yell, “Yo, Pete. You wanna whooping?”

  Alone in the car, I felt his absence. He’d never got that licence, never been able to share driving duties on a long trip. But Peter had been the navigator, the guy who changed the music on the CD player, the passenger who entertained me with stories so I wouldn’t get tired. After we had come back from India, we joked he was my “water walla,” who would hand me my bottle of water whenever I got thirsty. Driving alone, without Peter, especially at night, made me feel all roads ahead would be lonely ones every time I got in the car. One time, driving back from Toronto in the dark, I imagined his hand resting on my thigh to comfort me.

  Wallow. Just as the books I consulted reminded me grief would take time and would never disappear completely, they cautioned me not to wallow in it. Not to get stuck in the mud of grief. A line I read on Facebook echoed this: “You either get better or you get bitter.” At one level, I resented the pressure to find something good out of this great loss. But at another level I recognized a truth about myself: when I’m down, I let myself feel alone and abandoned, like the child left behind the fence. And I knew that prolonging my grief could become an excuse that would allow me to roll in the mud of the melancholic side of my personality, to go through my life feeling sorry for myself. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Going to the garden to eat worms.

  I didn’t want to become bitter. For one thing, Peter would never have wanted that for me. Together, we had made sure we each reached out from the dark corners of our souls. And while grief was exhausting and working through it the hardest thing I’d faced, I knew that if I stayed too long there, I would become bitter and find myself in a more exhausting, destructive state. I tried to keep the image of the Victory Garden created out of a bomb crater in Second World War Britain in mind. If I could avoid wallowing in grief, it was possible I might discover some form of self-creation out of the destruction of our joined life. I told myself that. Believing it seemed a long way off, though. I was still too angry. And wanted to shout Fuck off to any person or any poster that suggested I should just get on with it, get better.

  Strangely, one of the books that helped me most with the idea of creating a new life step by step was The Martian. At CBC, I had written and produced several television pieces on space exploration. And while I wasn’t a scientist, I was always energized by the excited big brains at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, and other NASA facilities I visited around the States. Working on the research and scripts for those pieces made me comfortable with both the technology and the can-do attitude of the astronaut stranded on Mars in the novel. What I didn’t expect from the book, which I read as nothing more than a distraction, was to feel I had to become like the character, Mark Watney. Alone and almost certain of failure and death, he never gave up. I couldn’t either. The recriminations, the self-pity would do nothing but hold me back. I could not wallow.

  Coping. I was good at that, but sometimes wished I wasn’t. Maybe then I would have fallen and others would have picked me up instead of telling me how strong I was. I continued to eat from the garden, making sure I had all my meals in a day and there were fruits and vegetables on all my plates. I tried to set a bedtime for myself to get back into the rhythm of a night’s sleep, but soon came to realize a full night’s sleep would take a very long time to achieve.

  When the first holiday of the season came around, I coped by avoiding it. Peter had always roasted the turkey for Thanksgiving and made the mashed potatoes to go with the pumpkin pie I baked from fresh pumpkin. No one in my family was hosting a Thanksgiving dinner that year and I couldn’t bear the idea of cooking all that food at home for just Jane and me. The Drake Hotel in Toronto offered a turkey dinner, so I booked two seats.

  The day after I received my confirmation, one of the Drake’s employees phoned me. “I’m sorry, but you missed the deadline for the Thanksgiving special. But we’d be happy to seat you and you can order off the regular menu.”

  “Fine,” I said. But after I hung up, I fumed. Why did they confirm my reservation then?

  I phoned the woman back and I begged. “Look,” I said, “my husband just died and I want to give my daughter and me a Thanksgiving dinner away from home.”

  I hadn’t pulled the widow card before, but it did work. The young woman said she’d see what she could do and the next
day called to say they could seat us for the Thanksgiving special.

  I stayed in Toronto with Jane that weekend; we dressed up and sat at the bar before dinner. The meal was so unlike any other Thanksgiving I’d ever had and I was so grateful to the Drake for bending the rules for me and that we had a pleasant few hours. And I learned that one way to cope with holidays was to find a way to celebrate them in a way Peter and I hadn’t.

  Widow. How I loathed that word. It made me feel as though I would shrivel up, that I would always be an outcast from the world of couples and functioning adults. It whispered to me of deep loneliness and uselessness. But it’s a word that also stirred some needed spirit in me. Whenever anyone tries to typecast me, I fight back. A woman I know told me a story about three of her childhood friends who were now widows. The first one had turned to a couple she knew for solace and then “stolen” the husband. The second one, who’d had a difficult relationship with an authoritative husband, spent all her days in anger. The third one happily continued to ask her husband for his advice three years after his death. I suppose she imagined his responses, and I wondered what that would be like. I knew I didn’t want to be any of those widows, especially the first two. I’d have to learn to take on the word in my own terms, but I’d never come to like it.

  There were other words that tantalized me with their possibilities: transformation, acceptance. But they were a long way off. In mid-October, I held Peter’s memorial, and in the days leading up to it I focused on little but the preparations. I wanted it to be a celebration of all that Peter had done despite his physical challenges and of all the love and kindness he’d shown so many. My sister was busy printing the photos and a program. The staff at the library had arranged for a liquor licence and would set up chairs after the library closed for the day. I bought wine and hired a local caterer, a young woman who ran a small café in the community centre whom I knew Peter would want to support. I asked friends to speak on key areas of Peter’s life and a local actor to read from Peter’s memoir, The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times. I wrote a tribute to Peter’s optimism, romanticism, and kindness.

  On the evenings before the ceremony, Jane and I walked the town practising the tributes we would both read aloud so we wouldn’t break down when we delivered them at the podium. The beauty of Jane’s words and the honesty of her voice stunned me.

  Wonder

  at the world.

  Be in awe of it.

  It is your mission to learn everything you can. Make connections between seemingly unrelated things. Use this to help people, to express yourself.

  If complaining isn’t going to fix the problem, don’t complain.

  If something reminds you of someone, send that note, that link, that article.

  Remember people.

  Help them reach their goals.

  Have the strength to be EXACTLY

  who you are.

  Play the hand that you’re dealt.

  Never begrudge others their happiness.

  Jane’s final words reminded me of how much she’d lost too, how important Peter had been to her.

  Throw yourself

  into life.

  Even when it’s scary or uncertain.

  Take that leap.

  If everything goes wrong and you only have a handful of things left that make you happy: be grateful for them.

  Revel in them.

  Be kind to people.

  Never give up.

  Cherish your loved ones.

  These are the lessons Petey taught us.

  This is how he made the world a better place every day that he lived

  and this is how

  we will honour him,

  every day after.

  On the morning of the service, I wandered the garden in my pyjamas, cutting flowers for two arrangements for the library, and I felt the slightest twinge of gratitude for the selection of blooms I still had. The first flowers I chose for a glass vase were the lavender-coloured roses I’d planted for Peter. He’d loved all shades of blue and purple and I’d created a bed of those colours for him. I’d bought the bush rose, called Poseidon, at the local rose grower’s. It was only later I realized the roses were also called Novalis after a German poet and were a symbol of love and yearning. With the roses, I stuck in purple flowers from the butterfly bush, springy gaura, and some of the small, perfect toad lilies that bloom so late in the season. In a bigger pot, I arranged twigs, sedum, orange roses, and orange hibiscus with variegated euonymus around the base.

  The day of the celebration was beautiful, sunny and warm, one of those fall days when you think summer will just go on and on. Later, the local paper reported that more than one hundred people came to the event, but I didn’t count. When Jane and I stood at the podium together and spoke our tributes, with less faltering than we feared, I could see all sorts of familiar faces from our past: relatives from both sides, friends from our days at the CBC, old friends from the United States and around the province, and new friends from town and our new writing lives. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to them all, to thank them for coming.

  Later, some joined Jane and me at a local Irish pub. Even though Peter hadn’t been able to drink beer for months, I chose the pub because for most of his adult life he’d enjoyed downing a Guinness at a table with friends.

  It was a Saturday night and a crush of drinkers had taken over the dining area to listen to the live music. Friends and family crowded into a corner room I’d reserved and spilled out around the bar, raising their voices to be heard. For the first hour, I felt nestled in the tight circle of people from our lives. At one point, though, I stood alone with Jane and realized I couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, couldn’t say another word. I looked at those around me who were talking animatedly, making new acquaintances and renewing old friendships, and recognized that the evening would bring closure for some. They would miss Peter and talk about him fondly, but their lives were not crushed as mine was; they would not feel the loss for the rest of their lives. Jane and I said goodbye and slipped out to the quiet, dark street, leaving the noise and the party behind.

  At the ceremony, one of Peter’s brothers had said he felt as though part of him had died. I hadn’t said anything so dramatic and wondered if that was true for me. But as Jane and I walked to the car, I started to think that more than a part of me had died. When I was in school, I hated mathematics and begged my parents to allow me to drop it as a subject after grade ten. But there was one thing I loved studying, and that was Venn diagrams. The idea of two circles overlapping to show what they shared was so visual it made sense to me. Besides, you could colour them. I realized my relationship with Peter was a Venn diagram. We had come together as adults with our own interests and the ability to function independently. Our love of Jane, our home, travel, food, art, and music (some music) and our drive to share a life of creativity, love, and respect formed the central overlap of our circles. We both wandered to the edges of our circles to our separate fascinations, knowing the centre was there and would always give our lives meaning. In my mind’s eye, the overlap in our Venn diagram became a red that grew deeper and wider over the years. It wasn’t a part of me that had died with Peter, but the very centre of my existence.

  Inconsolable, bereft, despairing.

  It was only after that night that the finality of Peter’s death began to poke through my armour. And I was finally able to weep. I’d had one long cry already, one evening when I felt angry that he wasn’t there. It was early in October and it came courtesy of Bell Canada. After Peter’s death, when Jane and I’d made calls to arrange for all the household bills to come to me, Bell Canada had insisted they couldn’t just change the name of the payer on our internet service. I had to make an appointment to have the old line taken out, the modem taken away, a new line brought into the house, a new modem and a new service started. Which I arranged. But the new service didn’t work as well as the old one. And one Saturday night it stopped completely.

&
nbsp; It happened on the same day Jane started her walk from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-Lake. No matter what I said, I hadn’t been able to dissuade her from the journey. Perhaps, I thought, she’d watched the movie Wild, in which a young woman hikes the Pacific Crest Trail to deal with her grief, one too many times. All she would say was that she wanted to walk from her home to mine and nothing would stop her. When Jane was a child, I’d realized with both pride and alarm that she had no fear of me. She had always been determined to follow her own path. Now, I had to accept that this walk was how she wanted to confront her grief. And I had to accept how much she missed her daily contact with Peter. When Jane left home, it was Peter who texted her every day because I didn’t want to be the pestering mother.

  “She’s alive,” he’d tell me when he got a text back from her.

  For a long time, he sent her alliterative greetings like “Have a whimsical Wednesday,” “Have a morally malleable Monday,” or “Have a scintillating Saturday,” and she answered back with her own alliteration: “Have a sideways Sunday.” When the alliterative ideas dried up, they switched to facts each day before going back to the daily greetings. He never forgot to text her a greeting except on the day he got his second diagnosis and the day he died.

  At least I was able to convince Jane to take someone with her on the walk; she’d be travelling along some sketchy stretches of highway where drivers might harass a lone young female and she agreed it would be wise to be with someone else. She enlisted an ex-boyfriend to accompany her and promised they’d stop in Hamilton for the night, sixty kilometres from Toronto and almost halfway. Throughout the day, she’d turned on her phone from time to time to send texts of their locations. But by evening those texts had stopped.

  While I waited, I called Bell to deal with the internet. I was on the phone with them for two hours, passed from one level of technicians to another. Each time I had to repeat the details. “Yes, the modem is plugged into the wall. Yes, I know what light should be flashing.” They all heard the anger in my voice and the disdain I felt for a company without compassion, even though I knew the poor sods on the other end weren’t responsible for company policy. While I was on hold, I couldn’t call Jane; my panic grew. If something happens to Jane, I told myself, I will just give up. Finally, the last technician promised to send a service worker the next day to deal with the problem.