A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  When I hung up I started to cry, a rasping angry cry that brought no relief. “Why aren’t you here?” I yelled at the picture of Peter on my desk. “You should be here to deal with this. You always deal with this.” But he just smirked back at me.

  Then I got Jane on the phone and couldn’t keep the frantic worry from my voice. It was almost eleven o’clock.

  “We’re fifteen minutes away from the hotel,” she said calmly. “I’ll call you when we’re there.”

  But when they got to the hotel, it was full and the receptionist couldn’t find any other rooms in the city for them. Jane called to say she was taking them back to Toronto in an Uber. She was disappointed but not upset that they wouldn’t continue; her ex-boyfriend’s feet were such a mess he couldn’t have done another day, anyway. She knew they had to call it quits even though she believed she could have done the second day’s walk. I offered to pick them up, but she refused. “I’m an adult,” she reminded me, not for the first time that day. And I realized that walk might also have been her way of showing it. Her form of victory. Later, I volunteered to join her on the second half of the walk but not until spring and only if we divided the rest of the journey into two days. She accepted that idea.

  It was November before my grief cracked wide open and the real weeping began. On the first weekend of the month, I drove to Muskoka to an amazing cottage that belongs to a friend of mine from my writers’ group. Each year, she holds a weekend writing retreat there and each year, I wait for that weekend with huge anticipation.

  Among the first to arrive, I claimed a beautiful room with a desk and its own bathroom, and I stayed there much of the time and wrote when I could. I hadn’t written anything other than notes since Peter’s death, but I made myself sit at the desk with its framed vista of coloured trees and blue waters and work through the events of the day Peter died. Later, as our group sat around the dinner table and talked about what movie we’d watch that evening, I grew intensely sad. I begged off the movie, saying I probably wouldn’t be able to stay awake, and walked quickly down a long hall to my room, trying to keep the sobs in. In my room, I fell on the bed and wept. I had a bath and wept. Got in bed and wept.

  The next day, I wrote more and went down to the dock by myself to take pictures for a photography assignment. I felt worn out, but in some ways relieved that I was finally grieving. As I drove home alone, I felt a little scared of the long winter ahead. Since the shorter days depressed me every year, I couldn’t imagine what they would do to me that year.

  Peter, in his knowing, had always realized how low my mood went in those months when there wasn’t enough colour in the garden, not enough green in the trees to feed me. When the dirt was too frozen for me to get my hands into it to plant seeds. When there were no vegetables or flowers to pick. In preparing for his celebration of life, I had sorted through a thick file of the cards, letters, and poems he’d written to me over the years and I’d chosen one card, dated November 1995, to read aloud at the podium. On the front was a photograph of a back road curving through birch trees with yellowed leaves. Inside, he’d written, “Dear Deborah, I know that this time of year gets you down but I wanted to give you a small reminder that spring and summer are just ahead. Be calm. Light, colour and warmth will be yours again. Love, Peter.”

  Light, colour, and warmth. They felt like foreign concepts as autumn days grew shorter. But the card reminded me again that Peter would not want me to be miserable, that he, more than anyone, would want me joyful again.

  Transformation. Acceptance. They, too, felt like strangers. But at least now they were words I wanted to stretch toward, just as I wanted to be alive for the first warm day of spring and the first sign of new red leaves budding on Peter’s maple trees.

  Chapter Sixteen

  GRIEF BECAME MY GARDEN. Over the next month (and during the long winter that followed) when I needed the most attention, I heard little or nothing from many of the people who had come to pay their respects at Peter’s memorial. The words the surgeon had used to describe the surgery that cut out half of Peter’s esophagus, routine but complicated, seemed to echo in my grief. No one can escape grief; it is as routine as night and day. And yet, after the rituals of funerals and sympathy cards, few know how to face the complicated pain of the bereaved or seem to want to be around it. Perhaps, I thought, people felt I had to reach out first (I couldn’t); perhaps they thought I needed time alone (I did and I didn’t). Perhaps they didn’t know what to say (“I’m sorry for your loss” and “I’m thinking of you” go a long way).

  I tried to ignore the hurt, to feel gratitude toward the good things in my life and toward those who did reach out. There was Jane, of course. There was my sister, who called me every week; an old friend who arranged a dinner of women for my birthday. There was my writing group; my new friends in town, H and A, who invited me to movies, dinners, checked on me often. There was a long-time friend of Peter’s, a woman he was writing a dramatic script with, who took me on. Soon after Peter’s death, she drove from Toronto and treated me to an elegant lunch, where we laughed and cried over stories of the man we both loved in different ways. Later, she heard what I’d said at the memorial about getting low in November and promised to come down again that month. She did and continued to schedule visits with me. There were A and D, who invited me to New York. Gestures large and small meant much to me that fall.

  But nothing could save me from the hours I spent alone most days and every night. There was no escaping the loss and the loneliness in the still hours. And the growing fear that loneliness would be my companion for life.

  To keep busy in the waking hours, I kept up my volunteer work with the committee to support a Syrian refugee family. Our original family had never made it out of Turkey, but we learned a new family with full clearance would arrive within months. I joined two book clubs in town to meet new women. I agreed to take Peter’s place on the board for the new park in town in the spring. But it was a book my dear friend O sent me, called Grieving Mindfully, that got me truly thinking that although I had to keep up social connections, it was up to me to dig my own way through my grief. No one else could do it.

  One day when Jane was feeling particularly sad, she wrote a letter to Peter and then wrote herself an imagined response filled with the kind of advice he would have given her. Hey, kid, it began, using the code word they’d chosen more than two decades earlier. I couldn’t go as far as Jane, imagining his responses, but I began writing letters to Peter and often walked around the house talking to him. Perhaps, after all, I would become like the third widow of my friend’s story, who kept herself happy through conversations with her dead husband. But it remained impossible to ever think I’d have a two-sided conversation since the only dreams I had of Peter were of me abandoning him and him abandoning me. But just writing to him about my day, voicing words I’d spoken so often to him, brought me some relief. And sometimes, I could almost imagine his response because I knew so well what he would say to me in so many situations. Whenever I walked out on the deck and left the screen door open, I could almost hear him holler, “Close the door!”

  Around the same time, I knew I had to make some changes in the house to shake me into realizing my life had changed forever. I bagged all of Peter’s clothes except his beloved blue suede shoes Jane had bought for him after his leg surgery, when he could finally wear regular shoes again; his favourite ties with Venetian lions and books on them; some sweaters I thought I could wear around the house; his black leather jacket; and his housecoat, which I wrapped tightly around me each morning. Then I took the green garbage bags of clothes — many of them new pieces he’d bought in the summer for his shrunken size — to a local charity that donates clothes to migrant workers. When I got back home, I claimed both closets in the bedroom for my own clothes and set up the bed for one person with two pillows in the middle.

  Each morning, though, when I came down the seven steps from our bedroom to the main floor, I was faced with Peter’s of
fice as he’d left it. Just as seeing Peter at his desk reading or writing on his computer had been my first happy view of the downstairs most mornings for the first two years in our house, the empty desk was now the first sad thing I saw before making my first cup of coffee.

  When a local handyman came over to do some fixes in late fall, I had him and his partner move the desk up to my bedroom and move down a club chair that sat in the corner of the bedroom. It was the chair where Peter had slept when he couldn’t stand to lie in bed on his wedge one minute longer and it too brought painful memories.

  The new arrangement in the bedroom worked. The previous owners had turned two small bedrooms into one large one with windows that looked out both the front and the back of the house. Our bedroom furniture took up one half of the room. The other end of the room had been filled with the chair and a dresser with a glass-fronted cupboard on top of it. I was relieved to see the desk didn’t overwhelm the room. Rather, it looked instantly like it belonged there. I’d had the men turn the desk so the now empty space for books faced the window and I looked each night at an unfamiliar side with drawers that Peter must have seen each day. The desk became a new place to write thank-you notes and letters to Peter beneath the window that overlooked the street, a view I’d never had. Those little shifts in perspective set off a little shift inside me to become someone who could live alone in her bedroom retreat and feel safe there while still connected to a shared life that was now gone.

  To bring Peter into the room even more, I went down to the basement and found the boxes marked “Owls.” For years, Peter had collected glass, stone, and wood owls whenever we travelled. And when I was away for work in countries he’d never get to, I brought home handcrafted owls as gifts. In our old house, the owls had sat randomly on his bookshelves. Sometimes, he’d move them about, have them face the books or the window. But he hadn’t opened the boxes of owls in the new house. He’d wanted to keep his new office orderly, and he’d managed that as well as any man could who brought new books into the house almost daily.

  When we’d moved to our new house, our goal had been to keep it as uncluttered as possible, the opposite of our Toronto house, which had always felt cramped and full of objects we didn’t really need. We’d kept only the furniture from our old house that worked and bought new pieces that fit our style and space. Although I loved the new house even after Peter died, I had an uneasy feeling that since we’d set it up for years to come, I had somehow jinxed us. I’d had the same feeling after my first marriage ended and I was left in a house we’d bought as the home we’d stay in. Our “death house,” my ex had jokingly called it. If I moved again, I told myself, I’d try not to care so much about the dwelling, try not to think of it as a permanent home.

  After we’d arranged the new house to suit us, I’d always meant to find a spot for Peter’s owls. The day of the furniture shift, with Peter’s desk beneath the bedroom window, I pulled the books we collected for immediate reading out of the glass-fronted cupboard and lined up the owls on the shelves. Whenever I walked by that cupboard after that day or reached for something in the drawers of the dresser below it, I remembered — or tried to remember — where each owl had come from.

  It was harder to find a new balance in Peter’s office, which had been his domain since we’d moved into the house, the first room I’d painted and set up. My town friend A moved Peter’s computer that, without a desk, sat on the floor into my office and configured it as a storage server for my thousands of digital photographs.

  But I had to decide what to do with all the books Peter had accumulated. Before we’d moved out of our Toronto house, he had got rid of thousands of books. As he’d packed up the ones he wanted to move, he mumbled a phrase I thought I’d never hear: “There is such a thing as too many books.”

  As well as the shelves in his office, we’d lined the family room in our lowest level with more bookshelves so he could control the number of books in his office. Still, after less than two years in the house, books sat in second layers on shelves and piled high in the corner units.

  As I reorganized the office, I pulled all the books off the shelves, organized them by category on the floor, and over two weeks decided which ones to put back on the shelves, which ones to move downstairs, and which ones to give away. There were volumes and volumes on subjects I’d never want to delve into: Pope Pius, euthanasia, and arcane histories. Peter had more books by and about Sherlock Holmes than I’d ever known he had or would ever know what to do with. Some of them looked rare. I kept the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes with the profile of the detective and his pipe across the bindings. I put it back on the centre shelf because I still wanted to remember Peter when I came down the stairs each morning, but in a gentler way than the empty desk allowed.

  In the end, the room reflected both Peter’s taste in books and my minimalist style and it felt like a library. It still needed more seating, but I’d get to that someday. Without planning to, I had also made the room my personal museum. On one shelf, all I put was the album I’d made of our wedding and the wood backgammon board Peter and I had played on most days. In one corner unit I placed copies of Peter’s books with some of his favourite boxes and souvenirs. He’d bought a stone at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with the word remember carved into it. I set it near his books.

  As I straightened the backgammon board on its shelf, I wondered if I’d ever play the game again. I had no desire to touch the board, which I’d bought on a work trip and we’d played on for more than twenty years. It felt sad to try to play both sides of the game on it and too sacred to use with anyone else. But I didn’t want to forget how to play the game Peter had taught me so many years ago, so I decided I’d play matches on his iPad, which we had used as a travel board for the past few years. And maybe if I played both sides, Peter would win more often.

  Peter had downloaded a game to his iPad and set his identity as Owlreal. I didn’t quite understand the name; perhaps he’d had to search for some variation of owl that hadn’t been used. He’d listed me as Deborah DeMarco. It was a name we’d come up with after watching the 1995 movie Don Juan DeMarco, in which a delusional character believes he is “Don Juan, the greatest lover in the world.” After that movie, Peter took to calling me “Deborah DeMarco, the greatest backgammon player in the world.”

  The morning after the room was finished, I read the paper on the green chair while I drank my coffee. I admired the room’s re-creation but I also felt miserable knowing it wasn’t Peter’s office anymore. The charge: betrayal. The verdict: guilty. It would take some time for me to be truly comfortable with the room as a library in my home and not just a pretty room I’d set up like a stage.

  With those tasks done, I tried to get on with our seasonal routines. I couldn’t imagine anything ever having the sense of purpose or fun it had when Peter was around, but after I read the paper that morning, I got out the bird feeders we hung each winter on the frame for our summer canopy. As I filled the feeders, I kept thinking Peter would like what I was doing, as though he would be coming back to see the birds fly through the yard to eat there. Later, when scarlet male cardinals came, resting in trees on one side of the yard before flitting to trees on the other side, Jane saw them as another sign. Cardinals were about male energy, she said, and Peter had sent them. I couldn’t let myself believe that, and I suspect she didn’t really either, but I liked that she was finding comfort in the signs, and I smiled, despite myself, whenever cardinals flew through the yard after that.

  Through the fall I puttered in the garden. A year and half earlier a reporter from the local paper had come to interview Peter about his memoir. She’d written that I was “puttering” in the garden while they talked on the deck. I’d found the word dismissive then, but now it seemed to appropriately describe my movements. I moved through the garden with little attention to what I was doing. I still resented it so for surviving. But at least the work wasn’t too taxing; I’d done it al
l before.

  November was a tender month. Unusually so. Jane might have said that Peter had sent me sunny, surprisingly warm days to help me get through the toughest November I’d had. I didn’t have to think about the weather as I worked. It was never too cold to make me want to rush into the house for a cup of tea or pile on more layers of clothing. If Peter wanted to send me any gift, weather that I could just be in was the best one.

  When I finally turned my attention to getting the vegetable beds ready for winter, I left the rows of kale and spinach. If the winter wasn’t too harsh, they might survive until spring. But I dug out the remaining beets, carrots, and onions, picked the remaining butternut squash off the vines, pulled out all the tomato plants. From plants lying on their side, I separated the beans into two piles on the lawn: beans I could eat or freeze and beans I’d keep for seeds. In the back of my mind, I wondered if I would bother planting beans the next spring. I couldn’t imagine the vegetable patch now lying barren before me as a second Victory Garden. Still, in the spirit of going through the motions, I pulled out weeds, spaded the vegetable beds loosely, and laid bags of manure.

  In the rest of the garden, I cut down all the sedum as I’d learned to do the first year in the house, trimmed perennials, piled soil around the rose bush crowns, and began watering the roots of trees before the freeze up. Those jobs seemed more practical. If I decided to leave this house the next spring, I’d want the garden looking its best before a sale.