Grief, Growth, and the Gardens We Carry

For years, I’ve farmed the land—building gardens from the soil up—so that our story was written in strawberries, apple trees, and echinacea wherever we made a home. Behind our last house, we cultivated a garden that was as much a high-yielding farm plot as it was a sanctuary for the heart and soul.

That was taken from us in the spring of 2022. That April, my partner became unstable. We could not have known that his brain had been hijacked by two rare and merciless neurological diseases: Fahr’s Disease, which calcifies the brain over time, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a prion-folding illness that unravels the mind and ends in a savage, swift death.

The first signs of CJD are often psychological changes. I was violently attacked and wounded—not just physically, but psychologically. That year, the garden was left untended. It went on, as life does. While I focused on the urgency of our situation, the asparagus went to seed, the walking onions looped about, looking for bare earth, and the mire of rotting tomatoes sprang forth into new life.

My partner was arrested, and my son and I attempted to move on with our lives without him. It wasn’t long before other symptoms began to emerge. After a trip to the emergency room, I was contacted and asked to be present with him for a neurology consult. Neither of us knew what was to come. A CT and subsequent MRIs determined the nature of the changes to his mental and physical states. Despite what our family had just endured and with a no-contact order in place, by necessity I became my husband’s primary caregiver. In the span of just 12 short weeks, I watched a healthy 50-year-old man go from running five miles daily to dead. 

There is nothing so cruel as a death pocked and pitted by regret—a landscape scarred by everything left unsaid and undone. But rather than wallow, I gathered what remained of our life and moved us—raw with grief—to a faraway town to begin again.

If the garden has taught me anything, it’s that pain offers guidance. It teaches, as does the stinging nettle with a slow burn that lingers, but lifts us with the vital nutrients it offers when we learn its ways.

And gardens do heal. Not just in the way science demonstrates with that elevation of serotonin and the soothing of our nervous system, but in deeper, more meaningful ways. 

In the Ojibwe tradition of my grandmother, the plants and animals of our garden spaces are kin and in some cases, elders. When we grow plants, we are not merely tending a garden, we are building relationships. In this space, we remember how to listen, we remember how to give thanks, we re-learn the value of reciprocity.  

Two years without a garden taught me that the absence of growing things is akin to a kind of achy spiritual hunger. A craving for ceremony. Though I am not a church-goer, in those quiet acts of tending to soil and plants, there is prayer. 

This week, I began a massive transformation of my small backyard—from a subtly landscaped lawn to a garden built along the contours of patterned sunlight and the gentle swell of land beneath our feet. Rekindled is the excitement of being alive, of sowing seeds toward a vision of prosperity, of tasting the rewards of our labor in the months to come—in sweet, sun-fed sugars and the memories rooted in this sacred space. And of re-building relationships.

The echinacea will soon push through the soil, reminding me of our time these past few years reaching desperately for light; quietly learning that grief and growth are intricately linked. This the garden teaches us. And as I have learned to walk in grief, I am again learning to grow—with nothing more than a seed of hope and a place to call home.