Fall Planting 🍁
Yesterday I decided to spend part of a glorious Fall Day, my last Monday before returning to work, digging out my summer plants from my four deck hanging baskets that Jamey had gifted me several Mother’s Days ago and plant some Fall friendly beauties. I don’t know why I have never actually done this before, but this weekend when a mom friend was telling me on the sidelines that is how she had spent her pre-soccer ⚽️ game time, I was at first like, “Why in the world would you do that now, when we are starting to have cool crisp mornings, weather clearly unfit for summer flowers?” (Obviously, I missed this adult homemaking skill, likely because I did not grow up with my biological Gardner father and his green thumb 👍🏻 gene did not get passed down to me. In fact, I used to tell Jamey I could only keep so many things alive at once, and at the time, our young girls trumped our houseplants. Well, they are teenagers now, and they are both a wee bit more self-sufficient, so I am “branching” out so to speak.)
In the past, during this time of year I have simply doubled down, and being a nurturer by nature, I would just keep watering 👩🌾 and fertilizing and watering and fertilizing and trying to squeeze the last bit of life out my tired, sad little summer flowers 💐 all the way into 🎃October. A process that sucked the joy out of their remaining bit of photosynthesis and any pleasure I used to get from tending to them. Probably out of desperation to try and please me, they too kept literally hanging on in their hanging baskets, but they generally started to look like Halloween 👻 flowers, all withered and skeletal.
But yesterday, with my hands wrist deep in soil, the parallels to human life, and especially to the end of human life, were suddenly very apparent to me. During Jamey’s last few weeks of life, the hospice team kept telling me “It was time,” and that I needed to let Jamey know it was O.K. to let go. At first, I didn’t listen to them. He may have been in a hospital bed in the middle of our den, taking pain pills the very second the bottle said he could again, but he was still in there. He was still enjoying Phish🐟🎶 concerts on tv, we were still talking and holding hands, and so I kept watering and fertilizing. But as the pain got worse (for both of us), and his lucidity started to fade, he was kind of like my withering summer flowers that I kept pushing to hang on. To be honest, he was fighting the inevitable too, and so when I did muster up the strength to push words out of my mouth between my sobs telling him that though I loved him with my whole ❤️ heart, and that though things would never be as good without him, and that though I would miss him forever and ever, the girls and I would be o.k. and we would find our way, because he had loved us so well, so he could now let go and be at peace. Out of the blue (also the name of his favorite restaurant in Ireland) he would come back to me and pat my head and tell me he wasn’t going anywhere. I think, like my tired summer flowers, he and I were trying so hard to hang on and please one another that it wasn’t until my aching and aging lower back sent me to my bed versus another night on our soft couch for the first time in 3 weeks, that he did let go and walk into the light.
The hospice team and friends have told me repeatedly that is how it often goes. The dying often don’t want to pass with their primary caregiver at their side. Why? I don’t know. But yesterday, as I stood on our deck with my new Fall cabbages and pansies at my feet, I was at first stupefied. I didn’t know what to do with the struggling summer flowers taking up residence in my hanging baskets. Should I replant them somewhere else in my yard??? How could I in good conscience tell these sweet flowers who had delighted me for four months that it was time to let go? As ridiculous as it sounds, I actually shed tears 😢 as I dug up my summer beauties, but as I did so, I saw how brittle their little plant bodies had become, and I was sure that letting them go was the humane thing to do. They were never meant for Fall. They had lived and flourished to their fullest, and they had brought me joy during a very dark and sad summer, but their time was over. Like Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 states, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest…A time to mourn and a time to dance…” The summer flowers had to go. Replanting them elsewhere would have been cruel. I needed to let them go as much as they needed me to dig them up. And as for me and our girls, we are all three clearly in a time of mourning, but I do hope that one day we will all dance 🪩 again. But for now, I am cognizant that God is in the process of not only pruning our family 2.0, but also our individual ❤️🩹 hearts, and I look forward to the day that we three are more fruitful and full with the growth that HE is planting in our hearts, but that day is not today.