The lilacs have passed. The lupines are on their way out. The peonies are rushing the stage. Every day there is something new to see on a walk around the neighborhood or just through my yard. Every day, from morning to afternoon to night, there is something new.
It’s time (past time) to get seeds and seedlings in the ground. My garden is happening slowly this year. It’s been a busy month, a full month, a shift month, and always, always in May there is an undercurrent of anticipation and dashed hopes.
Tomorrow is my son Henry’s birthday. He’d be turning 17. I see sometimes the pictures of kids he was a baby with, dressed up for prom, driving, looking so big, so grown up, and I can’t quite wrap my brain around that he would be that old too. He died in December of the year he was born.
Tomorrow we’ll have cake for breakfast. It’s a neighborhood birthday tradition. This year it’s lemon cupcakes made by his sister and cinnamon rolls made by our neighborhood friend/big brother. No candles, but sausage and strawberries on the side.
Tomorrow after cake, I’ll work in the garden we planted for him, another tradition, this one all mine. I tend to this space, listen to birds and bees buzzing the blooms. I clean things up, weed to make space, add compost and water, plant something new.
Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll pick up one of my kids from a XC meeting and get ready to take the other to her soccer game.
It’s so full, so very full, this month, this life.
It took me a while to navigate May, to learn what to do with myself on his birthday, to learn how to hold the anticipation and joy without the weight of what came after.
Here are my first two attempts, images from my memoir in progress, Rooted: A memoir of digging deep through grief, connecting with community, and getting home
First Birthday (2008)
On May 29, 2008, Henry should have turned one. There was no cake. No candles. No baby to blow out candles. Instead of buying books or brightly colored toys, Brian and I bought a peach tree, an idea I had had before Henry died. An idea I was determined to follow through with anyway.
On his birthday, we plant the peach tree in the back yard, near our wedding peach tree. We plant the hawthorn his cousins sent outside the kitchen window. We put our loose energy into the physical work of digging a hole, thrusting the shovel into the soil again and gain, pulling out rocks, adding compost, maneuvering the root ball into the newly opened space, watering deeply. We find a heart shape stone that I put into my pocket as a talisman.
We stand back and look at the slender tree: life for the life that has ended.
from Life Unfolds in Spring (2009)
For Henry’s first birthday, Brian’s family gave us a wooden sign that said Henry’s Garden with a heart of pea stone and a wood-burned image of his hand.
This year for Henry’s birthday, Brian and I dig a small bed, and I plant some perennials from my aunt: blue star because it blooms when almost nothing else does, lilies from my great aunt’s garden, Peter lilies that bloomed near my cousin Peter’s birthday. I add hardy geranium from Brian’s mom and heliopsis from my mom. Julie brings me snapdragons and gomphrena, or Buddy Flower.
I add a garden angel Brian’s sister had included in our wedding gift four years ago and another from a mom in our grief group.
It is a small bed with lots of space for perennials to fill in, lots of room for life. Planting it is a concrete thing I can do on this day when I don’t know what to do.
This month is complicated and busy and full and overflowing with life and newness. Make space to celebrate, to eat cake with friends, to slow down, to tend, to take it all in. There is room for it all.
So tender. Thank you so much for sharing and I’m so sorry for the loss of your son. What a beautiful way to celebrate his life each year. Thinking of you, your family, your words and your garden. Looking forward to your memoir when it’s finally ready to greet the world 🤍
Beautiful 💝