Grief, Deception, and Why I Garden
The problems of revelation after someone dies
It’s spring, and we kneel in the dirt.
Susan inherited her mother’s and uncle’s wooden-handled tools from the forties, and so we dig with ancient splintering hand-trowels and spades to loosen the soil compacted by frost; we add buckets of compost and manure from a nearby farm, and turn it with shovels and rakes. We pull up the seed potatoes that never sprouted, and I use old Felcos to prune the roses back hard so all their energy can be directed down to their roots. After a decade, the massive vegetable garden we built a few months before the shooting in my town will be dismantled and replaced by something more in keeping with our needs as a family of two who don’t need five hundred square feet of planting space anymore. The new garden boxes have just arrived from Canada — they will form a twelve by eight foot, hip-height U — but they haven’t been assembled yet, so for now, we dig around in the front perennial garden, which exploded last week when the temperature suddenly spiked into the high eighties. During any other year, we’d be putting in early greens and radishes and carrots by now, but until the new garden is built and the boxes filled, we can’t, for the first time in our twenty-six years together.
Gardening is life; gardening is truth. You can’t fake gardening: what you sow either lives or it doesn’t. It cannot be what it is not.
Not planting is unthinkable: I am a city girl, born and raised with the smells of hot cement and the East River in my pores, but I learned early on after moving to New England that putting my hands in the dirt eliminates the middle man — it’s just me and the earth, devoid of human cruelty and psychopathology; gardening is a contract with hope, and the promise of life. It is uncontrollable and unpredictable — how many times have we planted something and it never comes up, or it is eaten by woodchucks or deer, or cutworms kill it at the soil level, or it is demolished by blight the way my roses were last year while we were in England, where we ironically were spending days looking at other roses in Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Chelsea Physic, and along an outside wall of the little stone cottage we rented in Scotland — and yet: we do it, again and again.
Gardening is life, and gardening is also truth. You can’t fake gardening: what you sow either lives or it doesn’t. A rose cannot grow to be an astilbe. A foxglove cannot grow to be a poppy. It cannot be what it is not.
In Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man, the author makes the posthumous discovery that her beloved father, David Gordon — a staunch Catholic and an only child — was not who he claimed he was: born Jewish in Lithuania, he converted to Catholicism in 1937, the year before Thomas Merton, who he arguably idolized. Not an only child in fact, he had a sister, was an anti-semite, favored right-wing politics, was a pornographer. In Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, the author peels back the layers on his father, who was an inveterate liar, an un-pin-downable man of immense charm and profound deceit but also love, who once left his university student son on the hook with an unpaid bill for $1000 worth of his old man’s new clothes; in John Irving’s New York Times review, Irving quotes family members describing Duke as a goniff, a schnorrer, both of which are Yiddish for thief, manipulator, liar, taker.
An old story; there are scores of tales everywhere from the Bible to Greek mythology about parents deceiving their children. Think about Agamemnon and Hera, Jocasta and Medea. And there’s the mother character in Irving’s own The World According to Garp, who conceives her son by raping a dying comatose man whose injury as a World War II turret gunner leaves him with priapism.
Can we ever know who our parents really are, or who they were before we came along? Can we ever know what they’re thinking beneath their cloaks of domesticity, the school pickups and the dental appointments? It’s impossible to think of the people who raised us as other than who they appeared to be in our lives, and who we assumed they were, because that’s what we were told, even when their behavior showed us otherwise.
Is it wise, then, to go searching for truths about who our parents might have been, and been capable of, separate from us?
I consider this question daily, surrounded by my mother’s bags and boxes and files, and with every revelation, I’m drawn to my bookshelves containing volumes on gardening and nature, wildflowers and birding. As I write this, my office window is wide open and my birding app has identified a White-breasted Nuthatch; the Pileated Woodpecker as large as a chicken, who feasts on a tree stump behind my house; a Broad-winged Hawk; a Tufted Titmouse; an Eastern Towhee; a Song Sparrow. With the exception of those in the Mimidae family, birds also cannot pretend to be other than who they are.
The act of going through a deceased parents’ things is more than practical; it’s part of the process of metabolizing their loss and gaining closure, and during this process, we inevitably will make discoveries. When my father died in 2002 from injuries sustained in a car accident, I did not have the opportunity to go through his possessions, nor was I invited to; at the time of the accident, he was living with his longtime companion, a woman I adored (and still do; she’s 91 now), and so it didn’t feel appropriate for me to even ask her. It would have been unimaginable. But in the week following his accident, I did spend one early morning at his condo with Susan and one of my cousins, going through his papers while he still lingered in the bardo, on life support. We looked for and found his will, and his honorable discharge papers from the Navy so that he could be buried with military honors, which I knew would have been important to him. There was also a sheaf of letters from the 1950s that I brought home with me, that included the results of personality tests given to him when he applied for a job in advertising. Arrogant, brilliant, competent, possibly making up for diminutive stature, one of the tests showed. (My father was five foot five at his tallest, and had to get special dispensation from the Navy to fly Grumman Hellcats off the deck of the USS Enterprise in the Pacific, necessitating wooden blocks be affixed to his rudder pedals because his feet didn’t reach them.) He was self-conscious about his height as long as I knew him, and concerned about mine — I’m five foot one — to the extent that he once asked our family doctor about my being injected with human growth hormone when I was still in middle school; if it worked, I would grow tall, where I was meant to be short.
Nature is the original parent, lacking in guile.
As her only child, I have been going through my mother’s things, deciding what to keep and what to toss. A friend suggested just bringing all of her papers to my house and going through them here, and that’s what I’ve been doing, lugging home three immense accordion files covered with a thick rime of dust dating back to 1981, when she first moved into that apartment after marrying my stepfather.
Susan went through the first one when I was still too shaky to do it; we sat on the couch and she handed me rubber-banded stacks of cancelled checks from my childhood in Forest Hills in the 1960s and 70s. It was like taking a step back in time: here were checks made out to The Associated Grocery Store (listed only as Henry in the check register; he was the Holocaust survivor who owned the store, and appears in my second book, Treyf) dated 1969. Here were checks made out to the boarding facility where our two dogs, Binky and Heathcliff, stayed during our three week trip to California in 1970, exactly a year after the Cielo Drive murders. There were checks made out to my mother’s favorite boutiques, and to the dentist who terrorized me and whom I hold responsible for the phobia I’ve only just gotten over. But there were also my grandmother’s cancelled checks, certificates for redeemed municipal bonds, telephone bills from 1967 stamped paid, and a 1969 check for $500 to my grandmother’s brother-in-law for possession of part of a family plot, shortly after my grandfather died from lung cancer and Parkinson’s.
It is not surprising to me that my mother simply packed up my grandmother’s things when she died in 1982, moved them to her apartment, and never looked at them again; she knew that at some point I’d be going through everything, and just left it to me to do. I don’t resent this, and in a few instances I’m actually glad she did; otherwise I never would have found my grandmother’s 1916 high school autograph book into which is tucked a love letter from her boyfriend, Kenneth Johnson, written to her from France in 1917. My grandmother showed it to me when I was very young, and it was in that letter that he’d also enclosed a folded up, forty-eight star American flag which I requested from my mother back in the nineties, and had framed; it now hangs in my living room.
What I question are the various letters I’m finding in the files, which point to my mother’s forgetfulness, disregard, or tendency towards spite born of rage. In the throes of a battle with me, she’d wave her finger in my face and shout a familiar I’LL FIX YOU, which is mid-century New York Borough-ese for I’m going too get you back when you least expect it. And she did. An extremely important event to which I’d been invited by my college dean went unmentioned to me, the 1982 invitation stuffed into the accordion file and forgotten until Susan found it amidst the cancelled checks and the phone bills. Last week, in a box I always thought was purely decorative, I uncovered a letter dated 2000 between my mother and a Manhattan attorney, concerning our co-ownership of the apartment I’d lived in, by then, for nine years. I had recently met Susan, and was planning to move in with her. I read the letter and put my hand on the wall to steady myself. I went to my bookcase and pulled my Field Guide to Nature of New England off the shelf, and with it, my 1909 copy of Wild Flowers Every Child Should Know; I sat down and thumbed through them for comfort; nature is the original parent, lacking in guile.
My mother was capable of stunning fury and acts of spite when her rage and jealousy got the best of her; she could also conveniently forget about those acts when she needed to. And yet: she loved me in as authentic a manner as she could. She was furious that I was leaving New York, and she would make sure, legally, that I had no home to return to if living in the country didn’t work out. When I told her I was leaving the city — I was leaving her — for another woman, she was stricken with anger so extreme that it compelled her to strategize, and then, once the strategy was in place, she forgot about it. I never knew what she had planned until last week when I opened the decoupage box, ironically covered with antique roses like the ones that cascaded over my garden fence, until they were killed by blight.
For days, I wobbled around, breathless. Were her actions evidence of what she really thought of me? Did she not love me the way she always said she did? Was she someone other than who I thought her to be? Was she that irate that I might have room in my life for love beyond her? I left the field guide and the wildflower book on the coffee table, and I found myself mindlessly flipping through them, looking at the color plates and thinking: A Mourning Warbler can only ever be a Mourning Warbler; Joe Pye Weed can only ever be Joe Pye Weed. When you plant Batavia lettuce, you get Batavia lettuce; you don’t get beets. A Carolina Wren sings Cheeseburga Cheeseburga Cheeseburga Cheese, and can’t sing anything else. My mother could only ever be my mother; I should have never expected anything more from her, but, like all children do of their parents, I did. It was during this time — between my leaving New York in 2000 and her dying in October 2025 — that I began to consider myself a gardener: not a very good one, but devoted to finding solace by putting my hands in the dirt and planting, because that simple act is my origin story. We come from the earth; we return to the earth.
In a December 2024 conversation printed in Granta, Jamaica Kincaid and Olivia Laing discuss the garden as false haven. Jamaica has had a lily appear out of nowhere; Olivia refers to Kincaid’s My Garden Book as revealing the gardener’s bad character: covetous, greedy, inept, baffled by mistakes and mischance. She adds The garden is never quite satisfactory, or it is but only for a minute before something else goes wrong. I’m amazed at the intensity of my emotions in the garden, the fury, the ridiculous despair, the constant uncertainty over how to proceed.
Today, our new garden was constructed. Susan and I are making plans, thinking about what we will grow from seed versus starter. Less than five feet behind it stands the skeleton of our old, massive garden, which has been taken over by foxglove and lovage, flowering chive and the volunteer mustard greens that we still pick for our salad. There is no way for us to control what will come up or what will die, beyond the use of poison, which we will never do.
We will never manipulate it; we can only let it be what it is.
I have many of my mother’s letter, including letters written to and from lovers she had after she divorced my father. I’ve chosen not to read all of her letters as it feels too intrusive. My mother was so public in her life story, that currently I feel she deserves her privacy and finding out something unknown may upend the fragile peace I’ve made about our relationship.
I wonder about these things too, Elissa, about how much information is too much. My mother was a secretive person and I often feel like I’m still hungry for details and threads I can pull on, but sometimes the places they lead end up hurting. Like your letter in the box.
I packed up my mother’s apartment in March, and was hunting everywhere for the photo album with my baby pictures and childhood photos. We’d had a huge drama the year before she died, and then she got sick and I went into advocacy mode. Took care of everything. We did a tremendous amount of healing at the end of her life. But then I found my photo albums in the basement, in a bag with things it looked like she really didn’t care about. Random things. The bag could so easily have been misplaced or discarded and it really hurt. So, yeah. Gardening. This is exactly everything. Sending you a lot of love.