Lessons of Grief: May Gardens and the Compensations of Calamity

There was a loss in my family last week. It was sudden. It was unexpected. It hurts. Questions form in the lawn of my mind like dandelions. As I go about clearing a few, more pop up, and even if I clear the lawn for a season, the questions are sure to grow again eventually, a job never fully complete.

For those closest to the loss, the depth of pain is difficult to fathom. We are in a season of grieving, and as is with all grief, there is never an easy way through. It has me reflecting on prior seasons of grieving, and the lessons that helped me forward in sorrowful times.

It is also May, and the start of my favorite season on the Old Mission Peninsula. The cherry blossoms bloom in a white ephemeral flourish. The hackneyed, yellow grass becomes green velvet. Tender, pale shoots crawl out from the dew-wet, raw earth. The breeze is crisp, fragrant, and renewing. Golden dawn-light quivers in the steam fog that rises from the warming bays, and pastel sunsets linger in the western sky as the days creep toward the summer solstice.   

When I was young, May was the time that my mom started gardening again. She worked long into the sunset painted evenings, turning over the raw earth. From dead growth that lay trodden by winter, she coaxed new life, reborn in the cold dewy mornings.

In the last year of my mom’s life (2014), I wrote her a poem for Mother’s Day, attempting to capture this May gardening alchemy. Her life was ending then, she would pass that November, but so many beautiful lessons were revealed by the way she lived.

May Gardens

A clement May breeze does blow;

 The velvet earth awakens green,

Yellow the primrose will grow;

Blooming vibrance, the world pristine.

Sprouting tulips, pink and young,

Flourishing rich on the raw lands.

Pungent scent and taste on tongue,

Ambrosial pickings at one’s hands.

Prolific world is born again,

Purifying the soul within.

Rejoice folded hills and dales,

With the dance of golden sunlight.

With joy the spirit impales,

 The mind with glorious sight.

Loving hands nurtured this soil,

Teaching cycles and seasons.

Beauty now blooms from the toil,

Death to life transcends reason.

May is the perennial birth,

Of beauty, love, spirit, and mirth.

When my mom passed, I was buried in my grief without tools to manage it. I told myself that the pressures of daily life were more important to tend to than what I felt. It was many years later that I began to understand my grief and how it had shaped me, for worse and for better.

As I sit here again in the wake of a loss I don’t understand, I know that it will be a long interval of time before the fog of grief fades, and a clearer meaning appears. It is a process that all who grieve must pass through.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson has an essay called Compensation, which I find myself coming back to in times of loss. One point he makes in the essay is that loss is inevitable. It is designed into the fabric of life. But in loss we can seek compensation. If we are meant to lose things we love, people we love, we are also meant to receive from these moments. It is not ever clear what that compensation is, especially when we are in the grieving, but it is a natural law that all things come into balance in the arc of time. The final passage of the essay reminds me that there is a purpose to my grief. It reads:

“And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men.”

When I read the passage, I remind myself that my grief has a direction. I am not stuck, but moving, even now, in a greater story. It does not ease the pain but helps channel it. And so, I recall the lessons it has taught me.

For me, grief is love for someone or something I no longer know where to place. As I hold it, the weight of it feels like a burden, painful to go on holding this way. I chase what feels like easy places to set it, places like anger, confusion, doubt, desire, distraction, work, and memories. I find that these places are ill-equipped to hold the weight of that love for long. I get caught looking back. Like Lot’s wife turning back to a life in ruins, I am turned to salt, calcified, hardened, stuck in the quagmire of loss.

In a prior season of grief, I sought counselling. When it came to the stage of acceptance, I always felt revolt and anger, and I would find myself regressing. Acceptance felt like giving up, and going on like it never happened. It felt wrong, because that is not what acceptance is about. Acceptance does not mean we go on without our grief. It means we have accepted our grief as part of us and the mark it made on our life. Like a scar, it never fully heals, it is hardened and tender at the same time. We scratch it unknowingly and it reminds us. Acceptance is acknowledging that our grief is inked into our story. Whether an epoch or merely a chapter, it defines us in some way, and we must carry it now. Acceptance is the choice: how will I carry it? It’s a choice we will continually face. If we choose to carry it with grace and humility, it is then that grief becomes something more, something that, despite the hurt, can serve us and those we love. 

Greif is a great teacher. In our pain we are forced to see things as they are. We are surrounded by a transitory world. So much of its beauty is fleeting. The fleetingness brings us closer to the present moment, the reality that exists right now and in the love we feel for those around us. We are in the river of Time being swept along a serpentine path. The view may be unclear, the waters rough, but ahead too are new beautiful alcoves and peaceful eddies ready to serve as balms and respites from our current trials.

In the depths of grief, I feel buried, but really, I am being forced to dig a well. At the bottom, there is a fountainhead of love, a love that is self-sustaining and renewing. In the depths of grief, I feel buried, but really, I am planted. From the raw earth of loss, new growth will emerge, pale and tender, but capable of growing strong and baring new fruit.

It is May and the lessons of grief surround me: from the harshness of winter, summer blossoms; from death, there is life again. Ecclesiastes 7:3 says: "Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better."

So, to those that have lost, we will grieve. We will honor those we have lost. We may never understand why we have lost, but we will be made better, stronger, and more capable of serving the ones we love.

I must remind myself that going forward is a leap of faith. But in that leap, and in our faith, God reveals new mysteries, and deeper truths. While the questions are never fully answered, a clearer picture of the arc of our journey is revealed to us as we go. Peace and beauty are found later, further up the path, when we have a clearer view. It may not always feel like a fair trade, but these are the compensations of calamity.