Surrender

When you live at 7000 feet above sea level, gardening turns into a gamble on par with Russian Roulette. The growing season is incredibly short, so strike one. The dry, arid environment provides no extra moisture, and your nights are cold and your days can be blistering hot with relentless sun; strike two. If that wasn’t hard enough, summer brings severe storms that crop up with little notice, often accompanied by high winds, massive downpours, and the real existential plant threat: hail. Strike three. In the absence of a greenhouse, you stand little chance at actually producing anything to eat or getting flowers to consistently bloom. Many years, I wonder why I even try.

Yesterday morning, we were unceremoniously dragged out of bed by thunder very nearby. It had yet to start raining, but given the proximity of the storm and the intensity in the air, we knew this was the leading edge of something big. The weekend prior, I had finally managed to get some fledgling plants in the garden beds. The saying here is “the first full moon in June”, to guide those first tender plants into the ground. Even then, you know it’s likely you’ll lose some to the weather. This property being relatively new to us, we have some basic raised beds in place, with no cover or real plan for severe storms yet. With so many other projects needing attention, this is the best we will manage this year, and despite that I am determined to enjoy the space. 

As we scrambled around shutting windows and doing what we could to protect some small potted plants, the storm bore down on us with ferocity, dumping rain first, then marble sized hail in torrential proportions. I watched helplessly from the patio, as my baby seedlings were pummeled for about ten minutes, before the storm slid past us, on to someone else’s garden. I assessed the damage, and thankfully most everything basically survived, if a little worse for the wear. Knowing it was futile to try to clean up until the hail melted, we went about our day. Later that afternoon, round two rolled in, over the cliffs behind our house, with little warning. This time, golf ball sized hail rained down, again in true torrential fashion, and obliterated not only the gardens, but also our camper roof, our internet dish, and cut huge swaths of water down the driveway. Despite daytime temperatures near 75 degrees after that, the hail-snow remained piled on the ground the next morning. During the last week of June. 

The sun came out the next day, with perfectly clear skies, making no apologies for the destruction of the prior day. I wandered out to the garden beds first thing and took stock. As suspected, little survived except what we managed to pull under cover. I had my morning coffee on the patio and did my usual reading before I pulled on some work clothes and my mud boots and began cleaning up the mess. Gardening has always been a source of deep relaxation and meditation for me, and this gorgeous warm morning was no different, despite the destruction. It was incredibly easy to just face the mess and start processing. There would have been a time in my life though, where I would have allowed this setback to change the entire narrative of my mood and my day. 

As I cleaned up the torn and tattered plants, keeping some, pulling and discarding others, I noted a dialogue with myself that I would see what space opened up, grab more seeds, and maybe even head back to the garden center for some discount veggie plants to replace the fallen soldiers. I would just surrender to the situation, accept the hand that had been dealt by forces larger than me, and start again. Even though, the likelihood of it all happening again was statistically nearly unavoidable. Ummm….hold on. Am I having a life metaphor moment? For sure this echoed so many themes of the prior three years of my life. 

When you lose your person, whether that’s your spouse, your child, your parent, your grandparent, maybe even your dog, you stand by in utter destruction as the will of the universe takes over. You may think you have some semblance of control, but you don’t. Not really. The events play out and you are left to pick up the pieces of your life, and learn how to carry forward, even when you don’t want to. In my own grief journey, which really began in 2022, the storm that erupted was my healthy husband getting sick and dying in a matter of 30 days. Boom. Like the storm yesterday rolling in behind the cover of steep cliffs, we saw nothing and had no time to prepare. You scramble, you scream, you cry, you run, but ultimately it comes for you and overtakes everything, while you huddle in a pile on the floor wanting life to end yourself. In the depths of acute grief, you see no path forward, and even if there were a path, you wouldn't agree to follow it. Walls go up that take time and effort to scale.

There comes a point, in grief though, that marks a turning point. While this varies wildly depending on the person and situation, it does come, and being open and willing to see it is perhaps the most important task a deeply grieving person undertakes. For me, I happened upon this realization early on, maybe three or four months into widowhood, and it was at once terrifying and comforting. It was surrender. In my exhaustion, I surrendered. I found some small space of understanding that I could not have changed the situation or the outcome; that I lacked the power to control the whims of an uncaring universe, and that I needed to stop blaming (myself mostly) and start moving. I had to focus on now, or at least try, and acknowledge that the past was gone but unchanging, always available for me to visit, but I could not live there. It was done. 

It took me quite a long time to fully process that, or maybe I should say to process it enough to truly begin to live again. Even now, three years later, I have days where the grief is heavy, and little else has room to exist in my heart or my head. I had to learn that the measure of my love for my late husband was love, not suffering. I was allowed to live, really live. I learned the hard lesson of needing to remain in the present, the now, as the past was gone and the future not yet arrived. Grounding myself in the here and now gives me permission to live joyfully again, even if every moment is not defined by happiness or contentment. 

Just like my decimated garden, I had to learn to accept the forces at large, meet them in the present moment, and begin anew. Not start over, just start fresh. Leave the remnants that served me, tend to them, appreciate them, and alongside them, plant new seeds. Let the things that needed to die, die completely, to make space for the new growth and potential. Grieve what happened, stomp my feet, have a cry, struggle with the unfairness of it, and then let it go. Because really what choice do we have? We can sit in that rubble and shut our eyes and wish it wasn’t so. We can sit there, and we can sit there for a long time if we choose to. I could get angry and never plant another flower here. I could stare at the empty beds and just say “oh well, it was too hard, nothing will ever grow here”, or “this always happens to me”. Or, I can drop the absolutes and say “I can start again, maybe this time I will enjoy the flowers even more, because I learned just how fragile they really are”.