I Believe in Gardens

The bounce that my Mom got from having so much of her family around last week has faded. Mom is confused, uncertain of what is going on around her, the sequence of events, the time of day.

During a long talk with my sister last night, after she got home from seeing Mom, she told me how she got the feeling that Mom is trying to figure out how to outwit death. Mom has always managed to get her way by saying what she thinks people want to hear then doing what she wants to do anyway. This may not sound significant on its face but my Mom has never talked about dying or what she believes happens after we shuck our earthly bodies.

For once, she can't say what she thinks people want to hear then do what she wants because death is a one-way conversation. This uncertainty, we think, prevents her from acknowledging what's going on and why people from Hospice are visiting her room.

The discussion with my sister prompted another with my husband who veers from an interest in Buddhism to disgust with organized religion to a sometimes-profession of atheism. "I suppose it's easier for religious people when they face death," he said, "because they think they know what's going to happen next."

I disagreed — not with the issue of belief but that it's easier for religious people (a group that I don't count myself a part of) to face the end of life because of their belief.

For me, organized religion doesn't have anything to do with it because I can't remember a time when I wasn't absolutely certain that when I die, the energy that makes me Sonja continues, not necessarily as Sonja but as energy. And at some point, it gets recycled in some new material form. (I'm hoping to come back as violets or river willows or raindrops on Lady's Mantle myself.)

I base this belief on what Lady Nature has taught me about energy. She reuses everything in patterns that spiral and circle through us every minute of every day. Every year the moon waxes and wanes thirteen times between January 1 and December 31. Every year, the stars shine in the sky, clouds bring rain, ice on my driveway is slippery underfoot.

Her lessons are reinforced by what I watch happen in my gardens every year—the total die-back in the fall, the peace of winter, the excitement of watching what comes back in the spring, the leafing and fruiting and seeding of summer.

The first person I remember dying in my family was my Uncle Wes, a lovely man. But the death that shook me the most in my early teens was my Grandmother Hakala's, a woman who was almost as big a part of my life as my own mother. I was fourteen at the time. Grandma died of a heart attack, leaving my whole family in shock.

About a week after Grandma died, I suddenly realized that some of the words coming out of my mouth were hers. That some of the ways I looked at the world around me bore her influence. And I understood that even though I couldn't go to Grandma's house and see her knitting slippers for her grandchildren or eat her incredibly exquisite dinner rolls again, I did carry a piece of her inside me.

Her energy was now a part of me.

I think she would have understood that. Grandma was a gardener too.