My Mother Would Rather Garden Than Talk About Grief
But grief is perennial, like hostas and mushrooms, continually recurring and never buried deep enough
On the morning of my Uncle G’s funeral, I am a thousand miles from the dirt road in rural Missouri where I was raised. My dad is delivering the eulogy, and I’m watching it on a Facebook livestream. Grief from this distance feels surreal. Mourning alone is another consequence of leaving my hometown two decades ago. I don’t even ask if my family’s deaths are Covid-related anymore. It’s just a matter of who died and if I can make the trip to express my condolences.
The camera is stationary on Dad at a low podium. He’s wearing a dark grey suit, a crisp white shirt, and navy dotted tie. His brother is in an open casket beside him, Uncle G’s mountain man beard fluffing aimlessly from the satin interior. Dad and G have matching yellowed ponytails that they both clench at the nape of their necks, ZZ Top style. They also have the same tattooed forearms their father treated them to when they turned sixteen.
Dad talks of brotherly love and forgiveness. He says G is no longer in pain from cancer gnawing his bones. He promises heaven and salvation, even for a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, fist-fighting sinner like G.
Dad calls his brother a survivor. When I was eight, Mom was getting a perm in the neighbor’s kitchen when Uncle G’s trailer caught on fire. We smelled the smoke first, then saw the gray plume across the winter cornfield. Mom grabbed her purse and I sprinted to the car, knowing if I wasn’t fast enough, I’d get left behind. We made a dust cloud to Uncle G’s property and heard his coon dogs whining for their freedom. Mom ran to let them out of their pens, the metal cages hot under the heat. Then we watched the trailer burn. By the time the volunteer fire department arrived, the trailer was mostly a frame of smoldering ashes.
Uncle G was always a peripheral presence in my life. His trailer was a mile away from the stick house Dad built for us. He brought us eggs when the coyotes took our hens. He shucked corn and helped cut wood. My family’s love language is mushrooms, fresh from the woods and fried; Uncle G was the best mushroom hunter in our family, even when he needed a cane to navigate the forest floor.
When I was home for annual summer visits, G would tell me I was still the prettiest, smartest thing he’d ever seen. I had lived on his country road but he had never seen my city life, so our conversation was limited to familiar topics: weather, mushrooms, neighbors. When he saw my teenage daughters, Uncle G would pretend to stumble and grasp his heart, as if the force of them had knocked him over. He was gangly, silly, and sincere. I loved Uncle G because Dad showed me how.
Mom is the one who calls me to share that Uncle G is gone. It is expected. She is in the woods planting hostas. It’s early spring in mid-Missouri and the forest is dense with lime-colored moss. “Dad thinks I’m a bit nuts because I talk to plants,” she tells me, sniffing.
Mom says my voice on the phone makes her tear up more, but I think it’s my questions. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine.” She clears her throat. “We have to move the hostas before it rains. They’ll like being planted so their roots can soak up the good stuff.” And then to her beloved plants, “Won’t you?”
Mom often relocates her hostas. She digs them up and takes them to Florida. She replants them in my empty flower beds in Ohio, Connecticut, Illinois, and Maryland. I move a lot and leave a trail of hostas.
“I tell them they’ll be okay,” she says. “I couldn’t call, you know. It’s hard to talk about Uncle G.” I tell her I know, and I do. There will never be the right amount or enough sunlight, shade, soil, or time. “They get lonely when I dig them up, but I try to replant them close to each other and pluck out all the weeds.”
I say goodbye and go out in the backyard to cry in the lemon-yellow hammock I brought home from Brazil, the only place I’ve lived that Mom couldn’t plant. My feet hit a bed of hostas as I swing, and I think how weeds are out of place, not valued, and yet grow vigorously.
I call back within the hour to make sure Mom is out of the midday sun. The deer and rabbits nibble the hostas to their stems and she is furious at all wooded creatures. Slugs and snails cling to their stalks. Mom thinks the insects and animals are selfish. “Why do they have to eat half a leaf? Why not eat a whole one and leave the rest for me to enjoy? Such a waste.”
I call the next morning to see if my cousins have finalized funeral arrangements for Uncle G. Mom tells me the hostas are waiting in a wheelbarrow. “Should I book a flight?” I ask, knowing that because of current Covid travel restrictions, I shouldn’t. She reports that they ran out of sod for the rest of the hostas but they are in clumps of dirt and she waters them several times a day.
“If I start driving now, I might make it in time for the funeral service,” I say, ignoring the absurd desperation of my plan. Mom will just barely make it to the funeral herself because she and Dad have to make a roundtrip drive to St. Louis for more sod. The dirt they ordered is so heavy that when they loaded it, the wheels on their trailer hit the road. They have to borrow a truck from one of my brothers and make the trip again.
She is quiet on the other end of the phone. She breathes hard and I imagine her bony hands that match mine deep in the soil. I ask, “How are your hostas?”
“I keep telling them they’ll be okay,” Mom answers. “They’ll hold on until I can get them in the ground. Hostas are tough. Like Uncle G and his mushrooms. And it’s almost spring.”
After a prayer, Dad returns to the microphone and speaks of brotherly bonds and forgiveness. I hear my brother clear his throat and wonder if he’s crying too. Uncle G was the one who taught him to hunt; they’ve spent weeks together every spring in silent woods trying to kill.
The Facebook livestream abruptly cuts off as Dad walks toward the pews, probably to hug cousins and those of us left behind to sort the blunted and relentless grief of this pandemic. The screen that allowed me to briefly join my family again is black.
I text Mom: What happened? Livestream stopped. She doesn’t answer. Mom can rarely find her phone. It’s in her purse but she’s probably already making rounds in the gathering or Dad is beside her, holding her hand, guiding her toward the truck.
Two hours later, on the road back to their house, Mom answers: It’s over. We are worn out. We missed you. Grief is perennial, like hostas and mushrooms, continually recurring and never buried deep enough.
Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood and editor of Grace in Darkness and Furious Gravity, two anthologies by women writers. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Ms., Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and Believer Magazine. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is an associate professor in Literature at American University.
This essay is part of our Moms Don’t Have Time to Grieve column.
