In the rose garden

When my grandmother passed away on the 9th of October in 2023 it had been at least fifteen years since my grandfather’s funeral. She was born in September of 1934, and her husband in June (“a good age difference,” she once said to me). When she was slowly fading away, my parents thought they heard her - midway through the murmurings of what we sometimes call the death struggle - call out his name. I am not sure if that is true; perhaps to have named such an act was a reach for optimism. The truth, of course, is she could have been saying anything. “To be ‘sentimental’ is scorned by intelligent people as false,” writes Mary Gaitskill. “But the word is one short syllable away from ‘sentiment’, that is, feeling.”

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In Gestalt therapy, practitioners describe the act of wider phenomena becoming clearer, and more balanced, in the life of mind and in the practice of living, as “becoming figural.” Events which might seem overwhelming or even insignificant to the point of misplacing their value are brought into view. When she was in Bendigo hospital, not quite recognising me, and never really properly awake at the times I saw her, I thought not about how strange it was to see her there but how strange it was to see her in a place without a garden. I had never known that plot of land, never imagined it, never evoked it, without her being part of it. It was as if they were mutually guided factors, though it was only upon seeing her there (and at times at my parents place, sensing it, but not realising) that I realised this was the case. A person is borne of their relations, a single element amid an ecosystem far beyond the threshold of the body.

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It is the end of 2023. Me and my family take turns entering and leaving the hospital, swanning together, detaching, regrouping, sides touching lightly, all with no sense of how we are meant to move but aware that there surely must be a proper way. In a hospital everyone becomes that trepidatious child who has only just made the transition from kindergarten into reception and struggles to find their direction. It is here I become conscious of familial ties to a painful degree, aware just how much a certain kind of child is borne of the family, while not necessarily being “of” the family - the temerity to stand one foot in, one foot out, to insist on one’s place and keep balance. It can be an isolating feeling.

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You are pieced together from a million impressions and then you are all alone. Therefore, your relationship with yourself is the only true constant. Everything else can be taken from you. What will you do to keep that relationship steady? What can you do, for that matter?

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Between an interview with Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, the former calls the garden "a place of relations," where vegetables, colours, seasons and people exist only through one another. Gardening, she says, is “absolutely strange,” an activity constantly haunted by the realisation of its death, and your own. “Why garden when I know it will die?” She says. “Between us: death….Together we look at the garden.”

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Of all the lines in the poem “grandmother in the garden” by Louise Gluck, my favourite by far is the eighth. “I have survived my life.” A load-bearing statement, it arrives within the delicate frame of the poem feeling both exhausted and lucid. This refrain paints an image of a woman who has undertaken great trials which lay otherwise unmentioned, the billowing communism (to use the words of another poet, Alice Notley) of the clothes she imagines. She is not really the blueprint, to me as much as she is the benchmark from which all other writing is measured. I read this at my grandmother’s funeral, braided with other factual details, like:

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A woman grows up on a paddock edge nowhere, not so far outside the town of Deniliquin. Because of the loneliness of the area, she feels tied, not inexplicably, to her brother - the first kind of solidarity one experiences. Siblingdom, of course, is a tricky blueprint from which to base future allegiances. It teaches us much about staying in zones of discomfort with people who are like us but share little in common with us. She loses her father young. When she is 20, on the verge of marrying her husband, her brother dies too. Something unspeakable about the way men leave through holes, the kind of holes made in time, not in the body. At 20, my father loses half his fingers in an accident. Her eldest son dies at 32, and then his widow 8 years later, leaving my cousin an orphan. Maybe these are unlike the details of the poem I mentioned.

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Her garden was how she hid out from these realities. Her garden was where she consecrated realities. Each tragedy seemed to push its boundaries a little further outward. By the time I was grown it felt enormous, as though every loss had demanded another bed, another thicket, another place in which life could develop itself as a substitute.

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Many times, after experiencing a loss, someone perfectly well-intentioned would offer a truism, which used the physical reality of a body decomposing to enrich the earth as a means to understand how all matter transforms, how all loss begets space for creation. To do so would speak in the legalese of “compensation.” I do not always find this convincing - sometimes you do not survive in full, you merely carry on less whole. What is most interesting about these experiences is that there is not always the possibility of any kind of repair. Still, even as I say all this, I consider it remarkable that when my nephew was meant to be born they said it was the exact same date my grandmother passed away.

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From an interview with Elaine Scarry:

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“I had originally felt resistance to that idea just because the relentless nature of cancer pain, or burn pain, or pain inflicted in political contexts, never has any room in it for creation and, therefore, to imagine that great acts of creativity could come about seemed to excuse and apologize for the existence of suffering in the world. “

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Though not all grandmothers have gardens, it is hard to argue with the knowledge that a garden crafted by a grandmother is bound to be the most magnificent. It is liable to snake around unlikely corners, to have small islands in those exacting craters, to be filled out just where you’d like to have a piece of beauty encounter you, and change you. (Elaine Scarey argues that this kind of revelation about beauty forces an individual to bring copies of itself into creation.) A change of that kind enters your heart like a secret and keeps itself there in case of crisis.

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It not just a “place”, but somehow evidence of her philosophy, like a pattern you read on a palm to discern someone’s nature. I learned from this, in some way, how one unlikely person in a family - that is to say, me - can adapt to the larger ecosystem even if it seemed you were out of place. The “odd relative”, the “black sheep”, the “cool auntie” (or uncle) act as a test for the rest of the family, to see how well they can withstand their own representation being fed back to them through the force of comparison. You may not get the family you want, nor even the one you need, but the family that tests you in exact the ways you need to “survive your life.”

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From an excerpt of Fanny Howe:

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—Wait a minute. Is that because we're not allowed to say "beautiful" any more?

—It is basically against the law, it's true... Yet everyone uses the word "beautiful" and often in conjunction with the word "love."

—How?

—People say, "I love it. It's beautiful." Or: "It's beautiful. I love it."

—You're right. "Love" and "beauty" are almost interchangeable. Equal in their meaninglessness. "True" is too.

—But then why does everyone know what each one means?

— In the context of other words, each one of those abstractions makes emotional sense.

—Emotional sense? Huh?

—Believe me, you would know what I mean if you knew what it meant.

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So it is in this context that a child learns something about wonder without the simplistic logic of domination. To toil at the flowerbed is to pay to the earth, its proportionate mercies. To get down on your knees, to risk the muddying of hands and coarseness of flesh, to feel your politeness bubble over and body close up. You do all this so you can wake up and like yourself, the way you are framed against the gorgeous garden you have created. You are at the meeting point of all possible comparisons. It is a necessary process for the ego to experience. Could it be to your advantage to listen to it, which has some kind of directional sensibility, leading you down the garden path into the wooded clearing?

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It is here you must get to work, to fall to your knees. Below you is the fertile earth. “What hope we have lies there.” Writes Ursula K Leguin. “Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

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