Recently, my eighty-year-old parents have begun to spiral out of control. Don’t get me wrong: Mom and Dad have always been chaotic. But during my formative years and into adulthood, they kept their mayhem to themselves, tucked behind affable chit-chat and tasteful window treatments.
Dementia has blown their cover. It’s surprisingly, shockingly easy to approximate normalcy when you have your wits about you; all it takes, really, is a facility for appearing halfway pleasant and vigilance for secrecy. After all, people might suspect you’re a mess, but few if any actually want to know. But once the brain atrophies? Once those neural connections spit and sputter like clogged pipes? You’re too irritable and addled to appear pleasant. What’s more, you lose the inhibitions that once patrolled the gate between your public and private selves. The spillage is as inevitable as it is messy.
Funny phrase, that: “spiraling out of control.” As if the shitstorm confines itself to a pattern, tracing some golden ratio of doom. It doesn’t. It explodes. The last month has been a maelstrom of what I will charitably describe as “unpleasant conversations.” With criminal defense attorneys regarding the arrest of one of my parents for domestic violence after a dementia-and-alcohol-fueled scuffle (I would love to fill you in but as the case is pending, I’ll be smart for once and shut up. Just know this: Dementia can turn the most mild-mannered of grandparents into feral, liver-spotted rage-balls). With home health aides calling to report that, once again, my parents are not allowing them into the house to work, claiming they’re “doing just fine” on their own. With paramedics and ER staff needing answers to the questions my parents are too confused to answer. And – most particularly – with my parents, as I try to help them when they are both extremely vulnerable and extremely determined to assert their independence.
I’m making these botched attempts at “managing” my parents’ dementia from an opposite coast, three-thousand miles away. It’s a bit like watching a loved one drown, very slowly and from a great distance, which is anxiety-inducing. I’m told this is called “caregiver stress”, which I need to “manage” as I need to be in fighting form, ready to step up once Dad starts wandering pants-less or Mom leaves the stove on and finally sets the house on fire. The nihilistic part of me prefers to “manage” stress with a generous glass – or two, or three – of Chardonnay, but since alcoholism runs in the family, I probably should abstain.
So I turn to alternatives. Exercise helps. Prayer helps. And I’ve never fought the urge to have a good cry in the shower.
But for the greatest comfort, I tend to my garden. The peace doesn’t derive so much from the pleasure of creating landscapes, or the soothing rhythm of pulling weeds. The real salve is not in communing with Nature but submitting to it. Gardening forces you to not only confront but accept the most confounding aspects of existence – and, with any grace, simply experience Being in them.
Control is Illusory
Part of gardening’s therapeutic value lies in the sense of mastery and control it lends the gardener. With a good tiller and some organic soil, a hoary patch of weeds can be tamed into a well-behaved perennial bed. The neglected shade where only poison ivy grew can be cleared and coaxed into charming drifts of bleeding hearts and ferns.
That is, in theory it can. The far greater value of gardening lies in the realization that, as in life, there’s only so much you can do. I can carefully select and plant the yews the nursery touted as deer-resistant, I can spray them vigilantly every night until I reek of coyote urine, cayenne pepper and rotten eggs, but if the Whitetail are hungry enough, they’ll chew the things down to nubs anyway (and if not the Whitetail, then the beaver that cruises the canal in front of our house for fresh bark). I can dig clumps of onion grass from my beds until my fingers ache holding the trowel, but if I miss just one little strand, dammit-all-to-hell if bigger clumps don’t appear with a vengeance the next season (onion grass = the chin-hair of weeds).
In fact, I can do everything perfectly and still fail – for no obvious reason at all. This happens with surprising regularity. I site the azalea in rich, well-drained soil that receives just enough shade. I water as I should. I spray for bugs as I should. I feed as I should. For weeks, the azalea is glossy-leafed and happy. Then seemingly overnight, it fades and curls and dies.
But I did everything right! I cry, shaking my fist at God. And then I dig up the azalea and try again, humbly reminded that – in gardening as in life – no outcomes are guaranteed.
For this reason, I have a working theory that growing a garden should be a prerequisite for parenthood. Whenever a child publicly stumbles, the sanctimonious crowd is quick to lay blame on Mom and Dad: Why didn’t the parents do X? . . . They should have done Y . . . Well, no child of mine would ever behave like that! But as experienced gardeners know, even seedlings from the best of greenhouses can go rogue. I myself have observed that between two of the same flowers, planted in identical conditions and within two feet of the other, one thrives while the other struggles. Whether you’re raising kids or begonias, it’s not the fruits of your labor that count so much as the labor itself. The attention you give to who and what is in your care (and attention, to my mind, is the same as love) is the sacred offering – and that’s true whether the end-result is a bumper crop or a bust.
Let Go of What Doesn’t Work
The property where I garden was once a 19th-Century rubber factory. After going bankrupt in the 1920s, it became a lace factory, then the hodge-podge of small businesses and residential apartments that continues today. Over the greater part of a century, various factory buildings on the site were intentionally torn down or accidentally destroyed by fire. Before money started pouring into town, I’m told by old-timers the property was a favorite party spot for teens and fishermen who wanted to get tipsy while angling in the nearby canal.
As such, gardening for me often feels like an archaeological dig. I make plans – big plans – for, say, the gorgeous Japanese maples or redbud saplings I’m going to plant in a barren patch. I put on my sweats, grab my shovel, and get digging. Then I spend the rest of the day cursing a blue streak as I unearth brick after 19th-century brick – as well as lots of old blacksmith-forged spikes and nails, not to mention the occasional rubber heel from the boots the factory made. At times the soil is so packed with vodka bottles, flattened cans of Bud, and mangled fishing lures that I nearly weep. No wonder the patch is barren – it’s full of rubble.
So much for plans. Once again the garden has reminded me I am constrained to circumstances as they are, not as I wish they were. Maples and redbuds won’t grow in the rubble, but grasses and sedums will. And so I do the only sensible thing: I let go of expectations that don’t work and focus upon solutions that do.
This, by the way, is the essence of dead-heading. It can be a laborious task, snipping off all those dead blooms and branches, but I find it a symbolically rich one. In gardening as in life, you need to periodically take stock of what has outlived its usefulness and purpose. Maybe it’s the caffeine guzzling that propelled you through years of school and work but now leaves you enervated. Maybe it’s the longstanding friendship that has grown one-sided and anemic, despite your efforts to nurture it along. Maybe it’s the very idea you can get your elderly parents to accept help when they damn well don’t want any and have lost all reason. Whatever it is, shed it like a wilted stem and redirect your energy into the habits, thinking, and people that support your well-being: These are the roots of your growth.
Life Persists
I used to have this vitriolic hatred of weeds. Take crabgrass. It wasn’t so much that it’s unattractive – sprawling and spider-legged. Nor was it really about how difficult it is to remove. I hated it for its sheer relentlessness. I could dig up piles of it, spray it with some unholy brew of herbicides, and two weeks later new mounds would be poking their raggedy heads through the mulch. It seemed personal, as if the crabgrass was mocking my attempts to bring order to chaos.
Yet years of not only gardening, but living, have given me respect for my enemy. The weeds are only doing what they are meant to do: surviving, despite the odds. Would I truly want it any other way? There’s something deeply reassuring – heartening, even – about the tenacity of crabgrass, nutsedge and dandelions to disrupt the carefully-contrived little universe of my garden. Life persists, even when it’s unruly and unexpected and not the “look” you were going for. Life persists, no matter what the efforts to snuff it out.
No, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I’ll take the weeds – and the upturned plans, the disappointments, the frustrations. Such is the price of a garden. With every border or hedge I create, I am not so much bringing order to chaos as dancing with it – usually awkwardly, as I often fight to be the lead. But sometimes, if I surrender to the dance, with exceptional agility and grace.
Beautiful lessons, even more beautifully articulated. "...it’s not the fruits of your labor that count so much as the labor itself." YES, and how very hard it is to accept that, over and over! Thank you for the reminder. I'll be holding it close as I head out into the garden myself.
And peace to you and your parents, Johanna.
First-rate essay, thank you. Good luck and Godspeed in all your efforts.