After son’s death, learning about grief still hard
Saturday, Oct. 24, 2015, the day my son died in an auto accident, I didn’t think I could survive a week.
Being without him a year was beyond my capacity to imagine. More than 1,000 days without him have passed, and I have discovered that I am not born with a fixed amount of resilience.
I have more capacity than I knew to get through just about anything. I am stronger than I ever imagined.
For nearly a year, I was awash with the deepestaching pain. Profound grief is debilitating. Losing Ryan was an around-the-clock, unrelenting, inescapable horror show.
Throughout year two, the acute pain was slowly replaced with a sorrowful ache and the permanence of his loss. Tears were always just below the surface, and the most ordinary conversation would trigger a return to the abyss.
This third year has been one of reflection – and trying to focus on the moments that made memories. Grief visits most frequently in the night and on holidays. And in those moments, my sorrow is as raw and real as the day Ryan died. I don’t expect that to ever change.
I was so naive to the grief a parent feels in losing a child. I assumed that grief would be resolved over time. But I’ve learned the hard way that this is simply not true. The initial intense, debilitating grief has become waves of grief that unpredictably show up.
Sometimes the pain is deeply acute. This is especially true on Ryan’s birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. My worst day is Father’s Day — the harshest reminder that my son is no longer alive. I spend the day dreaming about a phone call or a card that won’t be coming.
It’s also the holiday when I tend to do a hatchet job on myself emotionally, reliving every interaction and every regret (every ball game I missed, every “I love you” I didn’t say enough). While counselors and clergy have suggested that is not healthy, I suggest they try losing a child and then follow their own advice. It’s not possible.
There are also other events in the lives of his friends, like college graduations, weddings, birth of their children, that trigger a deep sadness as I find myself thinking about how old Ryan would be, what he would be doing if still alive, and the cold hard reminder that a big part of my family’s story is ripped away.
I hear his favorite song, see a gray 300Z (his car),
worlds away from the internet, that airless, intangible domain empty of beauty, wonder, and soul.
First, let’s save children from the 24/7 social media carnival, where attention spans sputter, anxieties grow, and depressions fester. Let them not talk dirty, but get dirty. Show them burgeoning roots and shoots, hopeful buds, and handsome foliage. Let them gaze upon dazzling, luminous flowers. Teach them to become citizen-scientists, banding together to share sow dates and solve bug problems.
Set free your kids’ smiles, boost their moods, and – since studies show they eat what they grow – upgrade their diets. Let them learn the world from the ground up.
Soon they’ll plant themselves not before the computer, but out in the yard; their ear buds will give way to budding plants, their texts replaced by the poetry of the landscape.
Escape the Web’s cultural Babylon for the Edenic unison and serenity of the garden. Here tweets fan across the lawn or echo up the block. Here the only arguments break out over damaged deer fences and knotweed invasions. Here is peace.
Here your senses are fully engaged in a setting rich in color, sunlight, moonlight, fragrance, texture, beauty, breezes, and palpable rewards. Your social network is the web of life, including insects, birds, fungi, and bacteria—all your evolutionary cohorts.
In the garden our lives are rewarded minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, season by season. Our quests culminate in astonishing flowers, nutritious vegetables, flavorful herbs, and delicious fruits. Here natural algorithms lead to a cornucopia of satisfaction.
Anthropologists tell us that humanity makes the culture by which it is made. We see this in how the garden – nature domesticated by people – domesticated us in turn, giving rise to culture (a word derived from the Latin word cultura, meaning growing, cultivation), towns and cities, civic life and institutions.
Expand your gardening social network with your family, or join friends, neighbors, and visitors in a community garden: an open-air chatroom. Go from the web to the web of nature. In gardens the virtual becomes tangible, meaningful, and edible. Here harmony is harvested. Here you are home.
George Ball is chairman & CEO of W. Atlee Burpee Company and past president of the American Horticultural Society in Washington.