If My Grief Were a Garden
Explorations on My Own Personal Grief
If my grief were a garden what would it be like? Is it beautiful? Or wild? What would be in it? Would it be full of flowers or weeds?
Weeds are just things you don’t want in your garden; is that the grief? Things I didn’t want but have sprung into my life anyway and no matter how hard I try to remove them they are always coming back up, popping up in undesired places? Maybe that is my garden…a garden of weeds. But just because it is weeds (things I didn’t want in my garden) doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.
If I could control my garden, it would be orderly, predictable, organized in rows with everything blooming according to plan, and nothing out of place, no surprises or volunteers. But I can’t control my garden can I? It is a mess of planted, carefully planned and cultivated flowers, plants that were planted and tended to for a time but forgotten about, not watered, left to go to seed, and weeds or volunteers of all shapes and sizes. Unwanted and unplanned but nevertheless part of my garden.
What will I do with this garden? Will I fight it? Try to weed out the volunteers? Try to manage and control the growth of each flower, each plant? Or will I let it be, messy and beautiful, full of surprises and unknowns?
