How Starting a Garden Helped Me Grieve

Before the garden, there was my father. And then, all of a sudden, there wasn’t: He was alive, and then he was dying and then he was dead, the cancer spreading quickly over the course of 18 months.

The year after my father died, I decided to dig a garden because I thought novelty might open the tight fist of grief. Since we’d moved in, I’d wandered the rooms of my new house with my daughter crying at my chest. My husband and I had bought it even after I saw how it faced north, how the shadows clung in the corners. In a different year, I would have asked my father for advice before purchasing this house. He knew everything about everything, but especially about houses. He’d helped me move from place to place since I went to college, ready with his toolbox and his jokes, to turn an empty apartment into a home.

But this time, my dad wasn’t there. I discovered I was just the same grieving body in a new place. So I turned to the backyard and the small, raised bed there I envisaged becoming a huge, sprawling garden. I hoped the land could give me some life back. I called in my college-aged cousins, whose limbs were light and energized, whose minds did not go limp in the afternoon swelter. I brought in my 87-year-old Ama, my father’s mother, who had taught flower-arranging on TV back in Taiwan.

“Dig,” I told the cousins. “Dig it all up.” We excavated scrolls of grass, poured in compost and wood chips, pushing tomato and pepper seedlings into the soil while Ama observed from underneath her parasol. I spent the following summer nurturing the plot as tenderly as one would a grave. I imagined a bounty.

But my father was dead, and that first year, my vegetables were mostly hard as hooves, my single bell pepper as small and