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.
Like death, gardening is unpredictable
But my father was dead, and that first year, my vegetables were mostly hard as hooves, my single bell pepper as small and shrunken as my mouth. I plucked the only four sweet cherry tomatoes, feeding them one by one to my new baby, who sucked the flesh and spat out the skin, the juice sopping into her clothes. This was our harvest. By fall, there was creeping Charlie in all the corners and weeds popping through the earth like zits.
“Your garden is so big now,” Ama told me when she came to visit. An inveterate green thumb, we would give her our brown, wilted potted plants we thought beyond help, and she would return them, weeks later, vibrant and strong. But she couldn’t do the same for her own son, despite her daily visits, her offerings of vegetables and suggestions of homeopathic medicine. None of us could. He was dying, and then he was dead, in the bed my parents had shared for the last three decades.
“It’s so big,” she repeated, scanning the large expanse of dirt and weeds. “Are you capable?”
I asked myself that question every day. I did not feel capable; I felt lost. As a child, and as a young adult, I had always begun enormous projects, only to falter halfway through. “Your eyes are this big,” my father would tell me, holding his hands wide apart, “and your stomach is this big.” He would shrink his hands until the fingers were touching. It was true for food, for projects, for any dream. My father was the one who always helped tether the space between my ambitions and my capability.
That year my garden, like my sadness, was large and sprawling. I did not know how I — if I— could tend either. I kept looking for my father everywhere, startled each time I visited my parents’ house, to see my mother alone. Growing up, I had thought he would be like a tree: changing with the seasons, but always there.
Grief, too, comes in seasons
When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I had tried to imagine my future grief. But there was no way to be prepared. My mother, my sisters, my father’s mother and siblings: the shapes of each of our grieving was different and personal. And it transformed day to day, season to season, but the transformation was never linear. An easier month would be followed by a harder one. In the wake of his death, my family—the ones who been closest to my father—had the most difficult time being together, each of us a fresh and open wound.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this feeling of separation. Stuck at home, I doubled down on the garden. The year after my poor harvest, my husband and I stocked up on seeds. We set up grow lights in our house. With nothing else to do, I spent hours caring for my hundreds of seedlings. And everything grew: the Ping Tung eggplant, the daikon (not as big as the calf-sized ones my Japanese American great-grandmother had grown in California, but big enough to pickle into takuan), all kinds of heirloom tomatoes. By night I dreamed of my father, and by day I wrote about my amorphous feelings and pruned my vegetables.
That summer, the garden that had failed me a year ago overflowed. I pickled. I canned. I jammed. I was so proud, posting Technicolor photos of my harvest. And still things went to waste: I did not know how to give away everything before it spoiled. I thought I was on a linear trajectory. This year I had learned how to grow vegetables, the next year I would learn how to properly manage the bounty.
And yet the next year, the weather was strange: too hot, too early. Rabbits took all the eggplant. Some of our plants grew violently, and other plants grew sick. At home, my mother and sisters and I quarreled as old family dynamics rose to the surface. We entered family therapy. I wondered, how can we be a family without my father? I wondered, why is grief so circuitous? For days I might not think of him, and then later, the sight of a screwdriver could wreck me.
The garden helps me feel connected
Before the garden, there was my father. And before my father, there was the garden—not mine, but my mother’s, and his mother’s, and our ancestors’ before us. When I garden now, I think of my ancestors and the tending they did with their hands. I think of my father, who is not in the earth, but instead sits in tiny teal urns on many of our mantles. He wanted to be cremated; he didn’t want to be eaten by mice. (“After I trapped so many of their brothers, it would be their revenge,” he said.)
The garden had never been my father’s space. But the land reminds me of him through the act of tending, and the act of returning. My father cared over so many people, and he rarely gave up on a task—sometimes to his own detriment, when the rest of us had thrown up our hands. When I struggled, he came back. We hurt each other over and over, and we came back. And so too, another year of therapy and of learning to speak and listen to each other has helped my mother and sisters and me to enter into another stage of our relationship, one still emerging, still changing, still learning to grow.
I think of how grief never came to me in distinct stages, but in seasons, some fallow, some rich, some mixed. A season that is poor for one vegetable can be bountiful for another. And I think of how loss is never a thing that happened but a thing that is happening, and how with grief, too, can come abundance—not in opposition, but together.
Jami Nakamura Lin ‘s new book, The Night Parade, is now available from your favorite bookseller. This essay is part of a series highlighting the Good Housekeeping Book Club — join the conversation and check out more of our favorite book recommendations.
Jami Nakamura Lin is the Japanese Taiwanese Okinawan American author of The Night Parade, illustrated by her sister Cori. A former Catapult columnist, she’s been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and more. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area.
