On grief, gardening, and what it means to come alive.

If Mother's Day is hard, and there are a million reasons why it could be, you aren't alone and grief isn't something you have to hide. Every part of you is welcome here.

I spent the last few evenings pulling the dead things out of my garden. The dried bones of plants that once bloomed vibrant shades of viridian, emerald, and terra verte, now reduced to their skeletal remains. I’ve been breaking twigs and branches into mulch to nourish the earth and make way for what I will plant once the rains finally come again.

circa November 2024

My backyard went feral this last year. A little like my soul, filled with the dried remains of what once thrived, after over a year of sickness kept me weak and in bed. I’m digging us both out this spring. We will find our roots again together.

It does not escape me that the week I finally begin ripping out the remains of my garden is also a week forever intertwined with pain, grief, and loss. And maybe, just maybe, this is the year I can sit with them as friends and teachers instead of enemies.

Six years ago my mom was beginning the final few days of her life. Cancer was finally finishing what it started. And I was caught in the gales of a grief so elemental I thought my heart would be shredded by its fury.

When someone died in Sudan, the village gathered to wail and pound their pain into drumbeats that lasted all night long… sometimes going on for days. It was raw, wild, and primal. I didn’t get it then because I still existed in a system that gave grief tidy edges and banished it to greeting cards.

We used to have rituals that gave us sacred containers for our loss and pain. Some places still have them. But I find myself now in a land that tends to reduce grief to a social media post. And the few places that hold the literal weight of my loss, I have not been able to bring myself to visit.

This Friday I will be seeing my parents graves for the first time since my mom passed six years ago. Another family member is being laid to rest there, and while everything in me wants to run, I know I need to be there. For my cousins, but also for me.

Grief isn’t the enemy. It’s not a cosmic boogeyman. It is the thing that lets you know how deep your love runs.

This post landed on my Instagram feed today. I hope it offers you the same strength it did me.

When we aren’t allowed to fully, deeply grieve, something deep in us begins to die. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong in our world. We are carrying years of unprocessed loss and calling it strength. I’m learning that when I don’t pour myself out on a page, that loss gets lodged in my bones and metastasizes in my cells.

What if the very pain we are avoiding means we are also avoiding what it means to live fully alive? And all the pious, frantic bypassing with our platitudes and social niceties just leads us farther away from ourselves—and one another.

When we shut down our grief, we shut down a core part of what makes us magnificently human.

For those of you familiar with the story, when Lazarus (Jesus’s friend) died, Jesus wept. There was no, “Oh, he’s in a better place. Don’t be sad. That sickness was so hard.” Jesus freaking wept.

In the evangelical world I came out of, sorrow was often side-eyed as weakness and empathy has been rebranded as sin. When the whole system is built on a core belief that the human heart is intrinsically deceptive and wicked, emotional growth tends to get stunted in profound ways. This comes with a tragic lack of language and resources for navigating complex feelings. Like grief. Stuff-and-buff (as in stuff your feelings and buff your facade) is not a healthy coping mechanism or path to wholeness.

“Your grief keeps you tethered to what you have lost, longed for, and missed. In this way, grief is a sacred connector.”
Lisa Olivera

In the early days after my mom died, I wondered if I would survive the loss. It felt like my world was being dismantled on the molecular level.

But grief left stretchmarks my soul because it was a womb, not a tomb. Its darkness was not the darkness of death, but the darkness that comes before the dawn. Grief was an umbilical cord tethering me to the goodness that remained. Its pain still helps me embrace new depths of being in the world that are fused with wonder.

So if Mother’s Day is complicated for you, or just straight up hard, please hear me… your pain is valid. Your loss deserves to be witnessed with deep compassion. You deserve to be seen and heard, loved and held, not fixed or placated.

I hope that this space can be one where we find the wonder that lives in our scars and stretchmarks, and where we can bravely be more beautifully, deeply human even in the middle of all the hard.

All my love,