For the first time in two years, I was enjoying my garden, both surprised and pleased that I could finally work out there. I loved gardening, but the last two years I had been caring for my dying husband. It took all my time and energy, yet I was glad to do it.
I felt honored, blessed, in being able to care for him. We had been married forever, while I was still a teenager. I had never been single. I had gone from my parents’ home straight into his home. He was my life, practically my whole world.
I didn’t believe he was dying. He is getting better, I told myself. He’s doing his exercises. He’s learning to use his right hand again, and walk again, and . . . I would continue with all the accomplishments I thought I saw, not seeing that his speech still slurred from his stroke, that he was in his 80s and had diabetes and congestive heart failure. Those words meant nothing to me. I cared for him.
However, in doing so, I neglected me. I ignored the increasingly difficult lower back pain that every bend threatened. I had trouble sweeping, mopping, anything that required twisting my sore back. I ignored all of that.
But I couldn’t ignore the fact that I could no longer bend over to harvest the strawberries, or weed the garden, or plant anything new that wasn’t in pots and put on the work table on the porch. I couldn’t harvest the wild herbs. I also used those herbs for salves, teas, tinctures, lotions and oils. My back was progressively freezing up, and I ignored it. Almost completely.
Almost. Caring for my husband became more and more difficult. Bathing him, tending to his bandaged legs, all the rest of it, began to require more than I could do.
He used a walker to go from the bed or his office chair or to the wheelchair. See? I told myself. He’s still walking. At first when he went to the bathroom he could clean himself up after using the toilet, but eventually I needed to do that too. He learned to use his left side to feed himself, but he made constant messes that frustrated him. I was more worried about his frustration than with the fact that I was having serious trouble cleaning the floor under his chair. But I cleaned it up without complaint.
During those two years, he ended up in the hospital and a resulting rehabilitation facility three times. Finally he refused to go back, no matter what. That’s when we contacted Hospice. That was also when he had more difficulty in leaving his bed. “Please don’t let me fall,” he would pray under his breath as he walked to the bathroom. “Don’t let me fall, Lord.”
He didn’t fall. But the last time he returned to bed, he cut himself on a sharp corner, so I tended it, then helped him back to bed. The following day, Hospice intended bring a hospital bed to replace our bed. I had cleared a place in the storeroom for the bed frame and mattresses. By that time, my back was so frozen and sore that I couldn’t sleep in the bed anyway. I slept in an office chair in the living room. It wasn’t good sleep, but it was some. I was grateful for that.
So I helped him back to bed after tending to the cut and stood awhile while he shut his eyes to rest. He died that same moment, while I watched. And I didn’t want to believe it. But I called Hospice anyway. They sent someone out, verified that he had passed on, and called the funeral home.
And for the first time in my life, I was single. We had been married almost 60 years. I had just turned 78. I was confronted with that reality, my body reminding me that I might be dying too.
Not long afterwards, I ended up in the hospital. My health had collapsed.
It isn’t uncommon, I later discovered, for the surviving spouse to follow their lifelong partner in death. But death was too ugly a word. I discovered I wanted to live. I had spent the last decade and a half learning herbalism. I realized that I still had a desire to pass on the knowledge I had accumulated to others. I wanted to garden again.
I wanted to live.
So I followed my doctor’s instructions. I went to a spine clinic to find out what was wrong with my back. They recommended physical therapy, which I embraced with enthusiasm. The hospital also recommended a heart specialist, because I had come too close to congestive heart failure myself. My kidneys were also in trouble. I needed to watch what I ate from that moment on. I needed to follow through with everything they suggested.
And I did.
My first goal was to be able to sleep in my bed again. All that winter, my back began improving until finally in the spring, I actually could, for an hour our two, sleep under the covers. Before spring, I could sleep through the night. I still had difficulty getting in and out of bed, but I did it. By spring, I thought I might be able to garden again.
And I tried, almost succeeding. I had given away the strawberries the year before, but I was never able to harvest the raspberries or the gooseberries either. The weeding never quite got done. Very few of the things I planted could be harvested, but each time I was successful, I praised God. He was healing me! Yay!
And I was getting more mobile, even so.
Late this summer, I was outside enjoying time time in my garden, when I heard a screaming in the sky. I knew it was a bird of some kind, so I researched the sound. I had heard the phrase “screaming eagle,” so I thought that was it, but none of the eagle cries were even close. This was high-pitched, shrill, insistent.
Then I found it. A red-tailed hawk. Each afternoon I listened for the sound again, trying to find the hawk. But a couple of weeks passed before I heard it again. The same sound, high-pitched, shrill, insistent. Almost commanding.
And then I heard the sound that filled me with an emotion so deep that I couldn’t explain it. The hawk’s voice was joined by others.
In my mind I saw the picture of a mother hawk encouraging her children, day by day, until she felt able to push them out of their nest and let them fly. The sound I heard was so incredibly joyful that I wept. They screamed in amazed delight as they soared through the summer sky.
And I felt God telling me the same thing. “Soar, child of Mine! I am giving you a new life.”
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