On an autumn day in my 12th year, I came down the front steps of my middle school at the end of the day to find my dad in his pickup with my little brother in the back seat. It was an unexpected and pleasant surprise, as I knew he’d left that morning on an out of town trip for work. I was naive to the warning signs of calamity then, so I didn’t think to feel alarmed that he was picking me up from school, which had only ever been my mother’s domain, especially when he should have been out of town.
But I was to have my first lesson in the unraveling that follows calamity when I learned that my maternal grandfather had been in an accident and my mom and grandmother were rushing down the interstate to follow the emergency helicopter to the nearest big-city hospital where he’d been taken. He later died from that accident and this was my first significant loss of a close family member.
My grandfather had a large garden that he nurtured and tended. As hot west Texas days faded into the relative cool of the evenings, he would sit in his canvas folding lawn chair in the shade behind the garage and watch his garden grow. My favorite evenings were the ones where he’d have a sprinkler running and each breeze that graced us would blow some of that cooling mist in our direction. Sometimes their neighbor would see us sitting back there and come over for a visit. Those were golden days indeed.
After his death the garden dwindled and grass began to overtake it. For a couple of years after his death I wouldn’t go anywhere near the back side of the garage. This was tricky and necessitated some planning because my great-grandmother lived on the lot behind my grandparents, just across the alley. There were no fences to separate the two lots, just one seamless family homestead in this little Texas town. Naturally, when visiting my grandparents, we were back and forth between the two houses to see my great-grandmother as well.
The back of her home (we only ever went in and out the back door) looked out over her spacious plot of land onto the back of my grandparents land, which meant a full view of the back side of the garage and the declining garden. My solution to this predicament varied, but usually involved some combination of squinting my eyes to blur them and running right past it until I was squarely back in my grandparents’ backyard and the backside of the garage was behind me. As long as I didn’t go over there, I could fool myself that he might still be sitting there, watching his garden grow. Those first two years after his death were full of anger at silly, stupid, fluke accidents that shouldn’t ever happen paired with denial. As long as I didn’t round that corner, he wasn’t really gone.
In the spring of my 34th year, Parsley came to stay with us. 1 year and 1 month later I released him and his baby in a private ceremonial moment filled with unquenchable tears. I released him in a place where I knew he’d have food to eat and where I felt he’d be safe. It’s also a place that has meant a lot to me over the last couple of years that I visited often when I needed to clear my head and ‘reset.’ I’ve found that since his release, I’ve only been back to this place three times in three months. I used to go several times a week. I let the avoidance behavior continue until a friend asked me about it, and then Benjamin did the same. Once I received these promptings to put words to it, I realized it was my grandfather and his garden all over again.
As long as I don’t go to Parsley’s place, there remains the hope that he’s still there. There’s still the hope that I could walk up to the spot where I left him and the baby and find things just as they were: Parsley sitting on top of the piece of squash and cuttlebone I left for him, looking up at me with the baby sitting on top of him peeking over Parsley’s shell. (I know it sounds too picturesque to be believable, but it’s true. Benjamin captured it in a grainy photo for me. I honestly didn’t even notice it as it was happening because I was too upset. If it helps to balance this hardly believable picturesque scene with some reality, Parsley really had the most goofy expression on his face and it’s not a very good photo. No doubt his face was due to the disorientation of having just been deposited in his strange new world).
I’m still living with the denial of Parsley’s absence. When I released him I promised I’d visit but it seems I was wrong. Because it turns out that if I visit, and he’s not there, then he really is gone, and that’s a reality I still can’t face.
