Ecclisiastes 12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was:and the spirit shall return unto god who gave it. I believe the more common expression is "From the earth we come to the earth we return". I am as ignorant of the bible as I am of gardening, no, more, but I have connected to the experience of rising from the earth and returning to it only to rise again and be reborn.
Two years ago, I attended the memorial service of my two grandparents. There were ten of us gathered around their ashes in my uncle's garden. Each of the blood relatives spoke and said farewell, or bid adieu as my grandfather would like to say. We buried their ashes in the garden and planted flowers on top of them. No one but we knows that they are there, living again, adding themselves to the dirt so that life may begin.
I began the journey to their end thinking I knew something about them. What I knew were stories and encounters. The last time I had seen my grandmother she was crying and my mother was berating her for her cruelty to her family, which my mother was right to do. My grandmother had been cruel on that particular day and most of the days of her life. My grandfather was charming and clever; he danced and joked and made passes at young waitresses. This is what I knew.
When I arrived to my uncle's house the night before the memorial, my mother had laid out several letters she found among my grandmother's things. For the last five years of her life,my grandmother did not remember my grandfather, her husband, at all. Some took it as a sign of her cruelty and selfishness. The letters were written between my grandparents in the early years of their marriage. My grandfather lived in California for a year, working, while my grandmother stayed at home in New Jersey. They did not have a telephone, so they wrote to each other, sometimes twice a day. My grandfather's letters came on letterhead from different hotels and my grandmother's on small tan paper. They wrote about what happened in their day, who they visited, what they ate, how much groceries cost. My grandmother especially wrote about what a wonderful baby my mother was and how proud my grandfather would be to see her upon his return. But especially, especially they wrote about their love; how the days were interminable while they were parted, how they longed for each other's kisses. They called each other 'lover'.
I sat and read these letters and touched them and smelled them and breathed them. I sat with my own lover; a man I had known for years but only recently had begun to understand; a man who was to board a plane the next day for his long journey away from me. In those letters I came to know my grandparents. They were a couple who found joy even in the desperation of being apart, because they knew that when they reunited they would redeem their love. Through these letters I came to know my own lover to be my partner in joy, in separation, in redemption.
My grandmother died several years after my grandfather. I now believe not that she was selfish and cruel to forget him but could not understand life without him and thus had to forget him to live out her remaining years. My mother held on to my grandfather's ashes so that they could be buried together and return through the earth as one soul.
My lover. partner. soon to be husband and I have begun our own garden. We spent hours this weekend cutting down dead branches and planting new seeds. We worked mostly in silence, sometimes together and often apart. Two days after our wedding, my husband will leave for a time to go and work. He will come back and we will look at what new thing has sprung from our garden.
