The Beauty That Will Be
The sun presses gently on my back. It’s late spring, so the heat doesn’t feel too harsh, more like the reassuring weight of an arm resting on my shoulders. The weeds have crept their way toward the perennials in the garden bed. I stand there, hands on my hips, looking at the dirt, assessing what needs to be done and how much effort cleaning out this portion of my parents’ yard will require. I’m only in town for a couple of days, and I don’t want to leave my newly widowed dad* with a half-finished chore.
Much of the yard sits under a canopy of shade, massive oak trees towering over the lawn and garden beds. Mom used to plant flowers every year. Impatiens lined the shady areas. They were easy to take care of and didn’t mind the lack of direct sun. A few geraniums filled the pots on the patio where the sun shone brightly, unhindered by the trees casting their shadow nearly everywhere else.
It’s been months since she passed away, and Dad has since gone back to work at church. He keeps himself busy with teaching and studying and meeting the needs of others, all of it providing a better alternative to him being alone. This house all six of us kids grew up in is too big now for him to tend himself. Instead of a joy, this home has become a burden.
Tears well up in my eyes. I stare at the weeds and wonder how my mom managed this task every spring and summer. I chuckle as I remember how she shipped us outside with a pair of gardening gloves and instructions on what section of the yard to tackle. I resented the chore for years. It’s only now, staring at the overgrowth, that I realize how beautiful the hard work made it.
Bending toward the ground, I begin to pull at the weeds, clearing out a space large enough to plant a few flowers. I’ll be leaving in a few days, so I can’t do all that much. Yet I have to do something. I can’t bring my mom back and I can’t heal my dad’s broken heart and I can’t cure cancer.
But I can pull weeds.
****
“Does writing poetry make you brave?” Daniel Nayeri asks in his memoir, Everything Sad is Untrue. “It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.”[1]
I sit on the couch in my family room, reading those words after scrolling through the headlines of the day. Wars rage, death looms, children are murdered, evil masquerades as good, power is wielded in brutal ways. We can’t escape all death, devastation, injustice, and heartache. Some of us can look away for a while, able to opt out of the horrors of the news when we feel overwhelmed. But grief, in some form, on some level, will come for us all. How will we meet it?
When my heart feels heavy, I often find myself writing in my journal or pulling flour and sugar out of the pantry to bake. My restless hands need something to do, something to create. I ask myself if baking and writing are worth the time, if whatever I jot down or mix up actually matters when the world is burning.
But I remember Nayeri’s words. I remember when he talked about his grandmother and how life dealt her a great deal of sadness, enough sadness, he writes, to make her a poet, to make beauty out of horror and art out of ashes.
He continues, “I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do.”[2]
****
The Nazis established a concentration camp during World War II called Terezin, also known by its German name Theresienstadt. Nazis often strategically used this camp as propaganda, deceiving the outside world by showing how well the Jews were being taken care of there. In reality, it was a place of death and disease, suffering and unimaginable hardship.
Terezin often played the role of a transit camp, and many prisoners were eventually deported to death camps like Auschwitz. Approximately 144,000 Jews were deported to Terezin, and by the end of the war, only 19,000 were alive.[3]
In this place, with death looming not in a far off land but at every turn, a group of women created a cookbook.
The women jotted down recipes on any scrap they could, their work compiled in a hand-stitched manuscript eventually (and almost miraculously) obtained years later by one of the prisoner’s daughters. Those words were then translated and preserved in a book called In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin.
Many of Terezin’s inmates couldn’t bear to think of their past and of what they once had. For so many people, hope for a return to any kind of future wore off quickly, chiseled away by the brutal conditions they faced.
But this group of women dared to remember. As hunger gnawed away at their bodies, they wrote down recipes for strudel and vanilla cake, asparagus salad and Viennese dumplings. Remembering was an act of defiance, a conscious refusal to let their spirits give up, despite bodies ravaged by disease, starvation, and unfathomable oppression.
In the foreword to the book, Michael Berenbaum, director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute wrote, “Recalling recipes was an act of discipline that required them to suppress their current hunger and to think of the ordinary world before the camps—and perhaps to dare to dream of a world after the camps.”[4]
****
Kneeling in the dirt, I keep tugging at the weeds. Thanks to the recent rain, the unwanted plants release their grasp on the earth. I toss them in a pile on the bluestone steps next to me. My eyes start to water, and I wipe my tears with the back of my hand, dirt now smudged on my cheeks.
Part of me doesn’t want to be here. I don’t want to tend to a garden that reminds me so much of my mom. I want to curse the weeds that seem to tarnish her memory, like cracks in the glass of a picture frame. But I also know I have to be here. I have to remember.
This garden was hers, and it was beautiful. Taking care of this yard required more work than I appreciated as a child. But for years, our backyard served as a place for graduation parties and Sunday grilling and afternoons laying in the hammock. I know my memory idealizes the past, but right now, I’m okay with that. I’ll gladly view my childhood through rose-colored glasses, because it's those memories that keep me digging in this dirt, fighting against what threatens to crowd out the beauty that once was, the beauty that could be.
****
J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote a story about a character named Niggle. Niggle was a painter. He envisioned painting a grand tree set against a countryside and even a forest in the picture, along with mountains and birds and deep, strong roots. But he kept getting interrupted in his work by neighbors and needs and the responsibilities of everyday life. Others didn’t understand why he even bothered painting at all, when there was far more important work to do. And so despite Niggle’s best efforts at painting, he couldn’t quite make the image on the canvas match the image in his mind. Parts of it were barely completed, “and only so so, at that.”[5]
Eventually, Niggle passes away and travels through purgatory and eventually to heaven. At one point on the journey, he rides a bicycle down a hill and is met with the most astonishing sight: a Tree, his Tree.
Tolkien writes, “He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time.”[6]
Niggle continues through this new country, realizing he was wandering along in his picture, the one he’d imagined but never had time to finish painting. His traveling companion, Parish (who used to be his neighbor), also realizes they’re traveling in Niggle’s picture, and he’s astounded. He wonders why Niggle never told him about this clever creation, to which another man replies:
"He tried to tell you long ago," said the man; "but you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them. This is what you and your wife used to call Niggle's Nonsense, or That Daubing."
"But it did not look like this then, not real," said Parish.
"No, it was only a glimpse then," said the man; "but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try.[7]
Like Niggle, I dream of painting a proverbial tree stretching its branches out over a grand landscape. But I can barely get a few leaves done, and everything I try to do never turns out quite as I’d hoped, always tarnished by grief or pain or the realities of life that keep me from feeling like the thing could ever be truly finished. Still, I long to plant a garden that won’t be overrun by weeds. I want to cook a meal that satisfies for more than a moment. I wish I could write words that could forever heal an aching soul.
I question if my efforts are in vain. But then I remember Niggle. And I wonder if maybe one day when heaven comes to earth, my so-called leaves will have grown and matured and become far more than I could have ever imagined.
Maybe God will have taken the words I wrote and the food I cooked and the garden I tended and made something far grander with it. Maybe, whether it’s poetry or cooking or writing or painting or planting, what we see now is only a faint glimmer of what we will someday see face to face.**
****
The daughter of one of the Terezin inmates said, “Yet here is the story of how the inmates of the camp, living on bread and watery soup and dreaming of cooking habits of the past, found some consolation in the hope that they might be able to use them again in the future. By sharing these recipes, I am honoring the thoughts of my mother and the others that somewhere and somehow, there must be a better world to live in.”[8]
I’ve never dealt with the trauma and horror they held in their bodies, the grief that weighed down their souls. But I want to hold onto hope like they did, even while in my very ordinary life my hands shake and my knuckles crack and every ounce of fear and loss tries to pry my fingers away from that hope. I want to live defiantly against the darkness, not avoiding the pain or futilely trying to sweeten what will always be bitter. I want to look at the life that is, and the mess that comes with it, and dare to imagine a world beyond the brokenness.
****
Wiping off the dirt and tears, I take a break and drive down the road to the garden center. The last time I was here, I wandered through the aisles as my mom loaded up flats of annuals into the flatbed cart.
I pick out just a couple flats—a few impatiens, the geraniums for the pots. Maybe I’ll get a new kind of flower this time. I reach the cashier, and I grab a tissue from my bag and turn my head to wipe my eyes. He swipes my credit card, I push the flatbed card to the car, hiding my tear-stained face from other customers.
I feel silly still grieving a loss I know is nothing compared to what others have suffered. It was a “clean loss,” not one filled with torture or betrayal or injustice. My mom got sick; then she died. That’s the whole story, an unremarkable one in the grand scheme of human history.
Even so, I think any loss deserves to be grieved, albeit in different ways and to different extents. I try to bear witness to the stories of others and hold onto their sorrow as best I can, knowing I can’t ever fully know the pain they’ve carried. At the same time, I have to tend to ache in my own heart. Even a clean loss leaves a wound.
I return home, carry the flowers to the backyard, and get to work. Why am I doing this? I think. My dad won’t be entertaining anytime soon. I’m flying back to Chicago in a couple days. Will anyone even see this garden?
Yet something compels me to keep working, to keep weeding and digging and planting. I don't know what will come of this work, how soon the weeds will return or the rabbits will come to gnaw at the flowers’ buds. But sometimes hope looks like dirt under your fingernails and sweat on your brow.
As each plant settles itself into the earth, their stems gradually bending toward the sun, I clap the soil off my hands and take a step back to evaluate my work. I shake my head and shrug my shoulders. This garden is nothing like it once was, I think.
But it’s something.
Small and incomplete, this little plot of ground is my offering, a way to glimpse what one day will be.
*While written in present tense here, this story took place over a decade ago.
**This section adapted from an earlier post that can be found here.
[1] Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue: A True Story (New York: Levine Querido, 2020), 122.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Cara de Silva, ed. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), x.
[4] Ibid, xvi.
[5] J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf By Niggle,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 100-120.
[6] Ibid, 7.
[7] Ibid, 9.
[8] de Silva, ed. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin, xliii.
