Weeding the Garden ("A Study into Life Before Death")

He began by clearing the lawn. It had become so overgrown with weeds that the grass itself had begun to die off, and that wouldn’t do. After that came the borders; straggly perennials knotted around rocks and lost tennis balls, borders blurred as the grass crept into the beds.

 Most of the time, he was angry. Two decades - perhaps more if he dwelt on it for too long - he’d worked his way up to this. Research grant secured, carefully curated team on board. And now, he’d lost it all. Through no fault of his, either. Perhaps it was his own biology laughing at him for trying to decipher it.

In the early weeks of being stuck at home, he would plough through a border or two, tearing out weeds and lumping them in a wheelbarrow. But this soon proved to be ineffective – any remaining root complexes would simply sprout again. If he wanted to really get rid of them, he had to spend time clearing around the tap root and easing it gently out of the dirt. He found his anger felt further away when he did it like that.

After weeks of digging out stones and re-levelling the soil, it eventually started to look smart. He was surprised at this new sense of pride he felt when he looked over it.

Most people in his situation would travel – see the world before the clock got to zero. But he was high risk, and most airlines wouldn’t let him fly, so homebound it was.

All through the first few months of his absence, people would call with questions, information. With a diagnosis like his, it was hard to see it as anything other than chatter. Ex-students, family, and old colleagues ranked amongst the most determined. They’d ask about his research, if he would be coming to Martha’s 58th, if he had any cash to spare. Some would ask him to read their dissertations. Dutifully, he worked his way through each of those, one by one. He offered feedback and comments and everything he used to do before. He didn’t have to help them. He didn’t even have to speak to them. It took him a few months to realise that when your days are numbered, you can spend them doing whatever you want, and there isn’t a whole lot anyone can say about it.

There was one afternoon he remembered clearly – a gorgeous, mild evening, when the heat from the sun still lingered on the patio stones. He was working in his study as dinner cooked, just like he used to before the diagnosis. The consistency gave him as much peace as it did grief. This time however, he found himself impatient. Out the window, he could see a patch on the hedge he’d missed in his pruning that afternoon. It was fine. A job for tomorrow perhaps. He looked back to his computer screen.

But every time he tried to focus on the article in front of him, his gaze was drawn back up – back to the prickly section of cherry laurel, and the secateurs sitting on the grass beside it.

The sun would soon be going down, he’d need to sort it now or not at all.

With a huff, he rose from the seat and plodded out into the garden. He beelined for the hedge and spent the next ten minutes neatening it up. Then he noticed the opposite hedge – it struck him how pleasant the garden would look if both were trimmed symmetrically. So, he spent another hour doing that.

By that time, the air was quite cool again, and very pleasant. He cleared away the trimmings and hung the secateurs back up in the shed. From the low-rise wall by the herb beds, he admired his handiwork. Even had a drink as the sun set.

He went to bed without a second thought about the work waiting for him in the study. For the first time in a month, he woke in the morning without a headache.

He kept this practice up for a few more weeks, preferring to spend his evenings in the summer air. He would eat out there, take his laptop out to work; one night he even tried sleeping under the willow tree, but woke up with too many mosquito bites to hazard it again without better protection.

Then he received an email he couldn’t ignore. It was from a professor he’d worked with at St Gilbert’s School. Apparently, she was in dire need of a proofreader – something about an internationally published article for a paper he’d never heard of. Having spent a solid week away from his computer, perhaps it was time to catch up with the world again. So, he sat down and read it through. It was well-written but failed to keep his interest. He told her as much in a reply email and left it there. She’d be irritated, of course, she was famously particular about things like that.

In his defence, he’d spent the day digging up an oversized Duranta and foolishly left it lying on top of his flowering irises. It needed moving as soon as possible. And he could see his tools lying abandoned by the dug-up earth and they’d rust if he left them out as the dew collected on the grass.

If his colleague cared so much, she could be patient, or she could edit the article herself. Technically, a stipulation he’d made in his research proposal declared that he wouldn’t take on any other work while he completed his research. He could always refer her to that. After taking care to hide his diagnosis, most people still thought he was working with the grant money to make his name as a world class geneticist. The woman from St Gilberts didn’t bother him again.

His fondness of the plants only grew, and so did his disappointment when autumn, and subsequently winter, came. Of the twelve months he’d been granted, these seasons became a weight on his shoulders. He refused to spend the time in melancholy however – by December the house was full of various saplings and seedlings: his personal domestic jungle. The plants didn’t seem too bothered. The wisteria in particular took a liking to its placement on the kitchen windowsill – a week of not paying enough attention and the plant had made it to the ceiling, knotting itself so tightly around the curtain rail he didn’t have the heart to separate them. Instead, he removed the curtain and settled for breakfasts bathed in filtered green light.

March came, and the plants were bursting out the door. So eager were they to set root in the earth, he found a few had pushed around the linoleum in the kitchen, with others establishing themselves through the tiles of the pantry. By that point, it was too sunny to bother with clearing up inside and so the plants stayed.

He knew now the garden would be a life-long project, and with the remaining few months ahead of him, maybe he could do something good with it. As time passed, things got progressively harder. He required a cane and had more than tripled his medication. It was a slow process, but it was catching up to him. Oddly, he wasn’t as frightened as he expected. He could hobble around the garden and feel pride – he felt that the life in the garden was as fond of him as he was of it – and so they cared for each other.

As soon as the weather was stable enough, he had a beehive installed against the back garden fence. The men who came to set it up asked if he was alright, if he lived alone. He answered with a smile, said he was house sitting for his daughter in-law.

At first, it was the idea of honey that was appealing, but the longer he watched the little insects mumble from flower to flower, the happier he was to leave them to it. He welcomed the company as he pottered around himself, weeding this and pruning that. He even planted them a bed of lavender, overshadowed by a buddleia – the butterflies and bees flutter-buzzed around each other, and he no longer felt his isolation so acutely.

Most of his colleagues hadn’t heard from him since last July. The diagnosis came in August, in the middle of the summer break. He’d taken the summer off and simply hadn’t gone back. Not being the social type, he’d never gotten around to explaining why he wasn’t, and never would be, returning. Besides, what would they do? Fire him? Hardly the worst thing in the world. Since he didn’t expect anyone would ever hear from him again, he wrote some final thank-yous and fuck-yous and sold his computer.

By June, he was finished. The garden wouldn’t get any better and he only had a little while left. The pain made waking up more and more difficult. He had written up his findings by hand. It wasn’t quite the research paper he’d wanted, but it was something better, he thought. A Study into Life Before Death, was his affectionate name for it.

The final thing to do was to find the best place. He had a few in mind throughout the garden, but almost by chance, a single afternoon spent under the willow made up his mind. It was a simple process – crushed painkillers swilled through a glass of elderflower cordial.

Leaving the kitchen-window-wisteria in charge of the house, he took the glass to his chosen spot. A ploughman’s lunch later, he lay back against the tree and looked up through the branches. He couldn’t see the sky, though found himself relieved. Between the narcissus and oxeye daisies, he rested.

Pollen settled on his dozing shoulders, the beehive buzzing his lullaby as the sun set behind the willow. Over the next few weeks, he sank deep into the dirt, softened into the soil. The garden flourished that summer, nurtured and vibrant with life. He would have been proud to see it.