Lessons in Resilience from a Half-Dead Garden Plant

I’m honestly not sure when this plant burst into bloom. This will be my second spring season in this home, the first place I’ve lived with a yard of my own, and I have treasured getting to have steady and personal relationships with the plant life that grows on the little plot of land that I’m honored to tend. This plant, in particular, has been challenging though. It gives very mixed signals and often looks like it is all but dead only to begin blossoming just a matter of weeks later. Large sections of the plant have had to be cut back. Not normal pruning, but extensive removals in order to salvage the living parts from being taken down with the sections that seem to be dying. And yet, here it is, offering up sorbet-colored flowers, seemingly out of nowhere, and I am beginning to feel like this plant is here to teach me something about resilience.

I too have had to undergo deep losses in order to preserve my overall wellbeing. An emergency removal of my appendix. Sections of my cervix cut away. Skin cancers removed from my leg and arms and face. I’ve had more biopsies than I can even keep track of at this point.

I told a friend of mine recently, half joking and half serious, that I feel like a science experiment sometimes.

I grew up with an ex-green beret father and, as a result, one of the worst feelings to me is the sense that I am fragile or needy.

I spent much of my childhood trying to prove to my dad how very tough I was. How much I could take without flinching or giving way.

Even years after his death, I would often cast myself into circumstances that tested my limits, both physically and emotionally, and overrode signals from my mind and my body that indicated that I was, in fact, human and subject to both needs and limitations.

It’s strange how, more than fear for my own well-being, my response to most of my health challenges has been shame. As if I am somehow less worthy or valuable because my body has weaknesses, and is, in some ways, more sensitive than others. 

There have been points where I have wanted to withdraw completely. I’ve fantasized about moving out into the middle of the desert, alone, and forsaking community life and connection just to avoid being confronted with the ways I feel different from other people. I would live in my little adobe home and it wouldn’t matter how many scars I accumulated or if I was too damaged to be loveable because it would just be me and the sand and rocks and wind. Maybe the people in the nearest town would tell stories about me, say that I’m a witch, or weave myths about why I was out in the middle of nowhere, all alone. 

Of course, I’m probably far too social of a creature to ever actually become the feral desert recluse in my fantasy, but sometimes it makes me feel better to imagine it. To make myself and all of my struggles into some larger-than-life character from a storybook, if only as a game that I play in my mind in order to feel powerful within circumstances that so often leave me feeling helpless. 

If I exile myself then no one else can reject me. I won’t have to see the look of discomfort or pity when someone notices my scars. Or feel someone pull away when they find that they can’t be in the presence of reminders of their own human fragility or mortality. I would never have to feel like my existence or honesty about my experience is burdensome.

But then I look at this plant in my yard. This scraggly little plant that is half-dead and half bursting with life, that keeps doing its best, trying to hang in there season after season. It doesn’t shrink with shame over the parts of it that are damaged or atrophied. It goes dormant when it must in order to conserve its energy, and then blooms in the places that it can, whenever it can. 

I think it knows something. That even when we’re struggling just to survive, life is still a gift. That even when we’re broken and have suffered great loss, we can still blossom, offer nectar and nourishment to the beings that are able to receive it, and unapologetically share our unique beauty, however unconventional it may be. 

I don’t know if this plant will eventually stabilize, if it will continue to struggle on in this way for years, or if it will some time soon give way to death. It’s a mystery that lives within the core of each of us, but is too uncomfortable to face for most. None of us know how long we have here or what will bring us to our inevitable end. Many of us will make it all the way to our last moment without giving it much thought at all. And maybe those people are the lucky ones.

But I’m finding that, amidst all of my struggles with my body, I’m coming to be more and more at peace with the thing that is perhaps the most true and most universal part of the experience of life, which is its impermanence. And maybe, despite all of the ways my physical being may be fragile, this makes me extraordinarily strong in ways that will transcend the time I have in this particular form. 

I can’t cling to my body or force it to exist beyond its limitations.

But I can infuse my spirit with a strength that will carry it through whatever comes its way, in this lifetime or the next. 

Part of Everything

I’ve never been good at smalltalk. I blame my father for that. 

After my mother moved out of our house just shortly before I turned seven, my sister and I started accompanying my father to work on occasions when he couldn’t find a babysitter. He was an emergency room doctor and often worked back-to-back shifts at emergency rooms all over the Houston metropolitan area.

My sister and I would stay in his on call room, eating vending machine food and watching TV from the hospital bed, while he worked. Sometimes we would play in the hospital hallways and distract the nurses. We just had to make sure that my father never caught us since, depending on his mood, his reaction could range from amusement to contempt.

Sometimes the drives between one hospital and the next took hours. Anyone who’s ever driven from one side of Houston to the other knows that it’s a sprawling beast of a city.

My dad was often exhausted from a combination of workaholism and sleep apnea and, since my sister pretty much always fell asleep a matter of minutes into any long drive, it became my job to sit up front and keep him from falling asleep at the wheel. 

Maybe it was because he was essentially trusting me to keep all of us alive, but on these drives, he never treated me like a kid. I was the copilot, a fellow soldier, and his confidant. 

We would sometimes listen to music or books on tape, but mostly we would just talk about anything and everything.

Death was something that came up a lot.

I remember him asking me what I thought happened after we die and how, when I told him I thought we were like gas being released from a jar, that we become part of everything, extending infinitely into space, he smiled softly and nodded, eyes still fixed on the road, calm as could be, almost as if he were daydreaming.

When he told me that he wanted to choose how he went, that he never wanted to be old or bed-ridden and that one day, he would choose when it was his time and go, I understood what he was saying and accepted it.

I don’t remember feeling any fear or sadness. It seemed like a fair choice and one that was his to make.

And I can’t say now that I feel differently, except that I’m not sure his plan accounted for the possibility that our birth and death and everything in between may be guided by forces so much bigger than we could ever wrap our minds around. And that to try to tamper with or control the very essence of our existence, the energies that cause our hearts to beat and our spirits to be drawn to everything that they are, might be absolutely futile.

That perhaps there are some things we are destined to go through in one form or another, for the growth and evolution of our souls. And that if we try to bypass these parts of our journey, we will only find ourselves rerouted again and again back to that same part of the path until we have the courage to walk down it.

I can’t know if this is true for certain, but it feels true from the depths of my being.

And I’m not  sure where he is right now. My father, in and of himself, was quite the force of nature.

Sometimes I think he’s everywhere at once, permeating every swath of existence.

Sometimes I think he’s living another life. Revisiting everything he loved and everything he wasn’t yet ready to meet in his last one.

I hope this time he feels like he can face it. 

Whatever it is.

I guess that’s something I hope for all of us.