Written by Kevin O’Connor
March 23rd
The world ripens to bright and brighter green. The winter of long grey silence and cold dark loneliness fades to forgetting and budding life takes hold; whispering through the soil as hard ground softens and opens.
My bitter kernel of a heart recalls a land of fidelity and hope; a land which I have known and to which I now return as a weary prodigal. Though long months have left me hollowed with exility, and the thoughts I harboured on those dark nights carried twisted frightening meanings, I am returned now to a homeland. Though the Winter has exacted a harsh penance, the Spring redeems the soil and soul, and nourishes the tender dormant life beneath the surface.
I have decided to make a practice of writing here. Something to carry me through this fresh cycle of seasons. With you gone, my only recourse is to pour my heart out in ink. The notebook was not a special purchase. Rather, I found it forgotten, exiled to the obscurest corner of my bookshelf, filled only with empty pages. There seemed an honour in rescuing it and giving it purpose. I felt proud to change the fate of the little book. When I opened it to the first page, I titled it on a whim: The Gardener’s Diary.
March 24th
The heart in Winter: a cobweb.
The heart in Spring: a flower opening.
March 27th
Today, I walked the garden. As the days lengthen and as the air loses its chill, I will walk it more and more in ritual motion. My soft unhurried footsteps circling widdershins round the perimeter; the first of the myriad footsteps which I know will wear again that path of flattened grass which the garden has known before, though there is but one to walk it this time. You are acutely present in your absences. The empty chair, the empty bed, the joke unshared, the lips unkissed. The phantom pain stings at my heart. I miss you.
March 28th
The garden is well. The Winter frosts were mild this year. It was lovely to walk again the fine leafy way of blackthorn and rhododendron in the Spring sunshine. Your honeysuckle still tangles through the hedges. Rowan trees still proffer rubescences of berries for blackbirds to peck at. The sea-holly, planted merely to pluck the teeth from the prevailing wind, has come back as hardy as ever, and I am grateful for its shelter and its privacy.
My vision drifted and dithered through the garden and paused in fancy here and there to trace the complex involutions of the petals and florets of flowers. My fingers rubbed at the vibrant green of waxen leaves and at the rosemary and blackcurrants which left their scents lingering pleasantly on my hands. I listened to the whittering of birdsong and the buzzing of bees and found it joyful and invigorating; more sacred than a hallelujah.
March 29th
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
—Wallace Stevens
Rereading yesterday’s entry I was reminded of this line. You were more a lover of prose than poetry, but you liked that one. I miss being able to share a line with you, that I thought would catch your fancy, and I miss making you laugh and smile. Your laugh and smile were the measure of a good day. I feel their lack as a dull ache; a little discomfort of which I’m always aware, like a stone caught in my shoe. On the shore of Rossnowlagh beach, when the wind and the light are just so, I feel the empty space where you should be, and I see your smile in the hammered curve of coastline.
These days my reading is all rereading. The time behind me stretches far further than the time ahead. I shall never read War & Peace, though I long harboured the intent, and made abortive efforts once or twice. I shall never see the Parthenon, though I promised I would take you one day, during the long Summer when we were twenty-five, when I fell in love with you and when you, to my surprise, fell in love with me. It seems so long ago, and it feels like only yesterday: your voice that I would follow anywhere, so articulate and kind; your eyes that swam with mischief and laughter; your skin coppered by long days of sunshine; the curve of your body caught in the curve of mine with a unity and ease I had never expected to know. The mother you became and the father that I learned I could be when Clara arrived. The little miracle of our daughter. I recall the thousand different ways we said, “I love you”, in speech and in action. Long years later, I love you still as deeply or deeper still.
March 30th
I slept little last night and drank too much coffee in the morning. In the afternoon, I tried to read but all seemed dull and lifeless. All fiction feels fraudulent in certain moods. I read the mass cards and the condolences again and recalled the relief of the first day, weeks after you passed, when no one called or wrote or visited to “just see how I was doing”. I recalled the loneliness of the second such day and the loneliness of so many such days after.
April 3rd
George Herbert inspired me to finally do the weeding: “For Preservation is a Creation; and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment.” A great poet and becoming more and more a favourite of mine. More and more of my Creation is Preservation these days. When I visit Doctor Burke, as I increasingly must, she talks to me about quality of life. Her goals have turned from curative to ameliorative. I suppose that is the way of things. I trust her to preside over my personal disintegration.
Even this diary is a mere Preservation of my fleeting thoughts and moods, and of the quotidian events in my world, which the years have shrunk smaller and smaller. Perhaps when I’m gone, someone will pick this volume up, slim and unassuming though it is, and will parse through and discover the person I have aged into, a person known to so few now; an old man, sentimental and tired and wishing he could be of use. Then again, perhaps no one will open it at all. Perhaps, I am the only one who will ever read these words. Perhaps, I am the only one, singly and uniquely in the world, who would care to.
April 6th
Is boredom anything less than the sensation of one’s faculties slowly dying?
—John Berger
April 7th
Worked in the garden. There is simple pleasure in clean air and fresh growth and dirt caught beneath the crescents of fingernails.
April 9th
Beginning this diary, I wrote that “I am returned now to a homeland” and I hoped that through the act of writing it I would come to believe it. The cliché turns out to be true: home is where the heart is. My heart belongs to you. I think that I am coming home soon. I am very tired these days, though I know there is yet much work for me to do in the garden, and I have much that I must yet tell Clara; that I love her; that I am proud of her; that if she ever wonders what value her life has had, and we all wonder now and then, she made us happier and more loving and more giving than I had ever thought possible. The days working in my study while she played on the carpet or sat reading in the window-seat, her small face compressed thoughtfully, are among the happiest of my life. I suppose it’s nothing I haven’t said before, but it feels important all the same. Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps my strength is gathering.
*
I didn’t know you long, Granda, and I don’t know that I can write like you could, but I read your diary, and I cared. Mum found it, after your heart attack. The sudden death that came to you one day in your beloved garden. This diary became a treasure to her. Of course, there is sadness in it and a terrible grief, but love too, always so much love. Mum’s gone now too and for the first time I have known the bitter depths of grief with which you grappled. I can only admire your strength and aspire to endure the pains of life with such dignity as you did.
I was very small when you died and have few true memories of you, though our little time together left me with a warm impression. I think I remember your laugh, which came quick and easy, wheezing and honest and gutty, and I always suspected you were a good man. I am proud to have my suspicions confirmed. I love you, Granda. I haven’t prayed since I was very small, but I’ll say a prayer for you; a prayer that you are at peace; a prayer that you are together again.
Love always, your grandson,
H.
Writer’s Statement: The Gardener’s Diary is a quiet elegy for what is lost and a tender embrace of what remains. Through the rustle of leaves and the patient growth of flowers, it traces the seasons of the heart—where grief and love bloom side by side. With the gardener’s hand, we sift through the soil of memory, seeing the commonplace transfigured and the ordinary sanctified. This story does not seek to explain sorrow, nor does it claim to offer answers, but rather invites us to sit with it, to feel its weight and beauty in equal measure. It is about the things we leave behind—through both the cultivation of growth in the garden and the cultivation of love in one another—and the fragile, quiet hope that even in the shadow of loss, life finds a way to persist. Through its reflection on aging, love, and the inevitable passage of time, the diary offers us a gentle reminder: that in the space between the seasons of our lives, there is always room to grow.
Edited by Carmen Rueda Lindemann, Illustrated by Aneri Patel