I was listening to a podcast in the spring of 2020, three years after we lost Abbie. In a side story, the guest commented that someone once told her that the worst things take about twelve years to fully recover from. Hers was a long view that offered both consolation and despair. This Easter Sunday marks eight years since our worst day. If the podcast guest is right, I am just two thirds through. But I am beginning to appreciate the way that rising can take years.

In that first summer of numbing grief, my friend Jolyn took me out to a greenhouse that specialized in succulents. We laughed and planted and went home with a bit of knowledge and dirt under our nails. I went back for a winter class to learn about propagation and caring for them long term. Every spring and fall since, I dump the pots out, clean up the plants, reconfigure them, and propagate the dropped leaves into new hope. These desert plants are tough and each leaf is a seed that can recreate itself in a season. I have needed their fast and seasonal care to mirror my own.

Half-way through these eight years, we moved and found ourselves with an unfinished yard We have slowly done the work of mapping out grass and garden spaces, The raised beds hold vegetables, and some perennials and fruit trees are slowly growing the deep roots that allow for splitting and pruning. Yards take years to grow into themselves, and the work has to be paced out across many growing seasons, with fall and winter rests. This kind of rising is slower than the succulents, but no less instructive.

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Rising is not like constant, linear progress. It’s more organic and embodied, I think. If Easter is about dying as well as resurrection, then I shouldn’t be surprised that the new life is as earthy as the death. Rot has to be cleared away, dry bones rehydrated, muscles reacclimatized to movement. Resistance needs to fall away. These things take time and practice, at least in my experience of my own humanity.

In the first few years, there was so much bare survival. Taking just the next necessary step. Keeping things as simple as possible. Letting go of everything non-essential. Getting extremely familiar with discomfort and pain. 

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Gradually, it felt like I could do more than survive my life. The wounds had turned to scars, still jagged and tender, but less debilitating. I could see and touch and taste a life beyond them. There were new roots and new leaves, in with the ones that had been destroyed and uprooted. It would have been too soon to cut them away without doing more damage, so I needed to carry them both.

In the last few years, there has been so much new growth that it was time to clear out more of the wreckage. In those first years, letting go of that weight felt impossible because it felt like all we had left of her life. But the years between have revealed how close she always is, how beautiful the world can be as our hearts keep beating. She is with me more in my joy that I ever imagined possible. 

Rising from tragic loss has not been a one-time occurrence, a single and revolutionary miracle. It has been a slow and circular ascent, with several inconvenient rough patches. It requires my assent as well as my receptivity. Maybe this is why my plants seem to do better when I talk to them, touch them gently, watch for the signs of what they need.

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It is a lovely gift that this year, the anniversary of Abbie’s ascent into eternity falls on Easter Sunday. The last post I made on social media that Abbie interacted with was a photo of tulips with a quote from Norman Cousins: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” 

May the rising work continue to root out the dying that stops us from living with deep joy.