What Gardening Offered After a Son’s Death
Deep in mourning, I thought, What if spring never returns?
By Yiyun Li
New Yorker
October 23, 2023
Excerpt:
“It’s rather vexing, isn’t it, not to know what flowers will come up next year?” I said to my friend Brigid, in a voice that sounded more like a character’s in a novel than my own. It was November, 2017, and my family had just moved into our house in Princeton. The trees were shedding their leaves, in a theatrical manner that was new to us—we had relocated from California to the East Coast four months earlier.
“There are some roses,” Brigid said. “Those look like lilies.”
“And those are hostas.”
There were six or seven rose bushes, with residual flowers, fuchsia-colored, shivering on top of the near-leafless branches. Lilies and hostas, their leaves already paled and half rotted by the cold autumn rain, remained recognizable. The rest of the garden was a wilted mystery, buried under fallen leaves.
I was not a character, but I was speaking like one for a reason: I was pondering a set of characters. I went on and told Brigid about a moment in “The Saga of the Century Trilogy,” by Rebecca West, about a British family living in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The eldest daughter in the family, Cordelia, newly wed, has moved into a pretty house in Kensington; when she has her two younger sisters over for a visit, she frets, with the leisure of a young woman married into respectability and stability, about not knowing whether the hawthorn tree in her garden will bear white, pink, or red flowers in the spring.
A few chapters later, the hawthorn tree blooms. By then, the little brother of the family, Richard Quin, still a teen-ager, has been killed in the Great War, ten days after arriving in France. “Killed, not missing?” Cordelia cries out in agony when she’s told the news. The hawthorn tree outside reveals the answer to the riddle from the winter before: the flowers are red.
It is a quick stroke in a trilogy. The first time I read it, I did not fully register the weight of the detail. But, moving into a house in the fall, studying a garden that would remain unknowable for the moment, I went back and reread the few paragraphs about the tree.
Richard Quin, in West’s trilogy, is killed in the same manner that one imagines Andrew Ramsay is killed in “To the Lighthouse”: “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]”
