Since Then
The mother my daughter never got to meet
Daisy never knew me as a gardener. She knew me as someone who occasionally bought flowers and then forgot to put them in water. Someone who could identify a rose, a tulip, and probably a hydrangea if the hydrangea was behaving very obviously. I didn’t know the difference between compost and mulch. I had no strong opinions about soil and didn’t know anyone else did either.
She never saw the garden I have now—the beds crowded past the point of reason, the tomatoes escaping their cages, the sunflower forest, the trellis waiting for morning glories and moonflowers. She never saw me walk through it at dawn to see what opened or ripened overnight.
She never knew me as a person with chickens, which feels particularly unfair because she would have loved them. She never met Feather Locklear, Hen Affleck, Emily Chickinson, Benechick Cumberbatch, Eggward Norton, Yolko Ono (R.I.P.), or Chickolas Cage (R.I.P.). She never watched James offer them gravel as a tribute. She never heard me call Emily’s name into the dark.
She never knew me as someone who took yoga seriously. She never saw me breathing through something difficult while sweat ran into my eyes. She never knew I would spend hours learning the names of muscles I didn’t know I had or become the sort of person who casually says "fascia" in conversation.
She never knew me as someone who wrote things down. When Daisy was alive, I didn’t have a newsletter. I didn’t photograph wet chickens or dead hornets. I didn’t spend Wednesday afternoons moving one sentence back and forth like furniture. She never knew me as a writer. She never knew I would write about her.
It’s easy to list the visible things she missed—the garden, the chickens, the tattoo on my arm, the muscles I didn’t have, the short hair that became a way of life after it started as a gesture for a child who had lost hers to chemo. Those are the obvious versions.
She also never knew the woman who survived her. I hate that sentence. It sounds too neat, almost admirable—as though survival were something I chose instead of something my body kept doing without consulting me.
She never knew the woman who learned to say, “My daughter died,” and remain standing. The woman who could still answer a school email, make dinner, buy shoes, forget the milk, dig potatoes, laugh at something stupid, and have a dead child. The woman who could be devastated and bored in the same afternoon. She never knew grief as one of my ordinary features.
She never knew me as someone trying this hard to become herself. I was thirty-eight when she died—old enough to think the major becoming had already happened. Since then I’ve discovered that I can keep becoming myself long after I thought the big decisions had already been made. I don’t think losing Daisy made me more myself. Grief does not improve people. But it stripped away enough of what I thought I knew that I had to start asking questions I’d avoided for years.
Who am I if I’m no longer the mother I expected to be?
What kind of life can I bear to build from here?
When Daisy was alive, I had already lost people—my father, my best friend Eugene. I understood, in theory, that the world could take someone and keep operating. But I didn’t know this way of existing—the physical kind. The kind that lives in the jaw and the sternum and the palm of the hand and the part of the brain that notices a little girl in a dress before it notices anything else in the room.
She knew a mother who believed, despite all available evidence, that vigilance might be enough. A mother who carried snacks and worried about car seats and fevers and whether I had packed her nail trimming scissors. A mother who still believed that the worst thing she could imagine would remain imaginary.
I sometimes wonder what she’d make of me now. Not in the way people ask what the dead would think. I don’t mean whether she would be proud. I mean whether she would recognize me.
My face is older. My hair is different. I have two daisies and a bee tattooed on my arm. There are lines around my mouth and eyes that she never saw. I wear clothes she would have opinions about. She had opinions about everything.
Would she understand the garden? Would she immediately accept the chickens as members of the family, or would she regard them with the same suspicion she reserved for squishy blueberries? Would she like the sunflower forest, or would the bees make her nervous? Would she be impressed by the potatoes, or merely ask whether we had any watermelon?
Would she know why I made all of this?
I do not want to turn the garden into a lesson she had to die to give me. I would trade every flower in it for five more minutes watching her sleep. I would salt the earth myself.
But she died, and afterward I became someone else. Not all at once—there was no clean break, no dramatic before-and-after photograph. Mostly I became someone else by continuing to wake up.
I planted things. I started noticing small changes because large changes had become unbearable. A seedling pushing through soil. A new leaf. A bud loosening. The first bee sleeping inside a flower. None of this healed me—I distrust anything that claims to heal grief. But it gave my attention somewhere to go for a few minutes at a time.
I began writing because my friend Kathryn told me to. I kept writing because there were things I could not carry without language. I kept making jokes because language without jokes felt like another room I couldn’t breathe in. I named the chickens and deadheaded the flowers and wrote about my dead daughter, then pivoted to a salacious retelling of a rooster and hen’s torrid love affair because both things were true on the same day.
She knew that I noticed things and could make an event out of almost nothing. She knew I was easily delighted and easily devastated, sometimes by the same thing. She knew I cared too much about tiny details and also forgot to close the refrigerator door. She knew I was funny when I was scared and impatient when I was hungry. She knew I could become obsessed with a project that had not existed the previous afternoon and might not survive the night.
Every year puts more distance between the mother she knew and the woman I am. I pick up references she wouldn’t understand. I make decisions and develop new habits, new fears, new strengths, new ways of feeling lonely and being seen. New ways of arranging my face when someone says something unbearable. People enter my life who never knew her, including people who now know me in ways she never had the chance to.
I expected to miss her future. I knew I would miss the person she would have become. I understood that grief would include losing every later version of her. I did not understand that she would also miss every later version of me.
Children are supposed to watch their parents become people. They are supposed to discover, slowly and with some irritation, that their mothers had lives before them and continue having lives around them. They are supposed to notice the new haircut, mock the new hobby, complain about the music, borrow the clothes, reject the advice, and recognize the aging.
This is one of the loneliest things about outliving my child: there is no longer anyone on the other side of that particular mothering. Other people knew me when Daisy was alive. They saw us together. But no one else knew me as her mother from inside the relationship.
James knows me as his mother. He knows the version who gardens, writes, practices yoga, and sometimes cries when a little girl appears unexpectedly. He knows a mother for whom grief has always been present, even if he doesn’t yet understand its shape. Daisy knew the mother who believed vigilance might keep her children safe. James knows the mother who no longer believes that, but keeps watching anyway.
I imagine the mother Daisy knew meeting the mother James knows. The first would probably be frightened by the second. The second would look at the first with a tenderness so violent it might resemble anger. She would want to warn her. She would want to climb back inside her life and remain there, packing snacks, brushing bangs, still believing the worst thing she could imagine would remain imaginary.
But she would also see things the earlier woman could not. The sunflower forest. The chickens. The words arriving week after week. James running through the yard. The strange fact that joy came back not as a betrayal, but as itself.
She would see that the life after Daisy was still a life with Daisy in it. Not as a lesson or a sign or a flower appearing at the edge of the driveway, but as structure.
Daisy is built into the woman I became after her—in the way I notice, the way I worry, the way I love James with fear braiding through it. She is in the jokes I make when the room becomes too serious. She is in the impulse to stop and look closely, to take the picture, to call someone over before the thing changes. She is in the garden, not because each flower represents her, but because I am the person tending it.
I keep becoming someone my daughter never met. And still, every later version begins with her.
Stunning.
"I understood that grief would include losing every later version of her. I did not understand that she would also miss every later version of me." : stunning. What a beautiful text.