The Backyard

This Mother’s Day weekend, I spent part of the afternoon cleaning up my backyard: weeding and trimming and getting ready to plant new things. I bought two new clematis plants with large white flowers to help disguise a pole I’ve always disliked. My backyard is unquestionably my favorite part of our home.

When we bought this house a decade ago, it needed quite a bit of work (and still does), but the backyard felt full of possibility. Michael had a patio put in for me, specifically, with string lights overhead, a cozy sectional, a large picnic table, hooks for hanging flowers, and landscaping full of my favorite blooms: hydrangeas, lilacs, peonies, and hibiscus. We planted trees. Added a swing set. Slowly, it became a sweet little tucked-away oasis that I loved. It is nowhere near finished. It still needs work. But I love every inch of it.

A transplanted peony in my yard. I love this plant so much and it has ties to people and places I love. Their blooms are so short lived, but so beautiful, and I love watching them unfold year after year.

Particularly during the deepest years of Brady’s illness, this backyard became incredibly important to me. At the time, our lives had become so medically fragile and emotionally consuming that leaving the house often felt impossible. Friendship started to feel like something that belonged to other people. Even the simplest plans carried layers of logistics, stress, uncertainty, and exhaustion. We stopped eating out. We rarely had company. One summer I don’t think I even sat outside, once. I grieved all of this deeply.

There are some forms of grief that arrive long before death. The grief of isolation. The grief of watching your world shrink. The grief of realizing your life no longer resembles what it once did. The grief of realizing your life will not follow the trajectory you once imagined. The grief of watching your child suffer. I think my family understood how desperate I was for some small sense of beauty and normalcy, because even in the middle of survival mode, they worked hard to give me my peaceful little refuge. Ironically, though, I almost never used it for its intended purpose. The whole idea had been to create a place where I could still invite friends over and maintain some version of a normal social life while caring for Brady. A place where people could gather, laugh, and linger while my real life unfolded quietly in the background just beyond the back windows. But life rarely unfolds according to its original blueprint.

None of that ever happened. Instead, the backyard became something else entirely. It became the place where Brady and I could quietly sit together in total privacy after hard days. It became the place where I could step outside for a few minutes and feel the sun on my face when everything inside me felt tight and overwhelmed. It became the place where my girls could still have birthday parties and ordinary childhood joy while Brady rested inside and I moved quietly back and forth between worlds.

I have some happy memories with Brady in that backyard. Brady spent so much time with his friends in the backyard during those final years that his body still cooperated. We planted flowers and lilac bushes together with Taylor Swift playing on repeat. We raked leaves into giant piles and admired our giant sycamore leaves. We sat under the patio lights listening to music while the dogs wandered around us. We experimented with chairs until Brady had a few comfortable options to choose from.

Hanging out with cousins. Brady’s weight always fluctuated wildly. Here, we were in a bad downward weight spiral. He was having a terrible time with dyskinesia and was so frail. But he still loved to be outside and spend time with people he loved.

End of the school year party line dancing for the girls. I loved being able to do this for them; I would set up the party and pop in and out, in and out from our living room to backyard to make it work.

Sprinkler fun with Bucky Waffles. Brady loved spending time with his dogs.

I love our wildlife, too. We have ten bird feeders, some bee houses, and an entire chickadee colony living in our yard. There are squirrels constantly causing chaos with our dogs, two ducks who stop by regularly, and a possum who occasionally appears at night like an awkward little backyard employee making her rounds. I love all of it.

Brady loved his swing set. When he was little, he would swing endlessly, launching himself off of it in dramatic leaps and flips that once nearly knocked out his two front teeth and required emergency dental work. He loved movement and adventure. The feeling of flying. As his illness progressed and his body changed, the swing changed too. When he could no longer safely use a regular swing, we bought an adaptive one. And when he outgrew that version, we bought another adaptive swing that could support him differently. And then eventually, there came a day when he could no longer use that one either, and I took it down. There is something so brutal about those moments as a parent. The constant adapting and endless recalibrating. The silent recognition that another small piece of your child’s world has slipped away.

One year, Consumers Energy came to cut down one of my trees to allow room to work on overhead wires. I begged them not to do it. I pleaded for alternatives. Neighbors offered access through their own yards to avoid removing the tree. I made calls for days trying to appeal the decision. I cried in front of complete strangers trying to explain why this mattered so much to me, and they remained entirely unmoved. At one point, they said they could cut down the entire hedge if they wanted to. I sat there and watched them cut down that beautiful old tree, which had been planted in the 1940s. With complete certainty, I can say the tree did not need to come down. I still look at the bald spot where it once stood, a gap that will take decades to fill back in, and sometimes I wonder if any of those workers ever think about the devastated woman standing in her backyard crying over a tree. They could not understand. But it was never really about the tree. Is it ever?

That backyard had become one of the only places where I could fully exhale. It offered privacy and safety. A place where I could sit with my son during the most traumatic years of our lives and still feel sheltered from the outside world. Having someone stomp into that space, uninvited, with chainsaws buzzing felt deeply violating. I still miss that tree. It was a hemlock. It had two large nests near the top.

Right before Brady died, in early September, we went to a local flower shop together because I absolutely love planting perennials. I love the idea that something can disappear all winter long and then suddenly push back through the dirt when spring returns. That day, Brady and I picked out six little Veronica plants because he recognized the name from a Marvel character and laughed when he saw the tag. He always liked the name Veronica. I knew exactly what he was thinking: Tony Stark’s “Veronica, give me a hand!” in Age of Ultron. So we bought them. It was late in the season, and they were on clearance. We planned to plant them while the girls were at school. But then Brady died. And after he died, I barely stepped into the backyard for months.

Winter came. I never pruned back my beloved hydrangeas. Everything felt neglected and impossible and completely beyond my ability to care about. Grief can make even the smallest tasks feel unbearable. But sunshine and warm temperatures do amazing things for my mental state, and this weekend I finally tackled some things. I realized all six Veronica plants had died sitting in their little nursery containers, unplanted and unwatered from September to May. I threw them away with a deep sigh.

Veronica was the codename for the system designed by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to subdue the Hulk in Age of Ultron. It’s why Brady likes the name Veronica. Here is our new batch of Veronicas.

Our original Veronicas did not survive the winter. But maybe that is not the point. I went to the same store and bought six new pink Veronicas, the same plants we had chosen last September. Not because they replace the ones Brady picked out. They do not. And not because grief is over. It is not. But because somewhere underneath all this heartbreak, I still want to plant things and watch them grow. I still want to delight in spring and what it brings back. I still want to spend time in my backyard with my family where I once planted flowers with Brady tucked beside me in his wheelchair and Detroit Lions blanket. The backyard where he once flipped off swings and ran through sprinklers and threw tennis balls for his dogs.

We decided to replace the patio furniture this year, too. That was a harder decision for me than I expected, but in the end we realized there were simply too many memories attached to it. Grief is strange that way. Some things become incredibly precious after loss. Others become too heavy to keep looking at every day. Sometimes they are both.

Michael offhandedly commented recently that Brady and I were both naturally good at joy, and I think that is true. It is a helpful skill. We could turn almost anything into an adventure. We could laugh in terrible situations. We could still find beauty in places other people might overlook entirely. I loved that we shared that quality. It is one of the things I miss most about him. He always understood me in our shared, slightly obnoxious optimism.

I do not think giving up honors Brady, my joy-seeking ray of sunshine. I do not think disappearing into despair reflects the boy he was or the life he lived. So I put one foot in front of the other and I try to honor him in my words and actions and thoughts. I try to grieve not as someone without hope, because I do have hope. Somewhere in catastrophic grief, God became more real to me, not less. His mercy feels more tangible to me now. Heaven feels closer. Eternity feels less theoretical and more like home waiting just beyond my line of sight.

I remember the day Brady started preschool. I had been so worried about him. Would he be scared? Would he make friends? Was he ready? Meanwhile, Brady marched right into that classroom without looking back. He loved every second of it. And I think losing him felt strangely similar in the end. I was the one clinging to the doorway. Brady was ready for what came next.

The moment Brady and I made eye contact as he was leaving this earth, I knew something with absolute certainty: this was not about me. He was ready. I knew he was not afraid. I knew he was sad to leave us, but I also knew he was ready to be free. And underneath all of my devastation was this overwhelming realization that Brady was never actually mine to keep. That maybe sounds harsh, unless you have loved someone deeply enough to understand that love is not possession. It is stewardship, it is presence, it is faithfully walking someone home for as long as you are given, and then freely opening your hands when it is time to let go.

Our backyard turned out so differently from what I originally imagined. It never became the entertaining space I envisioned, but it became something far more necessary. A refuge. A gathering place for our family. A quiet place to survive. A place where beauty still existed alongside heartbreak.

We never really had the time or ability to turn it into the beautiful retreat we originally envisioned, but somehow it became one anyway, at least to me. The lilacs Brady and I planted together are fresh with new blooms. The patio lights still glow at night. And six new Veronica plants are sitting in little nursery pots, waiting to be planted near Brady’s swing set.

Is this what hope looks like? It feels like hope. Not denying darkness. Not pretending suffering did not happen. Not minimizing the magnitude of our loss. Just knowing that love remains, fully intact. And choosing to believe something beautiful can still grow.