Grief is Yellow

Why are ghost gardens so beautiful?

“Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” Proverbs 14:13.

My memories of spring are haunted by yellow.

Our first house was a little yellow double-wide. Our front walk was filled with flowerbeds. I remember specifically the marigolds, yellow and orange, bursting with life from the end of the walk. We left that place when I was ten, the only home I had ever known. We left our gardens and our trees, the popcorn ceiling and the lavender printed wallpaper. I left my first cat buried under the cedar tree. My family left memories, heavy ones as well as joyful ones. We left it all to people who didn’t care to make it beautiful, didn’t care to plant flowers or take care of the trees. They cut them down and chopped up our fruit trees to plant new ones. It doesn’t strike me as painful to drive by now. It doesn’t look like home.

We did take our dog, Chewy, a giant golden mutt-beast who blossomed into a new creature as he gained his freedom deep in the countryside. We built him a pen, afraid he’d run off like he used to. That pen became the fence for our garden, and he roamed a free and noble creature.

When he grew old, his fur faded from vibrant gold to a pale gray-ish yellow, like faded flowers. I remember him on the patio bathing in the light of the sunset, looking out over his property. The warm setting sun filled him with its glow, his brown eyes watching the fading sky as I stroked his face.

His patch of dirt in our little orchard is always covered in dandelions.

We also took our yellow cat. His name was Buddy.

My mum’s piano has many little figurines of yellow cats. She had a cat when she was in high school named Buttercup who loved her piano and her students. Students had brought her figurines, and she had kept them. When we had Buddy, he too liked the piano and the students, so more little figurines came.

Buttercups were my favorite flower. There was a summer our entire hay field was filled with wild buttercups, much to my dad’s dismay. It was beautiful. Even once he mowed and raked it, the weeds around the pond were full of them.

The last time my grandpa went fishing, I had brought my sketchbook, and made a little watercolor painting of the buttercups around the pond bank. We found a matching set of deer antlers that day, and I’ve kept them ever since.

He died shortly before his birthday, in the spring, after a long fight in the nursing home. They drove the funeral procession out to the farm, the place he had labored and given up so much of his life. It was bright and sunny that day. It’s always strange how we notice the weather on days like that. If it’s sunny we curse the cruel mockery, but if it rains we feel justified in misery.

They fired off the twenty-one gun salute, and twenty-one copper-gold shotgun shells fell to the ground.

My grandma approached his casket and kissed his forehead, whispering, “I will see you again soon.”

She died three months later.

Grandma’s funeral wasn’t nearly the ordeal Grandpa’s was. Half the fun for her was getting to meet and greet everyone. There was no point, she reckoned, in a bunch of people coming to visit you when you’re dead.

My relationship with my grandma was interesting, to say the least. I am sandwiched in between all her grandkids and great grandkids, and as such she would sometimes forget who I was. Despite living very close, she never had much to do with me, and I only ever spent the night at her house once, though I brought them deviled eggs every Sunday. She was a very interesting woman, and I could spend hours listing all her odd quirks.

I had been asked to play my violin at both funerals, and at Grandpa’s I had played a hymn in the little old church, all dressed in black. The request I was given for Grandma’s was different.

“It can’t all be sad,” my dad said. “She’s wouldn’t want that.”

You may call it irreverent, but the day of my grandma’s funeral, I wore a bright yellow buttercup dress. They asked me to play Amazing Grace, of course, and then they asked me to play I’ll Fly Away. I put them together into something quite lively.

It must have been a strange sight; forty some-odd people all dressed in black trying to squish in at a graveyard, all eyes fixed on a tent where next to a casket stood a girl in a bright yellow dress playing the fiddle, tears pouring down her face. I remember thinking, as the last chords rang out, that they must be beautiful. The tune was the finale of her life. The last chords were hers.

They held a time of remembrance during which some of the most ridiculous stories of my grandma were shared. There was a lot of laughing at that funeral, a lot of laughing through tears on that sunny day.

The house my grandparents lived in was a hazard to the highest degree. It had been moved at least once or twice, and resembled the Weasley’s in many regards. There were many rooms I never saw until after they were gone.

The house had to be burned one night. My dad watched his childhood home go up in one large, yellow blaze. I could not watch.

Most people experience grief as black. I’ve experienced black and dark blues in my life, but my grief, even the deepest, most bitter, has always been yellow. I think perhaps this is because of flowers.

I think it’s a shame that most people receive more flowers when they’re dead than they ever do when they’re alive. Every funeral is filled with talks of flowers, flowers from family, friends, flowers everywhere.

Ghost gardens are an Appalachian folklore tradition my mum used to tell me about. There are certain bulbed flowers, (think daffodils), that don’t appear in the wild. Someone had to plant them. You’ll be driving along in the mountains and see the stump of stone stairs and a brick fireplace— then daffodils. Sometimes the daffodils are all that’s left. Long after the house has rotted with termites and the names of the people who built their lives there have been forgotten, the flowers keep coming back where they were planted, year after year.

My grandma’s house has ghost gardens. There are still beds of yellow daffodils that keep coming back though her home and chicken coop and garden are all gone.

Today while calling a friend, my cat brought a bird into the house. It was alive, but barely. I locked the cat in another room, tucked my dress pants into some muck boots, and carried the little sparrow out into the field by the cedar tree.

The sun was so bright and beautiful today. I thought of this article, as I’ve been drafting it for a while. I noticed, scattered through the field as I carried the dying little bird, specklings of buttercups and dandelions. I set it down gently in the grass and stroked it a bit. “I’m sorry, little one.”

Not a sparrow falls without Him noticing.

One of the great paradoxes of my life has been how deeply intertwined are sorrow and joy. They are listed in the same verse in Ecclesiastes 3:4, “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” They are two sides to the same coin of the human experience. How often does laughter dissolve into tears, or tears into laughter?

Grief is not always a negative thing. When a man feels no emotion at the death of a loved one, we call him a psychopath. Grief, while having an unpleasant effect on the mourner, restrains us, reminds us of our mortality.

Grief is not black, it is yellow. Yet so is joy.

Joy is only deeper than happiness, is only wiser than grief, because it acknowledges that there is something more. That pain isn’t the end. That grief is temporary, but joy is not.

So for now, we give flowers to those we love while they may enjoy them. We give them flowers when they grieve, and flowers when they celebrate. Whether we drink joy or grief, we drink deeply, and we respect the ghost gardens.