Grief is a Weed

Another year without my mom

Snail Mail Giveaway

Pre-order All’s Fair in Love and Pickleball (in any format, from any bookseller) and submit your receipt and address below, and I’ll send you a handwritten note (and some stickers!) in the mail. Pen pals!

---

A few months ago, in a desperate attempt to find a tiny bit of joy amidst the grind of continuously awful, upsetting world news, I decided to grow some mint.

I come from a family of gardeners. All my grandparents had beautiful vegetable gardens; they grew their own food, dried their own spices, made me yank carrots out of the ground and pick green beans. My dad still grows tomatoes born from a lineage of seeds that originated from his own grandfather’s tomatoes. (Or “tahmaytahs,” if said with a Connecticut Italian-American accent like my grandparents’.)

My grandfather in his vegetable garden, with his trusty John Deere.

Alas, I am not a person who grows things. I don’t find gardening to be interesting or pleasurable. My personal flavor of ADHD brain likes to hyper-fixate, of course, but on the flip side, it loves to hyper-not even try to understand things that it finds remotely boring or confusing. It’s a real struggle for me to process things that require many different steps, and detailed instructions. Recipes, board game directions, math work sheets in elementary school… forget it. Baking — a relaxing meditation for some — is hell for me. Growing seedlings, tending to plants, understanding water, soil, sunlight, and space? Not happening. As much as it pains me, I will never be Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated.

But! The Meryl-esque fantasy of being Someone Who Gardens likes to drop by once every couple of years, and I respond by rushing out, buying a bunch of herbs, and subsequently under or over watering them to death as they roast in the sun and blossom with flowers I’m supposed to know to trim.

On this particular day the fantasy arrived on a wave of grief over the state of the world. I should have known better, but still, I went with it, and decided: MINT!

I knew a few things about mint, mainly that it’s incredibly invasive and practically impossible to kill. I reasoned that this obviously made it the perfect plant for someone like me, and I picked up a mint plant at my local gardening store. And then, because I was particularly delulu on this day, I grabbed a bag of mint seeds as well.

Back at home, I re-potted the plant, dumped some seeds into little pots of soil, soaked them with water and shoved them into a corner of the patio, and waited for the joy and relief to hit.

And sure enough, despite not once googling how to grow mint from seeds, something did indeed start to peek through the dirt.

I swear there is a little green in there somewhere.

The repotted plant, too, flourished. I barely had to do anything, and it was overflowing with mint!

Blurry photo of proof.

And then, of course, after a month or two, all of the seedlings died, mostly because I overwatered them into oblivion. Ironically, I forgot to water the potted plant, and that died too.

Almost.

Mint is essentially a weed. You’re supposed to only really plant it in a pot. In soil, it spreads by growing runners underground, that then root everywhere. It chokes out other plants, it can survive mowing and other attempts at its destruction. Mint is a beast. And despite my best attempts, I haven’t been able to kill it.

The mint, once essentially dead, has come back to life. The potted plant has been reborn with new, green growth. One seedling I planted has persevered, and is still hanging on. Behold:

Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of my mom’s death. This span of time feels incomprehensible; how has it been 18 years since she called me on the phone, or signed off on an email with her usual “xoxo”? When she died, Bush was President, and Tiktok was the sound a clock makes. The list of “Never Got To’s” is endless and enraging; she never got to meet my kids or my brother’s kids, see our weddings, witness grad school, careers, successes and failures. I never got to host her for the holidays, she never got to meet the friends I made later in adulthood. She never got to visit all the presidential libraries, like she wanted, or celebrate her 35th wedding anniversary with my dad (she missed it by three months). She and I never got to discuss Ben Affleck getting back together with Jennifer Lopez, and then breaking up again.

She would have loved dissecting this!

I have been observing the mint as it springs back to life on my patio, and marveling at how much it mirrors my grief. No matter what I do, grief also finds a way to hold on, to invade and spread.

I don’t think grief, and its persistence, is a bad thing. Or rather, over these 18 years I’ve come to know grief as just one side of a coin. When you flip it over, you have love. They’re two sides of the same coin, really. And love, too, can be a weed, if we let it. It will persevere, despite attempts to destroy it. Even when it seems like it’s died, it can grow back, blossom, and cover everything in its path. (My friend Marisa Renee Lee wrote a beautiful book all about this called, Grief is Love. I recommend it!)

I’ve been volunteering as much as I can at a donation hub for fire victims here in Los Angeles. As you can imagine, the city as a whole is in the throes of grief and loss. Actively supporting my community in this way has been more rewarding than I ever could have imagined. Above all, I’ve been blown away, and humbled, frankly, at how unconditional love is at the root of this and so many other community-centered and run offerings, fire-related and not. The other day, I helped a single mom of a newborn currently living out of a hotel find some body wash on a shelf. In return she told me I was a blessing from God. When I was done with my shift, I hid in my car and cried over the kindness of her words, the way she passed along love so openly to me.

I was despairing over the state of the world when I impulsively decided to grow mint, and just like the plant still sitting on my patio, my grief continues to ebb and flow, die out and blossom back to life. But if it can root itself permanently inside of me, so can love. My grief will never disappear; for my mom, for my community, for the world. But neither will my ability to love. It’s here to stay, and grow, and spread. Just like the mint.