RENEWAL | Lauren Klingman
I didn’t have a green thumb.
I was the person who managed to kill succulents, air plants, plastic plants…you name it. I smote them with too much love or too little water. Those plants that should have been indestructible turned brown and died.
No one was more surprised than I was when, almost one year into the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself standing beside two large planter boxes. It turned out there was an opportunity for any desired hobby in San Francisco. An urban garden offered up these containers for a monthly fee that cost more than a hospital parking spot, which I readily handed over.
Repurposed redwood made up the standing walls, chicken wire coated its bottom to prevent gophers from nibbling at future tasty roots. Rich dirt blanketed this, coming nearly to the top of the walls. I watched a worm pop up for air and then shove his head back into the velvety chocolate ground.
I stood looking down, a shovel in my hand, biting my lip. I had no idea what I was doing.
I was very late to this pandemic hobby game. But just because I hadn’t managed to bake sourdough or cross stitch, didn’t mean I couldn’t start now.
I was tired of death, of my part in it. My world felt like it was rotting from inside, like I was rotting. Like a fungus was inching its way up the walls of the hospital that couldn’t be stopped. I was covered with invisible scars a year in, and they were consuming, suffocating my soul. I no longer felt joy. I no longer felt pain. I no longer felt despair. I no longer felt. For the first time in my life, I sensed I was depressed.
It was time for a hobby. I needed something that was mine away from antiseptic walls, inane people, and a punishing schedule. I wanted a place without judgment, conversation, life or death decisions. And maybe sunshine.
I would plant. Which brought me here to two empty planter beds. I could feel their skepticism.
I ordered seeds online that sounded exotic and promised beauty: Mixed Wildflower, Honeybee, English Garden.
I started with seeds, pushing them into small plastic flower starters, leaving them in my apartment’s windowsill.
And then both a miracle and the most commonplace of things occurred: the plants grew.
Slowly over weeks and whenever I wasn’t looking, they sprouted, poking out of the dirt, unfurling new and green towards the sun.
I walked over frequently, after or before shifts to check on them and water them. I obsessed constantly, even at work. Were they alive? Had they made it?
When they reached a height, I moved them cautiously out of their plastic containers and into the ground. I was worried. From the warm and cozy protection of the heated apartment they were now being forced into the uncertainty of a bigger and harsher world.
I began to learn lessons.
Patience.
The seeds that stubbornly didn’t grow, those that I gave up on, might overnight burst upward, reproaching me for having ever questioned their potential.
The bounty didn’t bloom at once. Lettuce here, cucumber there. To grow a full salad, it might take weeks. I had to yield my timeline completely.
Mess.
Through the spring the chalky dirt began to feel commonplace. After weeks, despite how much I washed my hands, dirt remained under my nails, a reminder when I pulled off my purple hospital gloves that I had a life outside.
I planted tiny sprouts in one area only to have my milkweed leap to another part of the box or even to the ground outside, taking root where it preferred, eschewing my plans.
I let go. It wasn’t neat, it didn’t look organized. Kale spilled into the chard, garlic sprung among oregano, and a foxglove speared up between tomatoes. It was vibrant, unplanned, and somehow better than I intended.
Loss.
The corn didn’t make it. The hydrangeas did.
I had no more control over nature than I did over sickness and disease.
For plants, death is natural and expected.
I was bitterly angry when a patient didn’t make it. I was bitterly angry when unseasonal frost devastated my pea shoots. The first though, somehow felt personal, the latter out of my hands. Nature was allowed to exact its purpose outdoors when I didn’t want to allow it in.
Life.
I laughed with glee the first day I noticed tiny peppers decking the vine. I cried when frost stole early pea shoots, marveling at the absurdity I could be so upset.
Life was continuing, with or without humans.
The garden attracted life. Butterflies landed, hummingbirds drank with abandon, bees buzzed lazily about. Earthworms relished, deer overtook my carrots, squirrels scampered about. At night, under the light of the full moon I would sometimes wander, and I could hear a barn owl hooting. They lived with abandon, not affected by a human plague.
The plants stood in for patients I couldn’t save. When I grew something beautiful it felt like a second chance for them.
I grew kale, bitter and fibrous, that reminded me of a 75-year-old crotchety heart-failure patient.
Peppers, orange and red erupting off of the vine, was a 20-year-old leukemia patient with sizzling humor.
Rainbow chard, beautiful and proud, was a determined woman with multiple sclerosis.
Watermelon, round and jolly, were the old ladies with soft and pudgy cheeks.
Tomatoes burned in the sun, their red complexion crumpling under the extreme light was a cirrhotic bursting at the end.
Squash, so much squash, erupting under soft large leaves, was the gentle, quiet fade of advanced age.
Sunflowers, turning towards the sun were the ones with dementia, sundowning at night.
Marigolds, golden and bright was the glow of a person well-loved
Mint overly sweet and pungent that crawled and invaded everything else were like hundreds of Covid patients.
And more.
A cornucopia of regeneration and a reminder of loss.
The roots of the plants climbed over the scars of the earth, the bright foray of colors over my indelible scars.
The only constant in nature is change.
The garden taught me this.
Planting started as a hobby but ultimately gave me the space to begin to process, heal, and begin to evolve a year into the pandemic. The garden took on meaning beyond the physical and ushered me into a realm of spiritual contemplation. In cultivating flora, I progressed. In tethering to the earth, I became grounded. In succumbing to nature, I began to accept.
In spring, I hoped. In summer, I prayed. In autumn, I processed. In winter…now I am here. The roots are buried under snow. The plants have died. The stories are hibernating, and I try to keep them there, asleep and quiet in the depths of my mind. And I’m trying to forget.
Lauren Klingman is a practicing emergency medicine physician with the Permanente Medical Group in the Bay Area. A theater artist turned doctor, Klingman has continued to seek ways to bring art and the medical humanities into physician practice through publications, national conferences and creation of a specialized humanities track with Stanford Medicine's Emergency Medicine Residency. She believes art and humanities is fundamental in optimizing both physician wellness and patient care. She is working on a novel about the residence experience during the pandemic.