My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How Gardening Helped Me Heal After Loss — My Story at 62
By Tom, 62 — Savannah, GA
Healing through gardening was never something I planned. I did not wake up one morning and decide that dirt under my fingernails would be the thing that pulled me back into my own life. But that is exactly what happened. After my wife Linda passed, I spent almost a year doing nothing but sitting in a quiet house, eating meals I did not taste, and watching the yard she once loved turn to weeds. I was sixty-one years old, retired from thirty-four years of teaching high school English, and I had no idea who I was without her.
People told me grief takes time. They said it in the grocery store and at the barber and after church. They meant well. But nobody told me what to do with all that time. Nobody told me that patience is not the same as waiting. I had to learn the difference on my knees in the backyard, with a trowel in one hand and a handful of seeds that did not care how sad I was.
When Grief Makes You Forget How to Take Care of Yourself
The first six months after Linda died, I stopped taking care of myself in ways I did not even notice at first. I wore the same three shirts. I skipped meals or ate cereal standing over the sink at ten at night. I stopped sleeping in our bed and moved to the couch because the bedroom smelled like her lotion and I could not bear it. I was not falling apart in some dramatic way. I was just slowly becoming less of a person, like a photograph left in the sun too long.
My daughter drove down from Atlanta one weekend and walked through the house without saying anything for a while. Then she sat across from me at the kitchen table and said, very gently, “Dad, when was the last time you did something just for yourself? Not for Mom’s memory. Not for the house. Just for you.”
I did not have an answer.
She stayed that weekend and helped me clean out the garage. In a box near the back, we found Linda’s gardening gloves, her kneeling pad, and a tin of seeds she had ordered the spring before she got sick. Tomatoes. Zinnias. Basil. She had written planting dates on the packets in her careful handwriting. My daughter held them up and said, “Maybe start here.”
What Gardening Taught Me About Patience With Healing
I did not start the garden for healing. I started it because throwing away Linda’s seeds felt like throwing away the last thing she had looked forward to. So on a warm Saturday in late March, I went out to the raised beds she had built years ago. They were full of dead leaves and crabgrass. The wood was cracking. It took me three days just to clear them out and replace two of the boards.
I planted the tomato seeds first. I watered them. And then I waited.
Nothing happened for what felt like a very long time. I would go out every morning with my coffee and stare at the soil like a man expecting a miracle. I almost gave up after the first week. But somewhere in my thirty-four years of teaching, I had learned that the things worth seeing usually take longer than you want them to. So I kept watering. I kept waiting.
On the ninth day, I saw a pale green thread pushing through the dirt. It was so small I almost missed it. I crouched down and just looked at it for a long time. Something loosened in my chest that I had not even known was tight. That tiny shoot did not know about Linda. It did not know about my grief or my empty house or the fact that I had eaten cereal for dinner again. It just grew because the conditions were right. Water. Soil. Light. Time.
I thought, maybe that is how this works for people too. Maybe I do not need to figure out how to stop being sad. Maybe I just need to keep showing up and trust that something in me is still reaching toward the light, even when I cannot see it yet.
Learning to Take Care of Myself Again After Loss
The garden changed my mornings. Instead of waking up to silence and dread, I woke up to a task. I had something that needed me. Not in the heavy, suffocating way grief needs you, but in a simple way. Water the tomatoes. Check the basil. Pull the weeds that crept in overnight.
I started eating breakfast again because I was hungry from being outside. I started sleeping in the bed again because I was tired from real work, not just the exhaustion of sadness. I bought new shirts because the old ones were stained with potting soil.
Small things. But they added up.
One evening in May, after a long afternoon staking the tomato plants that had grown taller than I expected, I came inside and took a real shower for the first time in I do not know how long. Not a quick rinse. A long, hot shower where I actually stood there and felt the water on my shoulders and noticed that my body still worked, still carried me through a full day, still had warmth in it. I dried off and sat on the edge of the bed and just breathed.
A friend from my old book club — a woman named Diane who had lost her husband a few years before me — had sent me a small care package a month earlier. A candle, some tea, and a personal wellness item from HiMoment that she said had helped her “get reacquainted” with herself after years of forgetting she had a body that was not just grief’s container. I had shoved the box in the closet, embarrassed. But that night after the shower, I thought about what she said. About reacquaintance. About the body being more than a thing that carries pain.
I will not say much about that night except that it was quiet, and private, and I cried a little, and afterward I felt more like a living person than I had in a year. It was not dramatic. It was just a small reclaiming. The same way the garden reclaimed the raised beds from weeds.
How Grief Recovery Taught Me That Growth Is Never Linear
By July, I had tomatoes coming in faster than I could eat them. I started leaving bags of them on my neighbors’ porches. I planted a second round of zinnias in colors Linda would have loved — orange and deep pink and a yellow so bright it looked like it was showing off. I dragged a chair out to the edge of the garden and started reading there in the evenings, something I had not done since she was alive.
But healing through gardening is not a straight line. There were days I could not go outside. There were mornings I woke up and the grief was so heavy that watering the tomatoes felt like climbing a mountain. One afternoon in August, a thunderstorm knocked over half the zinnia bed and I sat on the back porch and wept like it was the day of the funeral. It was not about the flowers. It was about everything.
But the next morning, I went out and staked up the ones that had survived. Some of them straightened on their own. Some did not make it. I pulled those out gently and composted them. And I planted new ones in the gaps.
That is the thing about gardens. They teach you that loss and growth happen in the same soil. That you can tend something carefully and still lose it. That you can lose something and still have the ground left to plant again. Patience is not waiting for the pain to stop. Patience is planting anyway.
I am sixty-two now. The garden is in its second year. I added peppers this spring, and a row of sunflowers along the back fence that I am growing for no reason other than I want to see how tall they get. I joined a community garden group at the church. I cook real meals most nights. I sleep in the bed. Some nights are still hard. Some mornings I still reach for the other side and find it empty. But I am here. I am tending things. I am patient with myself in a way I never was when I was younger and thought healing meant getting over it fast.
Linda would have loved these tomatoes. She would have eaten them warm from the vine, standing right there in the garden with dirt on her knees, laughing at how proud I was of something she made look so easy for thirty years. I grow them for her. But I also grow them for me. For the version of me that is still reaching toward the light, still finding his way, still learning that the slowest seasons often hold the most growth.
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