Issue No. 5

'Matrix Sunrise' Pansy

Hi friends,

This month’s full moon is a super moon, which is the name given to full moons that orbit closer to earth than others and are even bigger and brighter. It’s also called a Buck Moon because buck antlers are in full growth at this time of year.

This month’s plant encounter is the pansy. I’m feeling all the full moon feels with this piece (and also like I wish I had a little more time with it). Spoiler alert: there’s a buck visitor (intruder?) in this piece too, even though I didn’t realize it was a Buck Moon when I began writing it.

Thanks for being here.

x J

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008 | Viola x wittrockiana, ‘Matrix Sunrise’

Yesterday, I opened the blinds in my studio and immediately noticed that one of the big, lovely ceramic pots on the picnic table did not look right. The pot already has Vaseline slathered along its rim to discourage small slugs from crawling in and making lacework out of my extra-large and apparently very tasty ‘Matrix Sunrise’ pansies.

I put my shoes on and went outside in my pajamas to confirm what I suspected: one of the neighbourhood bucks had leapt over our back fence after dark and had munched the plants right down to the dirt. We had seen the young buck with his velvety, deely bopper antlers in our fenced section of the garden yesterday and knocked on the windows and clapped our hands to shoo him away.

When I saw the pot up close, I shouted “You asshole!” even though the buck—later named “Buckface” by A.—was no where to be seen. I know people dislike deer because they like to eat pretty things, but our fence has always protected our garden, which has made it easy for me to love the black tails. Calling one an asshole felt like it indicated that my love was conditional, so I immediately felt guilty. Deer are going to deer, after all. At least the newly snacked on pot had a twin with a consolation of pansies still blooming, so I collected myself and hoped that’d be the end of that since we’ve lived here for fifteen months and this has only happened this one time.

Then, in the wee hours last night, I dreamt that the buck came back and levelled the garden—even eating the foxgloves, which, in real life, are too toxic to be consumed. I got up to pee, feeling the foreboding of loss. It felt like a heavy trench coat on my sensitive skin.

But of course, all that foreboding wasn’t really about what could happen to my flowers.

Back in bed, I curled around A.. Even though he was soundly asleep I could feel his foreboding too, coming through his hot skin not like sweat, but like the tears he keeps in trying to find a way out. Before the meds he wouldn’t even have been asleep at all.

In the morning, I felt brittle and constricted by worry. A. was anxious and wanting to hurry out the door earlier than necessary to catch his ferry. “Do you have the casserole?” I asked. “Wallet, keys, phone, charger?”

We hugged but my hair was still damp from my shower, so I didn’t nuzzle in. We’ve had more tender goodbyes. I waved from the porch, but A. hardly even looked up once he got in the car, generously loaned to him by a friend who’s on vacation.

It’s been nearly one year since what A. describes as his “collapse” happened—or at least became official. It’s been nearly two years since we found out that his mum, who will be ninety-one next month, has vascular dementia with Capgras Syndrome (CS). If you haven’t heard of CS before it’s a fairly rare delusional misidentification syndrome characterized by a false belief that an identical duplicate has replaced someone significant to the patient. To A.’s mum, A.’s dad keeps going “missing” and is replaced by another man who, rather outrageously, has the same name and wears the same clothes. There are good and bad versions of this man. Sometimes he is a twin, a triplet, even a quadruplet. A’s mum also has “phantom boarder syndrome” and believes that the house is full of uninvited visitors, like “Big Fiona” who does the laundry and, more often than not, someone simply referred to as, “the young man”.

“All of the people who sleep in the bed complain that it hurts their backs,” A.’s mum once said. Adding, “But don’t worry, they don’t try anything, if you know what I mean.”

“Anticipatory grief” is grief that occurs before an impending loss—usually the death of someone close due to illness. It is not an “upending” grief but a grief of “unmooring” that becomes the “subtext” of everything. That’s how Kyo Maclear describes it in her book Birds Art Life. She says she was surprised to learn that it is not just sadness but a grief that requires “a more alert posture”.

A's mum has been getting worse. Two days ago, she believed she was a hostage in her home. She is angry with both the imposter(s) when they are present, and her husband when he “returns”. All of them end up on the receiving end of her sharp tongue. There are tears and broken things and her small fists. Two weeks ago she took off and hid in the neighbour’s garage. That time she was at least wearing pants.

A.’s dad is having a hard time letting his mum go and, time and time again, has been extremely resistant to putting any kind of support in place, even when A. has begged and nearly cried. “We still have time,” he tells A. Meanwhile, A.’s mum is tired of being betrayed by her missing husband and thinks it’s time to move out. She refers to this as the two of them splitting up. She’s tried to make peace with the situation for two years already. She no longer wonders if a nicer chair would keep her husband from wandering off. A husband who, in reality, has never left but sometimes retreats to the bedroom and weeps behind the closed door.

Several years ago now, I learned about “Ring Theory”. A clinical psychologist named Susan Silk came up with it after her experience with breast cancer. How it works is that you draw a circle. That’s the centre of the ring. In the circle you put the name of the person at the centre of the current trauma. Then you draw a larger circle around that circle and put the name of the person who’s closest to the person in the centre there. You then keep drawing circles with the next closest people and the next until you have a “kvetching order”.

The rules of Ring Theory can be summed up with the words, “Comfort In. Dump Out.” What that means is that whoever is in the centermost of the rings gets to emote and complain as much as they want. The people in the other rings can also express their feelings, but the one distinction is that they must “dump out” to the people in the larger rings, not the smaller rings, the theory being that venting your pain to someone who is already feeling their pain deeply is not helpful to you or them.

I thought about Ring Theory as I walked through the house, which was tidy and felt empty. I’m not in A.’s ring when it comes to his family situation; I’m one ring out, and yet out of frustration and fatigue, I’ve dumped in. This is why I feel brittle. I fear I’ve been failing and selfish, thinking about the impact all of this has had—and will continue to have—on me. I have also pushed for resolutions that A. cannot achieve without his reluctant father on board. I’m also managing my own grief—primarily around what has been happening to my body while feeling abandoned by a broken, patriarchal medical system. I feel sheepish even admitting this when there’s currently a more acute problem.

When I reached my studio at the back of the house, I remembered my dream and opened the door to the garden to see if it had been prophetic. At first, I was relieved to see my cosmos merrily blooming next to the sway of oxeye daisies, but then my eyes landed on the one remaining pansy pot on the picnic table. Gone, the rest of the pansies were gone.

For a moment the loss felt unbearable. But once again, it wasn’t really about the flowers.

I sat down at the picnic table and stared into the ring of the pot. The sweet alyssum is deer-resistant so was untouched, but otherwise all that was left were nubs. Some of the ‘Matrix Sunrise’ pansies had been nearly four inches in diameter and flopped a little, the way a straw hat flops. Or their edges would curl in slightly, like a hemline in need of ironing. The pansies were the colours of sunrises, yes, but they also reminded me of the inside of a nectarine, near the pit, of maturing bruises, of Damson plums, and of the pale yellow of my favourite dress in grade two.

In French pansy means pensées, meaning “thoughts”, thus, as Ophelia says in Hamlet, “And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” I was thinking about how A.’s mum once told me I was her girl. I have cherished that proclamation for years. My own mother was young when she had me and is still in her sixties, so A.’s mum has always felt more like a grandmother to me, and in fact has much in common with my own grandmother. If I had to choose a flower to represent my matrilineage it would be the pansy because my little grammy loved them. She died of old age, but under cruel circumstances, having been separated from my grandfather due to despicable family politics. I hold the grief I have for her—not to mention for a family in ruin—under the surface, but it keeps bobbing up lately when I think about old women rounding the bend toward death, no longer sure of their husband’s love. This is something I have learned: new grief piggybacks on old grief.

As I tended the decimated pansy pots, I thought about a quote I wrote down earlier in the week: “The garden is a place to confront and contemplate loss, just as much as it is to revel in and celebrate life.” I don’t know where I got it from, but I could feel the truth of the sentiment in my ribcage. That the garden is a place that so elegantly models both life and loss is a theme I keep returning to. My pansies wouldn’t have lasted forever, Buckface just sped things along. And, let’s face it, flowers are worse than hamsters when it comes to lifespan. Still, I loved those pansies, and love is what gives loss its oomph and, depending on magnitude, transforms it into grief. At the end of the day, maybe the way out of grief, is to pay more attention to how much we have loved and what a privilege it has been. Then, sooner or later, when we stop clinging to what was, there is the mercy that comes from letting go.

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