by Aldrin A Wilding-West

Created on: February 16, 2010   Last Updated: March 30, 2010

Our garden has always been a busy place.  You expect that in a family with young children.  The vegetable patch is still in the planning stages and the flower beds are still a dream really for my wife and I, but they’ll come, and we’ll enjoy the journey getting there.

Still, at times I find myself there contemplating events of recent years, one event in particular.  In the quiet moments, even our child oriented garden provides a peaceful haven away from the house where one can dream or reflect....or cry.

A garden is always a place of growth or preparation for growth.  I think this is why they are also such very good places for positive thought and rebuilding, physically and mentally.  The garden provides rare moments of solace.  Watching a bee bustle from flower to flower or a blackbird pacing up and down, stamping to attract worms to the surface.  Perhaps a butterfly passing by or an occasional dragonfly in the warmer months, there’s always so much to see, hear, touch and smell.  Inviting the senses so readily.

It was two years ago that one of my four sisters decided to throw in her towel.  Through severely painful ill health and depression she decided to end her life, and end it in probably the most horrific of ways I could imagine.  She shot herself through the head.

We were a family of nine siblings, four girls and five boys spread over two continents.  We were not and still to some extent are not the closest of families, but nonetheless we all knew we could rely on one another in times of hardship.  I can't begin to explain then the images and guilt that this choice of passing left all of us with, coming out of the blue as the act did.  No warning. 

For an entire year I found it impossible, as we all did I think, to come to terms with the loss of our sister.  I tried many different ways to rid myself of the images that continuously haunted me, struggling to replace them with happier ones.  But nothing seemed to work.

Last summer however, I began spending more time in the garden.  There’s always work to be done in the garden in summer, regardless of how practical the garden is.  There is also much fun to be had with the children.  We have a trampoline and swings and a slide.  Summer days can be fun for all.  But when the fun is over and the children go to bed, there’s tidying to be done.  It was on one of these days

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