If you are new here, welcome. And if you have been here for years, perhaps today is a good day to wander around a little and discover something you missed.
The Grieving Gardener began on September 24, 2020, just a few months after my husband, VST, died. At the time, I wasn’t trying to build a website. I certainly wasn’t thinking about what it might become six years later. I was trying to survive.
Writing had always been part of my life, and when grief took almost everything familiar away from me, words remained. I could sit down at the computer and put what I was feeling somewhere outside of myself. Writing was life. And this blog helped save mine.
I have always been a gardener. Gardeners understand something about seasons. We plant. We nurture. We prune. We wait. We lose things we desperately wanted to save. And then, sometimes when we least expect it, something new grows.
That was grief for me. I couldn’t bring back the life I had lost. I couldn’t make the garden look exactly as it had before. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, new life began pushing its way through the soil. Eventually, the words underneath the title of this blog became “Where new life grows from grief.” That is exactly what happened here.
So, let me show you around.
At the top of the website, you’ll find the years. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024. 2025. 2026. Click on a year, and the posts from that year will appear in chronological order. If you really want to understand this journey, start with 2020.
But I should warn you. It is raw.
Those earliest posts were written by a woman who was still trying to understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know where the story was going because she didn’t know where she was going. There weren’t beautiful pictures accompanying every post. There wasn’t music. There weren’t videos. There were words. Lots and lots of words.
As time passed, pictures began appearing. Later came music and videos. The blog became prettier, brighter, and more colorful. So did my life. Without realizing it, the website itself became a record of my healing.
You’ll also find an About the Author section. That’s where you can learn a little more about the woman behind all these words—the teacher, gardener, widow, wife, traveler, and now author who has been showing up here five mornings a week for years.
But if you really want to know me, read the blog. I’m in here.
The frightened woman. The grieving woman. The woman who got angry. The woman who laughed again, surprised by the sound. The woman who dated again. The woman who fell in love. The woman who married again. The woman who discovered that loving a new life didn’t mean she had stopped loving the old one.
It’s all here.
You don’t have to begin at the beginning. Choose a year. Choose a title that catches your attention. Read one post or twenty. Follow a particular season of my life, or jump around and see how things changed.
And if you find some of those early posts a little plain, remember what you’re looking at.
You’re watching a woman come back to life.
Tomorrow, the Grieving Gardener turns six years old.
Six years. I can hardly believe it.
And on Friday, I’m going to take you all the way back to the beginning. While I’m off wandering through South Dakota, we’re going to spend some time with the woman who started all of this in 2020.
I think it’s time you met her.
Welcome to the Grieving Gardener. Stay awhile.
There’s a lot growing here.