If you’re a gardener, especially if you’re an English gardener, you know of course that the Chelsea Flower Show has been on all week. I’m not much of my garden enthusiast myself, though I can enjoy a nicely turned out garden as much as the next bloke, if the next bloke isn’t Alan Titchmarsh, but Sandra was always very keen. She was never as happy as when she was puttering around in our postage stamp garden, patiently nursing plants to health, providing hiding places for solitary bees and laying it out in such a way to pack as much green and flowers in it as humanly possible. Like everything she put her hand to, she made it look easy, even after she became ill; she made sure that before she went into hospital, her garden was in the best possible shape.
So of course we watched the BBC gardening shows, with Gardening World on Fridays being a staple, as was Gardening Question Time (for which we managed to attend one taping when they were on tour in Amsterdam) on Radio 4 on Sunday afternoons. There was something very comforting about these programmes, something very English in its middleclass niceness and preoccupation with improving hobbies. In this the Chelsea Flower Show was the annual highlight and Sandra always talked about how much she would’ve liked to visit there. We’ve sort’ve made plans that, when she was out of hospital and back into “normal” life, we would do just that, but we never got that far…
With the weather finally making a turn to the better this week and the Chelsea Flower Show back on, it’s been hard not to dwell on Sandra’s death these days. Hwer garden after all is also part of her heritage I have to get to grips with somehow; luckily my father is just as keen a gardener as Sandra was and more than willing to help out; he and Sandra had always bonded over their gardens.
But this, as well as talking about her death on MeFi has made me realise something important: I’ve made my peace with her decision to die. I didn’t really at the time, though I could understand it intellectually and although I had spent the last two years living in fear that she could die at any moment, or might make that decision. In my heart I wished she hadn’t chosen to end her suffering, if in my head I understood she had to. But now, a half year after her death, I’m beginning to make my peace with it.
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