The birds are singing again. Their melody wafts through the bedroom window, and a breeze soon follows, making the curtains sway, as if dancing to the rhythm of spring.

This was always your favorite time of year.

Even if the air had a bite to it, you said it was a small price to pay to listen to that song, to feel that breeze, to breathe in those wonderful scents of the season: lilacs and magnolias and freshly-cut grass.

We weren’t religious, but you always adopted a spiritual tone this time of year, pointing to its cyclical nature: with winter comes decay, yet a few months later, life springs anew. It wasn’t heady stuff, but I loved how spring made a would-be philosopher of you, my beloved accountant, your concrete world of numbers and equations briefly melting into something mystic, something beyond words’ limitations. Yet that didn’t stop you from trying to capture its magic all the same: “The same songs, the same breeze, the same smells.” You closed your eyes and smiled at this. “They say you can’t go back, but these are the senses of my childhood. Standing here, I’m in little league again. And maybe when it’s all done, I will be for real. Maybe that’s what it’s telling us: that at the end of our lives, you get to do it all over, if you want to.”

But I never shared your view. I don’t think spring is telling us anything. I don’t think it can speak, the same way I don’t think these are the same songs, the same breezes, the same smells. Those birds you loved to hear, the ones to whom you said, “Welcome back, fellas,” those birds were dead. These birds are new—maybe their offspring, but probably not. What spring tells me—sadly, what it’s always told me, even while you were philosophizing—is that things die and life goes on. The end is the end, and another’s beginning starts in the midst of your final moments.

I never told you that, I never wanted to spoil the magic, but it was hard sitting with you by this window two years ago, days after we’d been delivered your death sentence, and watch you lean forward to get a better look, a better smell, and to hear those melodies more clearly. It was hard watching you watch spring, still trying to believe its cyclical nature revealed that the soul went on, or that it existed at all. It was hard watching you smile in spite of everything we’d been told, when all I wanted to do was slam that window shut, wring those birds’ necks, and tell our obnoxious neighbor mowing his lawn for the second time that week to knock it the hell off, his obsession with ensuring his lawn was the best on the street was nauseating and meant nothing, not a goddamn thing, because in the long run, we all die, and that’s that, and some new birds will come and sing mockingly above our tombstones, while our bones wither to dust.

~

That spring two years ago, you still insisted on tending the garden.

I told you not to worry, I could do it, you could pick out the flowers and vegetables and tell me what to do and how to care for them and I’d do my absolute best, and you could even watch me from your beloved window and coach me through it, but you declined, still wearing that goofy spring smile. “I know you’d do well,” you said, “but I want to do it. That’s one of the things I love most. Hey, it might even make things better!”

It didn’t.

Last spring, there was no garden. You stared wistfully out the window, oxygen tubes up your nose, and whispered, “I can’t smell it anymore.” I asked, “What,” even though I knew the answer; I found myself incapable of letting silences fall between us, pushing stupid words and questions into my mouth, and I cursed myself for asking them, for making you exert the energy to answer, but your silence terrified me, allowed my mind the chance to imagine the inevitable, no matter how much you’d tried to tell me it wasn’t your time yet, that seventy-three was still young and you had many more springs to enjoy.

“The lilacs,” you whispered. “The grass. The magnolias on Jim’s tree.”

Outside, Jim was mowing his lawn again, still in superior health despite being older than both of us and being a grade-A asshole whose dark heart should have died long ago. He should be the one in here, not you, not you.

At some point, with that patch of dirt looking so forgotten, so desolate and bleak, I asked if you wanted me to tend the garden. You smiled and said, “Only if you want to.”

But I didn’t want to. I wanted you to do it. I wanted to look out the window and see you planting your flowers and vegetables and humming your silly songs, so offbeat I could never tell what they were until you told me. I wanted you out of this bed, those tubes out of your nose. I wanted things to be the way they were, even though I knew they never would be.

~

But eventually those tubes were gone, and so were you, planted in the dirt like just another seed you’d planted in the garden.

And once more it’s the season of renewal, your reason for believing we may find each other again, our souls bound by the energy of the universe: we may inhabit different bodies, bear different flesh, but we’d find each other again, as we always had. All this misguided spirituality the result of your inability to express how much you loved this season in practical terms. Or perhaps it was a way to mollify my atheist heart, to assuage my fears and ease my grief, knowing our time together was only temporary. You’d do that for me; you always had a way of making the bleakest scenarios palatable.

As long as you were with me, of course.

But now you’re not. And it’s spring again, my first without you.

The birds are singing, the air is carrying its intoxicating aromas, and Jim is still mowing his goddamn lawn.

It’s all here again.

Just without you.

~

You should have died in the spring.

Your funeral should have been accompanied by the sounds and scents of your favorite season. And if there were a just and loving god, He would have allowed this simple accommodation.

If there were a just and loving god, you’d still be with me.

Seventy-three is too young. We wouldn’t have thought that when we fell in love, old age so far away it may as well have been fantasy, but now that I’m here, I know it wasn’t enough. We still had so much to do, so much love to share.

This spring is particularly nasty, with thunderstorms and humidity and heat indices in the eighties. I can blame those for cranking up the air conditioning, for drawing the blinds and staying indoors. The Christmas tree is still up from when I decorated it last December, just weeks before I woke up to find you dead next to me, and without a view of the world outside, I can pretend it’s still winter, you’re still here, and that time hasn’t marched mercilessly forward. I can turn up the TV, broadcasting its tragedies and hatred, and drown out Jim’s lawnmower.

I can believe the world is as cold as my heart is now.

Yet I know the truth, and when I do walk outside—because I still need to go to the grocery store; I still need to eat and survive, I suppose—that truth sucker-punches me, and my eyes flick to that patch of dirt, your veggies and flowers now corpses long-since decayed, making your beloved garden just another graveyard, a poor testament to its gardener.

~

I may not be as old as Jim, and when you were here, I may have said we were still so young even while collecting our pensions, but now I’m too old. However much time is left, though, feels too long. There are ways to shorten it, to stick it to nature and take matters into my own hands. Be my own god. Finish my own story.

I’m tired of pretending it’s still the past. I’m not fooling anyone, especially me.

I’m tired of spring’s songs, its smells and sights.

I’m tired of our neighbor and all the noise he makes.

I’m tired of waking up from dreaming of you, only to find your side of the bed empty.

Mostly, though, I’m tired of that garden.

Maybe that’s where I’ll do it. I’ll make Jim pause his tiresome habit and call 911 after he hears the gunshot, and force him to wait for help to arrive. At least there will be half an hour of blissful silence—but no, the birds will sing; mockingly, they’ll serenade the start of a new season.

No, I know what I must do, what I keep avoiding. Time’s getting away from me, and it’s time to put an end to this.

~

Jim doesn’t pause his mowing, but he does wave as I make my way toward the garden.

On his next pass, he actually stops the mower and asks if I need help. He’s unsure how to talk to me, your death making so many pause and stammer. I thank him but tell him I’ve got this, and then I sigh: it seems far too big to begin, but as you once said, every long journey begins with a single step, so that’s what I do. I step into the dirt, grab the first dead plant I see, and rip it from the ground. It doesn’t give at first, despite being nearly two years gone, but eventually it yields, and into the garbage bag it goes. And then so does another. And then another.

By mid-day, I’m out of breath, bathed in sweat and filthy from the dirt blowing up into my face. I have to pause often and clutch my chest, feeling my fiercely-beating heart, and I wonder if I’m going to have heart attack, if my previous plan may actually come to fruition, albeit not exactly how I’d planned. However, I recover, I go on living, and I resume my task.

The next day, after telling Jim I’m still okay to go it alone when he offers his help, I begin planting rows of flowers, ones I thought looked familiar when I shopped at your favorite gardening store, and I hope they’re ones you’d have picked, ones that maybe you did pick once upon a time; I plant a few tomato plants, and this summer I’ll make the salsa you loved, the reason you  grew tomatoes every year; I plant many herbs, too, not something you usually planted, but I have some recipes I’d like to try, some things I’ve never eaten before, and now’s as good a time as any to try them.

The day burns to ambers beyond Jim’s house. The street lights spring to life, sending the neighborhood children home for dinner. And still, I toil in your garden, which will always be your garden, and as I plant the last seeds, in the tree above me, the one you planted decades ago, a bird starts to sing, and maybe it’s the same bird from last spring, or maybe it’s its offspring, or maybe it’s a new bird entirely, but its song is so wonderfully familiar that I can’t help but smile through my tears.

“It’s spring again,” I whisper, to the bird, to the moist night air, to you. “I hope you like the garden. It’s not up to what you did, but…give me some time, and I’ll make something special out of it.”

The task finished, I head inside, knowing the work is actually not done. With a garden, the work is never done: you care for your seeds and plants, you enjoy their time here, and the next year, you clean out the decay and begin anew. I wonder why you never included your garden when you described the cyclical nature of our lives; to me, it seems the perfect example and your strongest argument.

– Tim Hanson