For Lara and all the Garden Moms
by Laura Parker Roerden
(August 28, 2015)
This summer was a long march of loss. Three parents of the kids we grew up with in the neighborhood of the farm died, one after another, as if the branch they were hanging from no longer could sustain them. Each was in their eighties. You could say they were simply taking their place on the ground, though that would be of little comfort.
Last week, it was a contemporary who died: Lara, a 45 year old wife and mother to a 13-year old and the best friend to a close friend of mine. We had all become friends in Boston’s South End when our first babies were born. Several of us had already lost our mothers before our first babies were born. We met in parks and in neighborhood cafes or called out to one another when we noticed infants in buckets hanging from our arms as we awkwardly juggled our keys, strollers, and diaper bags up the long climb of concrete stairs of our front stoops. Our friendships grew quickly, like weeds and the odd flower growing through the cracks in our hearts and confidence.
Lara had been an attorney, a brilliant researcher and lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many of the women in this mother’s group we formed had similar accomplishments under their belts, though once our babies were born our pasts mattered not one bit. We were instantly transformed by this mothering task that required so much resorting of who we were and what was important to us. What we didn’t know about this new role could fill volumes of books. While we sometimes shared tips on feeding or getting our infants to sleep, mostly we simply held the hard stuff for each other while we watched our children grow, like a giant stand of birches holds still, oxygen rich air.
Our small group of moms was called “Garden Moms” for the Garden of Eden, a cafe in the South End where we first met and often gathered. Snowy mornings when the city was paralyzed and no one could work would turn into moments of unexpected joy as everyone walked in the street and turned up at what we simply called “the Garden” for scones and coffee, while snow erased the soot and grime outside of the large windows looking out onto the now quiet street. Other times, we’d run into each other at our neighborhood parks and end up spending the day together.
As the years passed, we split off into smaller groups and dyads—friendships that have stood the test of time, but have remained fluid in their expression, as water in a river clinging to eddies might suddenly make a break to rejoin the flow.
Lara’s passing, like so many of the other younger ones who have left too soon, defy our tidy images of nature’s cycles. It matters little though, since it’s clearer to me as I age that our hearts defy any such logic of loss, no matter how pretty.
The day that Lara passed away, many us received a text from her best friend Maria, who was with her bedside holding her space and dignity. I was on my run at River Bend Farm, where the Concord grapes were just ripening and read the text from Maria near a simple stand of birches. I was listening to Keith Jarrett’s “My Song” while I stretched (strange how the details about those moments when you receive such news can be so easy to remember). I looked up and noticed that the riverine birches had started to peel their bark, an accommodation to their fast growth that leaves them particularly thin-skinned.
I texted back to Maria an image of the birches, as I had no words to comfort a close friend who was watching her best friend die at 45. I could only bring to mind the heart space we had so many times held for one another over the years, as we left strips of bark from our former lives on the ground.
