What a weird Spring, friends.

This weird hasn’t been totally unfamiliar to me, though. This season has felt an awful lot like a season four years ago. It’s so like the weeks and months leading up to the first day of Spring, when we watched my Dad’s life on earth end. Living in palliative care is a hard mercy, friend. It’s a state of the now and not yet, and not really wanting it to be over because the loss is too big, but also wanting the grief and loss to be over.

I wasn’t ready to lose him. I wanted my old life back. The life that I knew that was predictable with annoying, but reliable, daily phone calls interrupting our dinner-time. With just knowing he was there as my greatest cheerleader.

We did lose him, though. And we worked through the grief. I realized that my identity had changed by losing him. I made one the best choices of my life and went to grief counselling through hospice. I did art grief therapy. I healed and grew. Every March 21^st, I am still sad and I grieve, but life after Dad is rich – even though his absence here leaves a huge gap.

Back in mid-March, the last week in my office before settling in at home, I had a moment. I just wanted my old life back. I wanted to go pick up my daughter at school and take her for a snack at our local Mennonite bakery. I wanted to plan Easter parties. I wanted to go on the vacation that we’d booked and paid for. I wanted to do the things we’d been planning at work. The sadness was overwhelming.

It was like too many pieces that needed sorting out. Too many scattered thoughts that needed space and time and the opportunity to land, like a life-sized game of 52 PickUp. Saying good-bye to things we weren’t ready to let go. Confusion. Loss. Not knowing what comes next.

That week, as this world pandemic really hit home, my husband and I realized there was a familiarity to the grief we were feeling. It was that exact same feeling from four-years ago. Realizing everything was going to be different and that we were walking through a loss. But also realizing that it was going to be okay on the other side – even though it would hurt. We’d find a new normal. That all things would work together for good – even through the pain.

I’ve learned that we have to go through ugly seasons. Seasons of pushing through the dirt and the sad. I’ve also learned that we can be intentional about planting reminders of hope. So, on the first weekend of April, after telling the truth about our grief, we found the ground was thawed and it was time for pansies.

In my world, pansies are a symbol of hope. Pansies are my slightly pacifist annual war-cry on winter. Every single year, when the maple sap flows and I’m completely fed-up and DONE with snow and ice and misery, I buy pansies and I plant them everywhere. So, when the sun shone unseasonably warm on that weekend, our family jumped in the van and drove five minutes out to the country in search of these tiny, cheery bits of life. Fortunately, greenhouses haven’t been closed in this pandemic – it was just a very different, physically distant experience. Normally, I do this alone. This year, though, all three of us needed this sign of hope.

My wee girl, walked around the greenhouse, empty of people but full of new life. It was hard to get her to leave. My beloved cheered up at the scent of growing plants. Despite world crisis, pots and flats of little pansy faces landed up in my trunk and some of the sweetest purple and white Alyssum tagged along. Glory. Spring.

Since unseasonably cold weather has replaced unseasonably warm weather this week, the pots are covered up with sheets of burlap, but I let them see the sun every day and this weekend they should be released to thrive. Every time I look at them, I see life, even though the rest of the landscape is only showing tiny hints of spring and looks relatively dead.

It’s appropriate that this season of life matches the season of the year. Although things appear bleak, there is life. Full, amazing life, right there under the dirt. The pansies might look scrawny right now, but give them a few weeks, and the right conditions for growth and they’ll be thriving.

The day of the epic pansy-planting, we planted peas too, Sweet Girl and I. I told her that she needed to press them, just lightly, tucking them under their dirt-blanket, give them some water, and that one day we’d look out and these “pea babies” will have woken up.

Just like us.

Sometimes, the dirt blanket is heavy, and the pressure to live is intense. We’re all in that place right now. Kind of like the bursting out of the seed and pressing through to find the light. On that greenhouse day, I woke up and chose to plant life. The dirt is still there, and it’ll never truly be all gone, but I poked my head up out of it because the warmth of the sun told me it was time.

And Dad? Well, he’s more alive than ever. We know it. Heaven is his new home and I know he’s just waiting for us to get there.

We’re still in the ‘dirt’ of earth, but he’s not. Life is hard, but God’s mercies are new every morning for us, friend. New. Every. Morning. His faithfulness to us is so great. So, I’m planting pansies as reminders that there is so much life yet to be lived, now in the midst of grief and crisis, and long after this season ends.