When the Garden Grows Around Grief
- Fiach OBroin-Molloy
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
On bees, flowers, loss, and the small signs of life
This week, death and grief have found their way into more conversations than usual.
Some have been conversations of faith. Some have been with friends. Some have been brief remarks, almost passing comments, where someone says just enough for you to realise they are carrying something heavier than they first let on.
It is strange when a theme gathers like that. One conversation might be chance. Two might be coincidence. But after a while, you start to notice that the same subject keeps returning, gently but insistently, asking to be looked at.
And what has felt most striking is that all of this has arrived in a week when everything else seems to be growing.
The garden is not solemn. It is not holding back out of respect for human sorrow. The nasturtiums are moving in the breeze. The flowers are opening. The green things are reaching over edges and filling spaces. The bees are working with their usual impossible urgency, and in the apiary, colonies are dividing and beginning again.
Life is not quiet just because grief is present.
That can feel almost rude at first.
There is a poem by W. H. Auden that captures something of this feeling — the almost impossible wish that the world would stop when grief is too much. That ordinary life would recognise what has happened. That the clocks, the traffic, the birds, the whole indifferent machinery of the day would pause with us.
I understand that impulse.
We often imagine grief in winter language. Bare trees. Dark afternoons. A cold room. A stillness after something has gone. And sometimes grief does look like that.
But grief also comes in summer.
It comes while the garden is bright. It comes when the days are long. It comes while bees are flying, flowers are opening, and the whole world seems to be busy with increase.
There is a particular kind of loneliness in that. The world keeps moving, and part of you wants to say: do you not know what has happened? Do you not know who is missing? Do you not know that everything has changed?
But the garden does not answer in words. It simply keeps growing.
When things feel too much, I often take the camera into the garden.
Not to make anything better. Not exactly. More to narrow the world down to one small thing I can bear to notice.
A leaf.
A bug.
A wild flower at the edge of a path.
The movement of a stem in the wind.
Some tiny, living thing continuing quietly with its own work.
There is a kind of meditation in that. The camera gives my attention somewhere to rest. It asks me to look closely, and close looking can be a mercy when the larger picture feels overwhelming.
It is not distraction, exactly. It is not pretending that grief, fear, or sadness are not there. It is more like finding a small sign of life beside them.
A small miracle.
A small witness.
A small reminder that the whole world is not only the thing that hurts.
I do not think that growth explains grief away. I do not think nature offers neat answers to loss. Anyone who has kept bees, or tended a garden, knows that the natural world is not sentimental. It is beautiful, but not soft in the way we sometimes want it to be.
In the apiary, a colony dividing is not a tidy little symbol. It is restless, risky, and full of uncertainty. One part leaves. Another remains. A new queen may emerge, or she may not. The old order disappears before the new one is secure.
There is loss in it, and there is beginning.
There is absence, and there is possibility.
There is a kind of faith required, though the bees would never call it that.
Perhaps that is why the garden has felt so noticeable this week. Not because it has made grief smaller, but because it has refused to let grief be the only thing present.
The flowers have not solved anything. The bees have not explained anything. The colonies dividing have not offered a lesson that ties everything neatly together.
But they have stood beside sorrow as a sign that life is still moving.
That may be one of the quiet mercies of a garden. It does not demand that we be cheerful. It does not ask us to pretend that loss is not real. It simply makes room for another truth alongside it: that life continues to press up through the soil, to open, to gather, to return.
Faith can be like that too.
Not always an answer. Not always a feeling. Not always a shining certainty. Sometimes faith is just the place where sorrow and life are allowed to sit together.
A prayer said without much confidence.
A candle lit because there is nothing else to do.
A name remembered before God.
A walk through the garden when words have run out.
A camera held close to a leaf, a bee, a small wild thing.
A sign of life noticed, not because it fixes the grief, but because it keeps the darkness from having the whole room.
There is a temptation, when writing about grief, to make it useful too quickly. To say that it teaches us, deepens us, changes us, prepares us. Perhaps, in time, some of that may be true. But it is not always kind to say it too soon.
Sometimes grief is simply grief.
It is love with nowhere ordinary to go. It is the shape left behind by someone’s absence. It is the strange ache of continuing in a world that has not paused with you.
And yet, even there, the garden grows.
Not over grief, as if to cover it.
Not against grief, as if to defeat it.
But around it.
Slowly. Quietly. Tenderly, almost without permission.
The bees go out and return. The flowers open and fade. The colonies change shape. The season moves on, not because loss does not matter, but because life is stubbornly, mysteriously given.
This week, that has felt worth noticing.
For anyone carrying grief just now, I hope there is some small sign of life beside it.
Not a cure.
Not an explanation.
Not a demand to be comforted before you are ready.
Just one small thing you can bear to notice.
A leaf.
A bee.
A wild flower.
A garden insect moving through its tiny world.
Something living nearby.
A reminder, however small, that grief is real — but it is not the only thing God has made.
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