I can’t figure out why the catmint is dying. On our way down the driveway to take a walk, I pause and bend down to take a look. The stems are all dried except for two of them, which have a few sparse green leaves. I rub one dried stem between my fingers and it pulls right out of the ground; its roots completely dried up, the anchor lost.
They left the catmint on the front porch on Mother’s Day weekend a couple of months into the pandemic. A little more than a month later, they and my teenage son broke up.
I stand and look at my partner, and my tears choke me. “Let’s go,” I say in an unsteady voice. He reaches for me, but I don’t want to let myself cry at the end of the driveway, a spectacle for all my neighbors to see. There have already been enough of those displays these past months: yelling down the driveway to maintain distance, a parade of cars in place of a party, nods and forced smiles where there should have been hugs. My son moved out a month ago. This compounds my grief, the loss of one laced with the other. Sometimes I wonder if I’m allowed these feelings. Why didn’t I compartmentalize my friendship with them better? There is no closure for the relationships that develop between parents and kids’ significant others over the course of a year. No way to finalize the texts and visits that abruptly end, no cork to stop up the empty bottle.
I no longer see “close friends” in the corner of their Instagram stories; I’m relegated now to the political shares and social commentary aimed at a broader audience. I reply with clap hands and 100s and sometimes a short sentence. Once, I type, “I miss you!” into the small box intended for emojis. They reply “miss you too.” In the kitchen I throw out frost-bitten veggie burgers, use up the vegetable broth, wipe tears with my shoulder as I chop onions and boil noodles.
Outside the kitchen window, my neighbor is decapitating her geraniums. She tosses them onto her driveway, where they lie like corpses. I think of how every sentimental plant I’ve owned has died — the ones from my grandparents’ funerals, the fern my former neighbor left for me before she moved away — while the cheap plants that I purchase on an impulse at the checkout counter at Aldi thrive in white pots on bamboo stands, being the nicest ones I’ve ever owned. They become the centerpiece of the living room, their topiary outgrowing the fireplace mantle. They mean nothing. I snip the overgrowth to contain them. Meanwhile, the catmint in the flower bed becomes a withering centerpiece.