Frankie's Garden
The brief flourishing of a summer garden mirrors the short life of a child lost too soon.
By Alexander Pyles
Illustrations by Katie Kalata Rusch
Gardening is a busy but slow hobby. There are months of planning, gathering materials, and preparation, all for a blur of activity in three to four months, and then the cycle begins anew. I’ve grown to enjoy the planning and prep since, if I do it right, it means we’re in for a decent season with a rich crop. It also takes a lot of waiting, and while the adage says, “Good things come to those who wait,” sometimes you wait for terrible, awful things. Such was our situation a couple of years ago when we had to wait for our son, Francis Benedict, to be born and die.
Similarly to how we planned and prepared for his coming, there are months of planning and preparation that go into a garden. I grow starts (seedlings) and that takes time—weeks before I have a mature plant, if any sprout at all. In my first year of gardening, I had a lot of trouble thinning the young plants. Who was I to decide that one plant, for being slightly smaller or less mature than the others, needed to be separated and thrown in the compost?
The issue is that I do get to decide, but sometimes we don’t always have that luxury. I didn’t when I got the call from my wife, Kate, in mid-February. She was crying and the reception was bad, because she was calling from inside a hospital room. She had been through a level two ultrasound at 20 weeks. Our OB had pushed us to receive one after an unclear reading of the level 1. We were mildly worried, but this was our third pregnancy and our children had been healthy without any real complications, so assuming the worst felt unnecessary and pessimistic. I was blindsided when she told me our new baby might have trisomy-18 (T18).
All I remember was the bottom falling out of my chest. I had so many questions, but I was frozen. I couldn’t speak beyond attempting to calm Kate down. If we could just get through the preliminary tests, we would be okay. Maybe the diagnosis wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Maybe there were options for us. My attempts to grasp some peace were like holding onto waves in the ocean.
The waiting was bitter and yet we dreaded the end, since all of it could go one way or another.
What we were entering was an excruciating waiting period. There was a good chance our baby wouldn’t make it to term; we would need careful monitoring for the next 20 weeks if we were to carry to term. Kate had to go back to the hospital for the next level ultrasound every two weeks to monitor his growth and in case he was beginning to struggle. There were no assurances, except that our child was going to have a hard life once born—if he survived at all. Early death was the only certainty for him.
This is truly death of a different kind. I’ve experienced plant death, laughably, more times than I can count. The annuals in the garden have such a brief span. They are started in late February or early March only to survive until late August before they begin to die off prior to the first frost. I’m left pulling their dried and cracked stalks and vines from the ground and throwing them either into the fire pit or the compost. Selfishly, the garden was, at first, a utilitarian endeavor for me, wanting to grow food and preserve it or provide a fun accent to our dinners during the summer. It has taken on a new life after our son’s death.
The garden was renamed “Frankie’s Garden” after he passed in June 2021. It became a place where I could be with my grief. It’s typically quiet in our backyard, but also large enough that the kids can play while I tend to weeding and pruning. The maintenance of a garden lends well to contemplative thought, since you work with your hands as your mind ranges far and wide. Typically though, my mind drifts from my garden plots to the plot where my son lies buried, roughly a mile down the road.
We held out hope that the ultrasounds could be wrong. Sometimes the images are unclear, but the genetic testing revealed he not only had T18 but also Klinefelter syndrome. Despite that latter genetic condition not weighing much in our current worries (Klinefelters normally shows up during puberty), it sealed something for Kate and me. Our boy had a lot going on.
As the days came and went, inching us closer to meeting him, we made plans and prepared for him. Kate took time to paint the nursery. I set up the crib and bassinet for him, although he might not be able to sleep well, if at all, in either. His viability was slipping with each new appointment, and it became our ultimate desire to meet him while his heart still beat. We barely slept. We held it together at day jobs, but Frankie was never far from my thoughts. The waiting was bitter and yet we dreaded the end, since all of it could go one way or another. It was beginning to kill us. Our patience was working directly against us, prolonging our anguish, stretching it into each minute and each hour. While we were attentive to ourselves, we should have done more.
You need to repot seedlings as soon as they begin to struggle with one another. Starts need to be repotted as they grow, they can become rootbound or, if multiple seedlings are in a cell, choke one another out. You might lose all of them, so you have to extract, separate, and then repot them quickly, so they can keep growing. This is all so you can have decent plants for transplanting. But moving fast wasn’t our lot with our son.
We couldn’t put our needs above his. We couldn’t ask him to suffer more than he already would.
T18 babies are usually stillborn or miscarried. The slim chance that Frankie would be born alive gave way to even slimmer odds that he would live for weeks, months, or dare we dream—years. His life expectancy continually dropped until it was decided that we would have him early. Our waiting, although partially cut short, still involved counting each day. Kate would still feel him kicking around as if fighting alongside us in hope. In many ways, Frankie was more delicate than any of the plants I decided to grow the following year in my first seedling attempt.
Plants, for the most part, are all the same. They need light, water, and good soil. If they are able to have all three of those things, you’ll end up with a strong, healthy plant. It’s no different for garden plants, although in order to help out your harvest, compost is recommended. If not compost, then a fertilizer of some kind. I’m a fan of the former. I relish spreading the compost, because it smells fresh, which is ironic, since it obviously is not, especially since I favor mushroom compost. But I do enjoy the smell, and fanning it out on my plots each season is one of the highlights. It is right up there with transplanting my starts.
Tomatoes can be robust little rich green plants, and their leaves stink with an earthiness that I have become fond of. While I am not as delicate about plants as one might expect, watching them die at the end of the season is heartbreaking. They are my offspring in some strange sense. I nurture them for months, from spring seed until summer runs its course. I keep them healthy, pruning and keeping mold and pests at bay. I protect them with fencing from rabbits and deer. I kneel down in the dirt and transplant them delicately, which contrasts with how violently I pull them from the dirt in the end. Their roots stretch and rip apart. Even in death, the plants will not go gently, and I spend at least a couple of afternoons clearing the garden plots.
Learning about the various needs and complications that can arise for a baby with T18 was hard to hear, but obviously, we wanted to do what was best for him, even if it was unfair or worse to us. We couldn’t put our needs above his. We couldn’t ask him to suffer more than he already would. The only demand we had of him was for him to live, and he didn’t even have much control over that part. We went to Lurie Children’s in Chicago a couple of times for full days of testing, and while they were exhausting, they helped us have a better handle on our next steps, which was really code for our next period of waiting. Always another few more weeks of waiting before we heard more. Before we could decide what to do. Before we could commit to a hospital that had a cuddle cot versus one that didn’t have a NICU.
But his small movements, his kicks, the small punches through the womb—these were maybe the only encouragement that Kate and I received during our wait for Frankie’s birth. I would lay my cheek on Kate’s stomach and would whisper to him how excited I was to meet him. This might be an overly sentimental memory, but I think he would kick more in response. They were fleeting moments, but they made our painful waiting better. He seemed to carry himself differently in the womb from his siblings, and not only because of his genetics. There was a distinct person in there, and he loved us.
The growing season is a microcosm of what it’s like to be a parent.
When it became clear that Frankie was beginning to decline in utero, we were tasked with making the decision to have a C-section. The hang-up was that it did not appear that he had a nasal passage, coupled with other physical issues, including a heart defect. The doctors prepared us for him to either not live long after birth or survive birth at all. We gripped each other’s hands until we squeezed the bones, but we agreed—he needed to be born. We wanted to meet him, alive. It didn’t matter if all of our waiting was going to eventually force us off the edge in the deep well of grief. We were already there.
All of this waiting, and for what? At least with my plants, they bore fruit and I used those cucumbers for pickles. I froze the tomatoes for later sauce-making. I used others to garnish burgers and salads. The hot peppers were dried or became hot sauces. Bell peppers were eaten as snacks with hummus or joined the tomatoes in salads.
With Frankie?
He was everything.
The doctor, who we were told was the fastest C-section deliverer around, pulled Frankie out. Our boy cried almost immediately, peeing on the doctor at the same time. Kate and I were crying too; hearing his voice broke us. We had waited so long for that moment. When the nurse brought him to us from around the curtain, giving him to me, he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. He still was when he passed roughly 24 hours later in my arms. His entire life outside the womb was in a single hospital room with his parents, and that was enough.
The growing season is a microcosm of what it’s like to be a parent. Every season when I am out in the garden, I can’t help but feel the similarity to waiting around for Frankie’s birth. His lifespan partially matched the starts. Born after a long gestation, and as quickly as he entered the outside world, he was gone. The early joy of discovering we were pregnant in the fall dissipated in winter once the diagnosis emerged and the dread of waiting took hold.
I could offer every detail of that single day with Frankie, but there is no space, nor words that could describe how merely holding him was worth it.
Yet much like the tribulations of waiting for plants to flourish or fail, wilt or blossom—we hoped that Frankie would live for as long as he possibly could. I give up control over the seeds once I plant them. Similarly, we handed control over to Frankie as he kept beating each odd that arose. We built the discipline of continually returning our focus to him, rather than the specter of future complications or future absence. It may have been foolish, but this hope was our only solace in this place of limbo. We could only let Frankie survive and trust that he would hang on for us. That he would live for a short while and meet us face to face.
At the end of it all, waiting inevitably stretches us. It may arc toward the simple sprouting of plants or the darkness of a diagnosis that could mean early death. We don’t ask for these latter kinds of waiting, but the former prepares us for them. The moments span out into hours, weeks, and months—and suddenly, anything larger than what we are having for dinner feels like a far-off mountain range. With Frankie, waiting asked us to sit in this valley and focus on the tasks at hand—after all, we had his two older siblings to take care of. It brought the weight of ambiguity, but also its own kind of simplicity.
What I can say with confidence is that, if it was asked of us to wait again on a child that may or may not have complications—we would do it again. It would be just as hard, if not harder, post-Frankie, but waiting taught us how to remain present with those we love. I could offer every detail of that single day with Frankie, but there is no space, nor words that could describe how merely holding him was worth it. We were able to have meals with him. We were able to read to him. We were able to pray with him. And that was more than enough.
Alexander Pyles is a writer, editor, and reviewer based in the Chicago area. Originally from Virginia Beach, VA, he finds himself stranded in the Midwest among the corn. He holds an MA in Philosophy and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. His chapbook MILO was published by Radix Media as part of their Futures series. His nonfiction has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Three Crows Magazine, Litreactor Magazine, Analog Science Fact & Fiction Magazine, Ancillary Review of Books, Dark Matter Magazine, and others. When not writing or reading, he is attempting to cook, garden, or play video games when his kiddos allow it.
