I wrote this piece in August 2022, six weeks after my girlfriend died by suicide. While suicide itself is not the least bit funny, I feel it’s important to find humour in the grieving process. Here goes…
This morning, I mowed my front lawn for the very first time.
Now for you suburbanites and country folk furrowing your brows in confused indifference, let me clarify for you the epic journey required for me to get to this point.
The fact that I’ve never mowed a lawn before is purely circumstantial. Previously I didn’t have a lawn to mow, or somebody else was doing it. But now I’m living solo with my young child in a house with a massive front lawn and neighbours who expect a certain look from our little stretch of homes facing the park. As the grass continued to grow this spring, some folks made comments to my landlady, and then the pressure was on.
Getting this done was complicated in terms of time management inasmuch as there was no way I could mow the lawn when my daughter was at home, because she’s terrified of lawnmowers. And pretty much the only time she’s not home with me is when I’m working, when I probably shouldn’t be taking time to do yard work.
Furthermore, my girlfriend worried that my seasonal allergies would be triggered badly by mowing the lawn, so for many weeks she insisted she would do it for me. But for one reason or another, she never got around to it – then she died, and the lawn remained un-mowed.
To be clear, I did actually have a lawnmower in my possession; I’d just never used it. My previous landlord (not the one who evicted me, but the one who sold the house to the people who evicted me) gifted me a gas lawnmower, presumably because he felt bad about the situation he’d put me in.
So one day, I did actually get the lawnmower out of the garage, onto the grass, fully ready to give the lawn a buzz cut, when I realized that a gas lawnmower actually requires gasoline.
By this time my anxiety about the whole thing had gotten to the point where any other obstacle made this task near impossible. So did I drop into a gas station and resolve this entirely resolvable situation? No, I did not.
I wondered if I even deserved to have a fucking lawn.
Several weeks had passed since my landlady had made the original request to get the lawn up to snuff: she texted me again to see if I’d gotten it done, and I painstakingly admitted I hadn’t. So she came over WITH HER OWN LAWNMOWER and just did it for me. To her credit, she was very nice about it, and left her lawnmower (an electric one) behind, so I could use it next time.
SO NOW I HAD TWO LAWNMOWERS IN MY GARAGE.
Around mid-July, over a month after my girlfriend died, the lawn was starting to look a little hairy again. But the shame surrounding the circumstances of her death, coupled with my feelings of self-doubt, wondering if I’d ever be capable of doing anything ever again, led me to prolong the agony until the point at which I ended up chatting with my neighbour who had one of those manual lawnmowers that she had bought only because her other one had burnt out and she didn’t want to invest in a more expensive one. She was going away for a couple of weeks and offered to leave me her manual lawnmower to try out, and she wanted to try the electrical one when she returned.
SO NOW I HAD THREE LAWNMOWERS IN MY GARAGE.
There was one day, can’t remember exactly when, that I did attempt to mow my lawn with my neighbour’s manual lawnmower, and it was absolutely useless on my overgrown lawn. Like trying to cut hair with blunt scissors.
I had wanted to try using the electric lawnmower, but the cord wouldn’t extend to the outlet on the outside of my house, and this confused me tremendously, like how are people supposed to mow more than a few inches of grass under these circumstances? And of course, those of you with any common sense will know that all I needed was AN EXTENSION CORD, which was pointed out to me by my neighbour when she eventually returned from her trip.
Now we’re at the end of July, and I am ready to tackle this beast of a task that I’ve been procrastinating on basically my entire life to date. In fact, I’ve taken the week off work (because: trauma), so I have all the time in the world to decimate every blade of grass in my path.
And then I injured my back. And then depression set in. And there were days when I wondered if I even deserved to have a fucking lawn.
Yesterday something shifted. Suddenly I had clarity. And I knew that everything was going to be alright.
This morning, after dropping off my daughter at school, without overthinking it, I mowed my front lawn with the electric lawnmower complete with extension cord. I also pulled up some weeds and swept my steps. The buzzing from the lawnmower was such that I couldn’t hear my own thoughts, which was refreshing for me. I got dirt under my fingernails and sweat on my body. It felt good. And guess what – I didn’t even sneeze.
I climbed that mountain of grief with a lawnmower-sized weight on my shoulders. And now, my friends, I’m ready for whatever’s next…
… starting with the lawn in my backyard. Hey, we can’t do it all in one day!
Jessica Ruano 