A Tribute to Earth Day and My Father

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 each year (ironic that not every day is Earth Day in a way similar to International Women’s Month, which singles out 50+% of the population for 1/12 of the year). 

It is also ironic that my father passed away in the spring, the season we loved most (although he hated the idea of Earth Day–a gimmick). Throughout every day of spring, he taught me to see, hear, smell, and feel the signs of rebirth as early as February: snowdrops, the buds of lilacs, the cinnamon scent of witchhazel even on downtown street corners, then bloodroot, hepatica, skunk cabbage, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, purple and yellow crocus blooming from bulbs we had planted the fall before appearing through still-dormant grass, and our wide patches of King Alfred daffodils. We were friends with all these spring beauties; we knew where to find them; we laughed about their habits and names and celebrated their trustworthiness. In 2015, Sibbaldia, the Scottish journal of horticulture, published my essay about mental health and gardening, inspired by a life of gardening with my father. I can’t believe it’s been ten years since I truly learned the phrase, “A Long Row to Hoe,” when I had the idea for that important essay.

When he died on April 21, 2021, I was lying on my back in the grass of Cricket Hill in Chicago, looking up at the sky, at the midway point of a 10-mile run. I had seen him the day before, and after years of sickness, his passing not only did not come as a surprise, but also was a blessing. I felt him go. In a few hours, I was due to teach my first post-Covid semi-in-person class at Northwestern. It was among the first hybrid classes to be taught after lockdown and was a big deal. Twenty-five students were coming in person, masked, formally distanced by desks set in widely spaced, perfectly measured rows (planted like a cornfield?) in the largest auditorium in the building. The other twenty-five students were coming in over Zoom–including Adam Wolford, now my PlanPerfect cofounder (who would have ever guessed!), again in neat rows. Skilled audio-visual engineers would be helping me DJ multiple screens and microphones.

Despite my father’s passing that morning, I went to teach. It was what he would have wanted–expected–from me. It’s what I owed the MBA students who had lost more than a precious year of business school and young careers to the pandemic.

Looking back now, exactly four years later, I can’t believe that we survived those days and that I survived the pain of my father’s death–all that led up to it, and all that I lost following it, including my childhood garden and woods. I will always love and always call those acres home, more than any other place on earth. I can smell the black Illinois earth softening amidst the tang of the wet brown oak and yellow walnut leaves, although I’m so far away.

Happy Day, fellow inhabitants of our beautiful Earth. Let us cherish every moment of every day, admire each others’ as well as our own strength when suffering pain and yet moving forward, even in the most subtle of ways and even when faced with seemingly insurmountable hardship. Spring encourages us to believe we can.