It was just such a shame.
Next door, huge orange and black Caterpillars were chewing through Ho’s remarkable garden. Their thick metal tracks crushed hedges, pathways, shrubs, ornaments, and even larger trees. Everywhere was mud and ruin. The house was already rubble. An articulated metal insect tumbled the old brick chimney. A great cascade of raw red brick that’d stood solid for years burst a vein, then bled into the once tranquil pond I’d helped Ho dig.
I’d helped him a lot with the more physical landscaping tasks, particularly as he got older. His garden was the work of decades. It’d been both my great pleasure and an honour to share the labour and those decades with my quiet neighbour, my best friend.
That pond—once tranquil, now turbulent and turgid with broken brick—had been a microcosm of life. It was the centrepiece—a dark jewel at the garden’s heart, where mayflies danced ballet, and two quiet men shared stories and became friends. I was, perhaps, the only one who really understood how much it meant to Ho, how it embodied facets of his most treasured memories: those of Hue, his wife. He hadn’t asked me to help him dig the pond; he’d asked me to help build a memorial. For that, I’d put my heart into the work, because I, too, understood what it was to live with loss.
I remember a day on his front deck, just us, looking out over the tranquil lilies and the darting, dynamic goldfish. It was hot, and we had beers. I was drinking my Tui straight from the bottle, Ho was drinking his from a large glass with a big chunk of ice in it. That, he told me, was the Vietnamese way.
“Dan, I will tell you something of Hue.” His voice was different when he spoke of her; it gained layers, reverential, resonant harmonics in a minor key drawn from deeper within him. I’d never met Hue. She died not long before I moved in next door, but her widower and I shared much, both shy, both quiet. We were neighbours and then, gradually, friends. I learned of her at Ho’s pace. He spoke of her rarely, quietly, carefully.
“I have a memory of her from before the illness. It took her hair, but before that... Oh, I loved that hair so much. It wasn’t straight. She brushed it but it was mischievous. I remember when we were young, even before Anh. Hue was reading and her hair, it was long and tickling her. She wasn’t thinking, just reading, and every minute she was trying to tuck it away but it kept escaping...”
I didn’t have the right words. After a time, Ho fell silent too. It had taken many years for our friendship to develop to the point that we could talk like this. I knew he had slipped into a moment from his past, and I wouldn’t take that from him.
“It is here, Dan, see?” He surprised me as he surfaced suddenly. Ho pointed at the pond. “It curves just like her hair. It flows just so.”
Everything in his garden was in some way a memorial. Each tree was planted on an anniversary, her birthday, their wedding day, the date they first met, the day their daughter Anh was born. Only Ho knew all of them.
Well, maybe not anymore.
The roar intensified as another monster joined the massacre. A chainsaw belched and farted a few times before screaming into abrupt, angry life.
I remembered another day with Ho. Autumn. Misty. Quiet.
We had been walking around in the section of native trees he’d been growing for five or six years, our heads tilted back, our breath steaming and streaming upwards. Ho was extremely excited because he was sure he had grey warblers nesting in the kanuka branches. We stood in comfortable silence under the trees, peering up through the vital curly ghosts we’d expelled into cold air, waiting for a feathered flitter or flickering.
Instead, we got song—that distinctive sound that grey warblers are named for, and suddenly, with an expression of child-like delight, Ho sang back.
“Chúc ngon miệng!” He didn’t sound anything at all like the warbler. Surprised, I almost laughed.
The birds went silent, but Ho burst into a beautiful, happy laugh. Blissful, his face was transformed, and I was stunned.
“It’s like her voice, Dan. Hue would sing to me when she cooked. No one else could cook like her. Oh, she made the kitchen smell of heaven, and she filled it with song.”
The garden often prompted Ho to recall his wife. Ho told me once that he was trying to make it easier to remember the good times, to think back past the last two years of their life together, which had, I understood, been heartbreaking. Hue was fighting thyroid cancer. By the time she’d died, the cancer had spread throughout her body. Ho didn’t often speak of the very end, but the one time I clearly remember him saying something, it was simply: “It was finally some mercy. We were exhausted. We went to sleep together, and I woke up alone.”
Alone. That one word carried more weight when he breathed it out than I believe I could ever carry. I never let myself laugh at Ho’s fancies, not even if, on the surface, they seemed silly.
Next door, there was a crackling cacophony as a steel beast splintered the stand of kanuka as if the wood were fragile glass. I couldn’t cope anymore and headed inside—only I couldn’t settle there either. Before long I was drawn back, white-knuckled and stricken, to my deck railing. I couldn’t not watch, though my vision blurred. Over the decades, I’d witnessed the marvellous creation of Ho’s Memory Eden; I would witness, also, its day of demise. I felt like John of Revelation, witnessing horrendous visions of the apocalypse.
If only…
Anh.
Ho was not close to his daughter. She was a lawyer in Auckland and, apparently, quite successful. They’d clashed when she was younger.
“We were too alike, Dan—both stubborn, but different too. I wanted a daughter who would sit and read with me. She wanted a father who would kick the soccer ball. Hue would mediate and find the compromise. She held our family together.”
They were distant. I thought it sad. I sometimes wondered if maybe the garden held some of Anh, too, another facet of Ho’s yearning.
With virtually no communication with his daughter, I was Ho’s closest contact. It was me, therefore, who first noticed that something wasn’t right. I spent a whole morning with Ho turning his tidy little house upside down.
“They must be here, Dan!” He was getting upset. I tried to calm him.
“Alright mate, that makes sense, but seriously, we’ve searched everywhere twice over. Are you sure they aren’t in the car?”
“I have looked thoroughly there!” Ho kept his car immaculately clean. If his keys were there, he would have found them.
“Okay, how about you make us a cuppa? I need to have a think.” I picked up a couch cushion from the floor and put it back on the sofa. I could hear the sounds from the kitchen. Cups clinking, jug boiling, fridge door opening.
Silence...
The keys in the fridge incident was a minor omen predicting things to come. Ho started misplacing more important things, documents and small valuables, as well as forgetting names and even appointments. He’d always been a careful, precise man. He was becoming flustered and often frustrated. Aware of what was happening, he’d get angry. I was on hand to help with the small things—searching for reading glasses, looking up forgotten contact information online—but the real problem, the creeping decline, wasn’t going away. Ho got worse. His car had dents he couldn’t explain. He would forget to take his medicines. His house was not being kept as clean anymore. Unopened mail piled up on his coffee table. Some bills went unpaid, others were paid twice.
I will never forget the feeling I experienced when I looked out of my lounge door one quiet Wednesday evening and saw smoke belching out of Ho’s kitchen window—the panic, the shock. I suspect I became a few years older that day.
After the kitchen fire, I called his daughter. I’d not seen her in many years, but I hoped she would remember me.
I didn’t know much about her adult life apart from what she did for a living. Ho didn’t have her home number, but was able to give me the name of the law firm where she worked. It took me a while to get through the fortified receptionist system. It didn’t help that I was asking for Nguyen Anh rather than Anne Nguyen. I wasn’t being rude; I just didn’t know that she didn’t use her real name anymore. Neither did Ho.
I came to know Anne a bit better over the next few months. She was an intimidatingly reserved young woman, tiny, intelligent, intense—bordering on prickly—and she responded to my call for help promptly, listened carefully, then acted brusquely and decisively.
She organised an enduring power of attorney for herself and organised for Ho’s bills to be sent to her rather than him. She had me approved with his doctor as a support person in case Ho forgot something important, like a prescription. She rolled up her sleeves and gave Ho’s house a much-needed clean up, while I took a weed-eater to some of the more remote and neglected corners of the garden. She organised for a public health nurse to make regular welfare visits, and then she buggered off back to Auckland.
Ho’s decline felt painfully quick to me. In fact, it was over a couple of years, during which he became physically frail as well. Eventually, after he had a nasty fall in his bathroom, I called Anne again, and Ho’s shift into a full-time care facility was arranged.
I visited him often. He was in a nice home near where we lived. Sometimes he stumbled over my name, but he knew who I was. I was always delighted to see him, as he was to see me. He would chat about Hue or ask about the garden. They were almost interchangeable in his mind by that stage. I would tell him what I was reading, what I’d been up to, but the conversation always circled back to the garden. I’d talk about the seasonal shifts—the flowering, the growing, the fruiting... He would tell me stories he’d told me before—stories of Hue—and I’d enjoy them once again.
“She’s doing well.” He would nod happily after we’d talked for a while. He meant the garden, I think. I don’t think he always remembered my visits afterwards, but I know he was always happy while I was there. His health decline, meanwhile, progressed inexorably. Of particular concern were a series of progressively worse chest infections that left him hacking and coughing like a lifelong smoker.
Eventually he needed a higher level of care, so Anne had him moved to a specialist dementia facility in Auckland. My visits, sadly, became rare. I couldn’t afford a lot of travel, and busy city roads made me nervous. I wrote him letters, but he didn’t reply. Occasionally, I would send him a photo of his garden, taken from my deck or down the end of his driveway. Apart from a bit of basic maintenance I’d promised Anne I would take care of, I didn’t often venture into the garden’s heart; it felt empty without its creator guardian, lonely and sad. On very rare occasions, I would still wander its pathways, indulging my grief for my friend, using the garden to summon up happy memories from before his illness, just as Ho had done for those he treasured.
One day Anne showed up at the house with strangers.
“Potential buyers,” she explained later, over a cup of tea at my place.
She was a little mysterious about them, quick to change the subject. I’d wondered if she might sell the property eventually. We were in a desirable rural area near a major centre, and Ho had over five acres; the property would be worth good money. His health care could not be cheap, although I never asked. The house's exterior condition had declined a little in Ho’s absence, but it was nothing a lick of paint couldn’t improve, and the inside was fine, if perhaps a little dusty.
New neighbours. That idea would take some getting used to.
Anne mentioned her father still asked after me. I knew she was just saying that to be polite; the last time I’d visited was heartbreaking. Ho could barely speak, had barely moved. Still, I’d held in my grief and spoken cheerfully of his place. It’d been a warm spring, and I told him of regularly hearing the grey warblers sing.
For Anne’s sake, I didn’t express my dubiousness when she mentioned Ho asking after me. Our relationship wasn’t close enough that we could speak openly. We stayed in the safe social shallows, chance companions only through mutual respect and obligation to her father.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Honestly, Dan, he doesn’t know he’s moved. He’s far gone. On bad days, he’s silent; on good days, he keeps asking after my mother. He insists she is here in the garden.” She was silent for a moment before carrying on angrily, “He doesn’t even remember that she died!” She sounded hurt, bitter.
My heart fell for my friend, unable to communicate his needs, and for the young woman who understood so little of her father. I wish I hadn’t heard what she’d said. It made me queasy. I might have tried to explain, but where to begin? She didn’t give me a chance to find the words. She was always much too quick for me, nothing like her patient old man. She spoke briskly, and the moment was lost.
“I visit him. He smiles when I read to him.”
He would enjoy that; it was what he’d wanted when she was young, but my spirits couldn’t be lifted. It was too sad that she had such a deep misunderstanding of what the garden meant for her father; I would have liked to put her straight. I tried to find the right words before she left, but that’s not my strong point and she was in a hurry to get going.
I haven’t seen her since. Perhaps, given time, I could have written her a letter explaining what the garden meant to her father. What was enshrined within it.
Unfortunately, I, too, misunderstood something important. Anne’s ‘buyers’ weren’t new neighbours: they were property developers. She wasn’t selling the property as a whole for some young couple like her parents had been when they bought it. It would be broken up and sold off in bald, bare patches of dirt.
I have watched helplessly as my dearest friend’s most precious memories slipped away from him, and now it feels like I must watch them be taken again, ripped out of the one place he’d planted them: his beautiful garden next door, his mosaic of memory.
Perhaps I could go see him one last time, but I’m so deeply afraid: not that I’d see no recognition in his eyes—a very real possibility now—but that I would see that sparkle which I’ve missed so deeply, and he would ask, “How is she, Dan?”
What could I say?
The Caterpillars have almost finished their work, and now how will anyone ever remember that grey warblers once sang in those trees, and that there, where the mayflies danced among the lilies, a woman’s hair flowed just so?