A restful farewell from writer Linden Staciokas
Linden Staciokas, who has died at 74, worked for years in her professional life as a social services manager to improve the lives of thousands of children in Alaska.
She also had a large following among gardeners and those who never got their hands dirty but liked to read all about it. She shared the mysteries of growing in columns that ostensibly dealt with the specifics of nurturing plants, but always included bits of her personality and humor in the mixture.
From time to time she wrote directly about herself, most notably in a powerful series a decade ago in which she described something that most people can’t bear to examine—the difficulty of dealing with a life-threatening illness.
She allowed all of us to learn from her pain. Everyone who may have to deal with serious illness—meaning all of us—can profit from reading those columns again. Some of it makes for uncomfortable reading, but all of it is worthwhile. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6 Part 7 Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.
After more than a year of severe sickness, she was back in the garden, grateful for the assistance of a young helper and friends during the 2015 growing season.
She claimed to have retired from writing about gardening in 2019 after 30-plus years, saying she had grown old writing the column. “There are only so many ways to talk about seed starting and shutting down the garden for the winter, and I think I have exhausted all of them.”
“And, as with pretty much everything in my adult life, I have to thank my husband, Ted. He built me five greenhouses and countless raised beds, hauled manure and heaved it into those beds, installed grow lights and figured out how to make it so I could raise and lower them with no effort during spring seed starting, and peed in dozens of bottles after I read a BBC Gardening article on how they use urine for composting in their national gardens. He also helped me gather poop from the homes of friends, during a time when we didn't have a dog, so that I could spend a summer following the directions for composting dog poop. (If any activity deserves the label ‘Don't try this at home,’ it is weeks of shoveling up dog waste and then a summer of hand turning it every 10 days.) And this was all done by a guy who hates any vegetable that is not a deep fried potato; I'm serious, he doesn't even like baked potatoes.”
She failed at retiring from garden writing now and then, publishing her final gardening column a year ago, which showed her at the top of her game.
“During my 40-plus years as a gardener, I have spent a lot of time evaluating things through the lens of ‘Can that be made into compost?’”
“Over the course of our marriage, I have convinced my husband to surrender our backyard to miniature sheep, chickens, geese, a Russian boar and ducks — not for eating but for their various fertilizers. I have driven by a field with horses and tracked down the owner to ask if I could have some of their horse droppings. I read an article about how to compost dog waste and spent one summer asking neighboring dog owners if I could clean up their yards so I could replicate the recipe (trust me, you don't want to try this). I knew things were out of control when I found myself looking at my husband one evening, idly wondering if the worst happened, could he be composted.”
An artist with the written word, she shared her expertise and philosophy about all growing things. She brightened our corner of the world. She revealed things about herself even when the topic of the piece dealt with beets.
“I was born shortly after my parents arrived here, and my earliest memory has me sitting on my Lithuania-born father's lap, sharing his salad of boiled beets and raw onions, drizzled with oil and vinegar and topped with sour cream,” she wrote in 2005.
“Talented in engineering but short on English, he worked as a bricklayer. Every night he would come home exhausted, but, pretending to believe my childish lie that my mother hadn't fed me all day, he'd share his first course of beet salad and teach me all the new American words he'd learned that day.”
“When I came home after my first year in college, my father's new wife was American and beets were banished from the menu as foreign and boring; one of the most poignant memories of my young adulthood is seeing my father sitting alone at a scarred Formica-topped kitchen table, eating the salad and borscht spurned by his new family. By the next trip back I had dug up the recipes for all his old beet favorites, and soon the others were vying to join us for what seemed to them like some exotic bonding ritual,” she wrote.
“These days I grow beets every summer and have expanded into American standards such as Harvard Beets and Roasted Beet Salad with Rutabaga and Turnips. But despite my every attempt to become a kitchen-spurning career woman, one of my sweetest pleasures is bringing my childhood full circle by fixing my now-aged father beet and onion salad and borscht,” Linden said.
When she wrote her series about illness in 2014, she said her husband had been the greatest gift of her life.
”This does not mean he has agreed with everything; in fact, we have had some quite spirited discussions about how I cannot control things from the other side of the grave. For example, I want to be cremated and put in a secret compost pile; I don’t want him scattering my ashes in our compost heap because no one would ever want to eat anything from our garden again. He does not want any part of skulking around to find a stranger’s heap in which to dump me,” she wrote.
“I don’t want a funeral; I am not opposed to that ritual, but I don’t want him embarrassed on my behalf when only three or four people show up. He intends to have a service of some sort. I want my casket to be the cheapest and as environmentally friendly as possible. If he made one out of old wooden pallets, that would be great. A cardboard one would be even better. Ted thinks having people see me in some cheapo box would be disrespectful to my memory; my friends would understand he was coerced into it and as for what others think, who cares?”
”I want him to use the obituary that I already have written. Ted is quite dyslexic and often what he intends to write and what he really puts down are different. A guy who consistently leaves me notes saying “Sweatheart” instead of “Sweetheart” cannot be trusted to write a public document. He has even managed to misspell my name, which would look especially bad in an obituary. He thinks I have made too many jokes in the obituary I have crafted,” she wrote in 2015.