All my flowers are dead

It's sad but it's happy, I guess.

I was living on borrowed time in the garden. The late summer blooms may have been fading, but I did not deserve them. They brought me beauty to behold in the simple everyday moments of my life and lived well beyond normal expectations. They surprised me with what I learned from them. With what my children learned from them.

On a dusty fall evening, a cold front blew in. It took every good and living thing in my garden as expected, quicker than expected. My morning stroll through the garden is no longer for curating vases, but for surveying the aftermath.

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At the end of September, my grandmother passed away. She had ninety-four beautiful, hard, sad, delightful years on this earth. I had thirty-five years of my life knowing my grandmother. What a gift and heartbreak all in one. Sitting around a dinner table, our family reminisced on her legacy. I’m surprised by the memories that stand out most in my mind. My best memories of her involve her cooking my favorite foods for me, climbing into her lap at night while she read the tales of Peter Rabbit to me, and seeing her read her Bible. She made us feel safe and loved. I’m shocked at how ordinary those moments are, and yet they have produced some of the most radical fruit in my life. Her presence, hospitality, and gentleness sowed thousands of seeds of presence, hospitality, and gentleness.

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I could not show you the last beautiful bounty I received from the garden. I didn’t know it would be the last, and to be honest, I didn’t want to think about the end. Pending death has no right to rob the present. In an act of resistance, ignoring fate, the warm autumn wind whipped across my smiling face as I clipped zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, poppies, and celosia.

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“This makes me sad” Mia says to me. Crisp air is encroaching on our moment in the autumn sun. I step over dead stems and my boots crunch in the garden bed. My dirt-caked hands trim off the dahlia remains, and I pass the bunch of tubers to Mia. She places them in a brown paper bag carefully labeled “purple” in her six-year-old handwriting. Mia has been my sidekick in the garden all year. I laughed when she planted onions next to peonies. The delight of growing what you want, where you want, what a thought! I still remember the day she excitedly ran to get me, pulling me by my hand to her little garden to show me her first bloom. The reward of delayed gratification.

“Tell me more,” I say to her.

“Because all the flowers are dead, and their seeds will grow. But it’s the same as people. It’s sad but it’s happy, I guess.”

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I did not know it would be the end, but I do know this: no good thing is ever wasted, and my garden was good. With dirt under my fingernails and death all around, I clip dead buds to steward and keep. My shovel breaks through the dry earth and resurrects next year’s lifeblood. Death is awful, it’s the end of something, something good and beautiful, something that shouldn’t have ended. But what if it truly didn’t end? In those dead flowers lie dry dead things and you’d just never know they are the beauty next year will desperately need. And so, at the end of this good and beautiful thing, I cry but I don’t quit. Because in death lies an opportunity to resurrect beauty, and this I know, because all my flowers are dead.