It has been one year and one day since my father died.

I dreamed of death last night.  So many people with me in that shadow world, and then it was their time and they quietly, electively, peacefully disappeared.  I slept for nearly nine hours, and woke up tired and heartsick.

I sometimes think that there is no amount of therapy in the world that will bring me solace after watching my father die on his own terms.

I did not know that gratitude and trauma held hands and danced together in the afternoon sun.

* * *

* * *

A few weeks after my father died, I wandered through the aisles of our local JoAnn’s store (now also defunct, the irony).  As part of the Celebration of Life I was planning for Dad, I was going to finish and display the art quilt that had been started by family and friends after my mother died.  I had quilt square contributions of a dozen different crafting arts, and was looking for inspiration to bring them all together.

Halfway along the row on my left, I stopped in my tracks, then reached down and pulled out a bolt of fabric.  It was a lightweight, dark-dyed jean material, and it was embroidered, end to end, with vibrantly multicolored vines of flowers.

I knew this material.  Yards of it had been in my mother’s stash for years.

~

In the darkest hours of the morning on January 26th, 2022, a few hours after Mom had finally forgotten to breathe, I saw the van from the BraIN Laboratory in Seattle pull up outside the house.  It was time for her to leave us for the last time.

I knew she would be so embarrassed that strangers would see her with her hair all messy, so I put a woolen cap of sunset colors that I knitted on her head.  And I didn’t want her to be cold as she was taken into the winter night alone, so I took a length of flower-embroidered dark-dyed jean fabric from her stash, and covered her from shoulders to toes.

And then they took her away.

~

And that is how I found myself crying in JoAnn’s on a September afternoon.

~

I bought more of that fabric, and finished the quilt.

* * *

* * *

Dad went for long walks, nearly every day of his life.  With mom, until she no longer could.  And then by himself, until the pain from the metastases slowed him to a stop.

He would come home and talk about the flowers he saw on the walk, the blooms pushing up in February, something inconceivable in the cold of a Massachusetts or Calgary winter.  He would take pictures of particularly vibrant examples, look them up online, share them with his friends.

We were out walking together once, and he stopped, looking around our neighborhood.  “You know what more this part of the country needs, to just be perfect?” he asked.

“What?”

He smiled.  “Absolutely nothing.”

* * *

* * *

I called the florist for a phone consult about a month before the Celebration of Life.  They were very nice.

“Do you have a theme in mind?  A color scheme?”

“Chaos,” I replied.

There was a prolonged pause.  “I’m sorry, what?”

“Chaos,” I repeated.  “He used to love to walk through all the neighborhoods in town, looking at gardens.  He loved all the flowers.  I want you to use as many flowers as you can find.  Odds and ends, crazy color combinations, different heights, different vases.  Beautiful, beautiful chaos.  Just like nature.”

The pause was much shorter this time.  “I love this.  You got it.”

~

They did an amazing job.  They arrived at the venue with a riot of flowers, and they were perfect.  Every table had color and life and vibrancy.  The room was an explosion of lights and sunshine and pictures and family and friends and food and drink and it was spectacular.  And we celebrated my parents, and the life they had lived, and we cried and laughed and cried again.

And it is not lost on me that just as it was the end of my parents journey in this world, it was also that for the flowers on every table.

The final act of a flower in a bouquet, a vase, a display, is to begin its own final journey. 

In death, to be seen.

* * *

* * *

So what do you do with hundreds of beautiful flowers when the celebration is over?  When friends return home and families head back to the airport, or to a hotel for the evening?  When the venue is empty and the decorations packed into the trunks of cars?

I couldn’t bear the idea of bringing them all home, only to watch them wilt and fade.

I put them all in my car.

“Head on back to the house,” I called to my brothers and my family.  “I’ll be there in a little while.”

And I drove down the street.

~

There was a group of couples, standing by the waterfront, enjoying the sunset.

I leaned out my window.  “Do you guys want some flowers?”

They looked confused.

I held a bunch out the window.  “For free!”  I yelled, and I laughed.

Then they smiled.

“Hell, yeah!”  called one guy, and jogged up to my car.  “Gonna give them to my girl tonight!”

Another young woman within the group glared at a man next to her, who visibly wilted.

“Well?” she said, then pointed at me.  “Go get me some fucking flowers!”

~

I gave flowers to some teenagers, all dressed up in their best, heading to a formal dance.

I gave flowers to the mothers of some children playing on the swings.

I gave flowers to some of the warehouse workers, sitting outside in the cool evening air on their smoke break.

I handed flowers through my car window into another car window at an intersection.

Flowers leapt into the world along the harbor roads, into the corners of the marina.

And when I had one bunch left, as I was getting ready to head to home, I saw a father walking with his two young daughters.

And I missed my father so much.

But I got out of the car, crossed paths with another man carrying a guitar case, silently pulled a single flower for him, and then gave the father my last bouquet.

~

And then the celebration was done.

And I went home.

* * *

* * *

“Although we know the end of the maze holds death…I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being–one of many ways–and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”

-Charlie Gordon

* * *

* * *

One week ago, we walked the familiar unmarked path through the forest, high in the foothills of the sleeping volcano, for the second time in three years.

We found the tree at the end of the path, huge beyond belief, an ancient giant, miraculously spared from the voracious maw of the timber industry.  

I sat at the foot of the tree and wept.

And we scattered Dad’s ashes in the shadow of leviathans, the same place we scattered Mom’s, releasing them both from us save but for memories and gratitude, and allowing them to find their own path, through the forest, through the glaciers and the rocks and the rivers and the flowers, finally together again, at last.