THIS IS US
May You Produce Seeds
A meditation on the gifts of death inspired by the failure of my first bouquet, plus an exercise in creating from decay.
Picture the scene: There I am at the flower shop, stationed in front of those big, backlit refrigerators, grasping for the necks of birds of paradise, and then: “That one that looks like velvety lettuce! And the spiky purple ones! And oh, oh, those little orange bursts!”
“You mean these ones?”
The teenager flings a manicured hand in front of different buckets.
“These or these? You sure you want these? They smell like onions.”
(Oh, I do.)
We don’t use a single proper name as I move toward the blooms that please my eye and point. It doesn’t matter what kind of flowers they are or what they need or how they grow, the flowers are my paint; they are tools. As far as I am concerned, though while once wild, they are now, obviously, inanimate.
I admit that I can slip easily into the seductive trap of “ignorance is bliss” in the creative process, an impatient student hacking her way on the fumes of impulse. This is an imbalance I constantly negotiate in my writing practice, but in my floral arranging? No holds barred. This is my first bouquet; I’m a complete novice, and it feels like freedom.
Of course, however fleeting the high, being ignorant is really a form of a curse. While my instincts finessed up some easy beauty (a fool could do it—flowers make it nearly impossible to fail in the task), I could not sustain it. I hadn’t considered the flowers to be living beings.
I had to research it to be certain, but the evidence shows cut flowers are, technically—in a way, that is—considered to be living as long as they are still feeding on sun and water.
Well, imagine me days before learning this important fact at the kitchen table gleefully bending the supple stems toward my creative vision. Some didn’t even reach the water. Despite my husband’s concern (“Caits, you’re manhandling the plants!”), I basked in my creation, cocky enough to swish the bouquet off to a prime location on the bedroom dresser and put off snapping a proper photo until the next day.
By the time I slept and woke, the blooms were already drooping.
The next day, I forgot to change the water.
And the day after that.
By the time I dumped the stems into the trash, they were soggy with the slime of decay. The water smelled like the accumulated morning-breath air of an assisted living facility (upsetting, I know, but there is no other way to describe it—it stank).
But then, I also saw the beauty.
In their last gasp, the flowers told a different story. The petals were dark and textured as elephant skin or the back of a grandmother’s grandmother’s hand. A single, half-wilted orange heart struggled to keep beating in the middle of the spread.
I quickly arranged them in a fan on the kitchen table, hoisted myself onto a chair, and shot from the top, memorializing the flowers in a photograph this time.
As I began to write about my failed bouquet, a memory struck that I have never told anyone. A few years ago over dinner, a friend showed me a photograph she’d taken of her mother just after her siblings had left the room. Propped on pillows in a hospital bed, the family matriarch eternally slept, swaddled in a pink robe, chin slumped into her chest with her eyes, mercifully, closed.
“I’m so sorry,” my friend quickly withdrew. “I know this is weird. Is this weird? I’m sorry.”
I gently pulled back her hand and the image to look more closely.
Though I hadn’t yet lost someone as close as a mother, I instinctively understood the desire to study death up close, to hold on to that surreal and ephemeral moment when the animal body suspends between worlds, like the clipped flower still metabolizing, the mother’s eyelashes still imperceptibly growing alongside the nails on her fingers and toes.
Where do the souls of flowers go?
Where do the souls of our loved ones go?
I was disturbed and intrigued, repulsed and drawn closer, and that specific, saturated tension was the feeling of life.
Of course, Google is a frenemy that helps dispel the most seductive of myths. As it turns out, nail growth after a person dies is not true growth. The nails simply appear longer as the skin around them dehydrates. The hint of aliveness in an otherwise empty vessel is an illusion.
The camera’s subject had transitioned out of body, but the gesture of the photograph itself was full of life.
Which is to say, in looking at this image of death, I was looking at the person behind the lens. I was seeing the beloved; I was seeing my friend.
Earlier this summer, I found myself releasing primal sobs while flat-backed on the dock of a lake house. The speed boats rocked the cradle of slatted wood up and down in their wake, and I became a baby. Things in my life were changing. I was in mourning. Inconsolable, all I wanted was the touch of my mother. The one who once held me in the lake of her womb.
Again, the realization struck me in precise blows to the heart: I would never feel the gentle squeeze of her hand, the slender fingers so delicate, so communicative, her distinct way of saying without words, “I wish I could take away your pain.”
After an hour of tears so loud they must have frightened the neighbors, I crawled into the claw-footed bathtub in the lake house of a friend’s recent ex-partner, a home she built but would soon have to leave. She had loaned it to me for the night, a last hurrah gift I didn’t know how much I needed. As the clouds rolled in and the rain pummeled through the screen door to slick the kitchen floor, I let the water and salt hold me, and the quiet was a blanket.
The next morning, I was wrung. But the sun had come out, and I drank my coffee on the deck, smiling into its warmth.
Assemble together a string of vignettes that look something like the above, but in different settings, timelines, and ceremonies, and at the end, you’ll find a person who is different.
Death as release to welcome a new possibility.
Death as a rite of passage.
Death as the only inevitability.
Death as teacher.
Death as fertilizer. Of course. Of course!
The loss of my mother inspired the novel I’m writing, bringing me closer to my true artistic expression than ever before.
The loss of my mother offered a chance for my relationship with my father to ripen into a rich friendship.
The loss of my mother helped me find new spiritual rituals where I bring her into my home and heart in intentional ways. I talk to her. I ask her for advice.
My mother makes my journey with plant life feel like an inherited part of my legacy, imbuing it with deeper purpose.
My mother helps me bolster my own internal foundation so I may be of contribution to others.
She is still my mother even in death. The gifts of her death are still her gifts.
Even as I write this, a little part of my heart screams, “This is just your brain making meaning! It’s all bullshit! You made these choices!”
To which my brain replies: “It may just be my psyche working overtime, sure, why not, who knows, I’m only as big as my human boundaries allow, but whatever the case may be, I can assure you, it is not bullshit.”
Maybe that voice in my head is my mother, too.
And then I laugh. Wait, isn’t fertilizer technically bullshit?
Hey, mom.
Of course, this parade of insight wasn’t immediately accessible to me. These perspectives bore their way in quietly until one day, something inside snapped open and accepted the taste of sun.
What I didn’t tell you about my “failed bouquet” is that the lilies must have begun to raise up their heads while I was still arranging. Invisible to my lazy human eyes, somewhere between working the stems in my hands and the trance-like zone I entered, the bulbs had opened their faces, like birds in choir. Little trumpets of life, still changing, still seeking light.
When I wrote earlier that the flowers were technically alive, what I could have expounded on was that sometimes, even after severed, the flower’s cells are still dividing. There are two precarious variables that allow this. One, if the flower can garner enough light energy, and two—and here is where it all comes together—if the cut flower has been fertilized, there is a small but fighting chance it may even produce seeds.
