Winner of the 2023 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction
I fell fast, to my knees, both hands buried deep in the mud of a newly turned field saturated by the Seattle January rain. I bent to the earth, too tired to move under the weight of my upended twenty-five-year-old world. My mother, now sleeping in the house behind me, had called five days after my wedding to tell me she had officially lost the fight. “Nothing more they can do,” she had said about her ovarian cancer. That night, I flew 800 miles away from my new husband to her farm, reprioritizing yet again on a wing and a prayer; too unable, unwilling, unbearable to answer his relentless questions. “I’m not dying now,” she’d said into the phone. “I see myself dying during a month when there are lots and lots of flowers.” The crows circled above. I pulled one hand out. Would she make it to summer? Would my marriage? What I did know: I would plant that dying vision of abundance right here, sink seed and tiny rhizomes deep in this fertile soil, raise and nurture masses of tall, ripe, beautiful flowers for her.
When she’d called, I had been watching a California sparrow hop through my freshly potted geranium, then the extent of my gardening abilities. The ink was barely dry on my marriage license. In my mind, one situation far outweighed the other; there was time to repair any damage to my marriage. There was little left for my mother and me. I threw the suitcase on our bed. The choice seemed obvious: my stepfather David needed to go to work, she was on their farm alone, I was her person, she needed me.
“When exactly do you think you will come back?" My husband asked one last time, hanging up from cancelling our dinner reservations. I kept my back to him. “I simply don’t know,” I answered, stuffing in another waterproof jacket. I couldn’t face him — what kind of new bride leaves the moment she is needed elsewhere?
I had no illusion he would chase me north to my mother’s farm. He was a city boy, preferring filet mignon delivered by a five-star waiter to pulling eggs out from under an angry chicken’s butt. Would he still be around whenever this cancer was done with us was the question left unspoken.
We were mother-daughter best friends. I drove across the country for her wedding. She had worn a gold lamé suit and high heels to walk me down the aisle for mine, strong and happy, between treatments as far as she knew. During our honeymoon the next check-up revealed the cancer had instead traveled unchecked throughout her body. Within a week I landed back in Seattle but palpable tumors had affected her speech, motor skills and for the first time in the three years since her first diagnosis, her temper. She greeted me with, ”I want you to leave me alone.”
The mood was set: everything was a battle as she lost independence before my eyes. She needed me to dress her, guide her downstairs, take her arm so she could walk to her studio and on a bad day, even eat. I deployed my hands for distraction, baking all through the night, cleaning; closets, cupboards, sock drawers — all those beautiful clothes that would never go out again. I knit formless sweaters when the house was silent. I don’t know what annoyed her more that month, my being there, my being healthy, my leaving my husband to help her. My hands were my ‘tell'; they read: a girl on the brink.
My husband, usually my rock, hardly called. When he did, he had been to a wine tasting, or at a dinner with friends. Our phone calls were testy, sparring. I was tired and realized I didn’t have the bandwidth to talk about his work. Mine was all-consuming.
I was brand-new to human death and dying. The sadness of a lost childhood dog or my parents’ divorce had nothing on this daily challenge of watching my mother die. I was making a lot of judgement errors in quick succession; brandishing protein shakes and freshly baked scones in the morning when she just needed a pain pill. She would shout at me “You are trying to poison me I KNOW this!” her thin hands clenched tight with confusion. She was my mother and she wasn’t; she was alive, barely. I was holding on, barely.
Absent wife, bad care giver, mean daughter — everything was a fail in my mind. Go home! she shouted at me one morning. I looked her in the eye and answered, “No!” Inside I screamed: I can’t do this! I have to do this. Cope.
In the end, I learned coping with the end-of-life months — I was so lucky to have months — has to take different forms for different people involved; for starters, safe and medically correct caregiving for the patient. Tools for the caregiver to self-care in order to be a good caregiver. Opportunity to have time-out for anger diffusion, for everyone involved. Fresh air for balance to remind us that there is something else besides the endless circle of food, meds, laundry, cleaning. My mother, that month, needed twenty-four hour care and yet she would not relinquish her home to strangers. Her core team, David and I, were burning out. This month was a fail according to everything I read and felt — my own self-care looked like slamming out the kitchen door, gasping for breath and staggering down a boggy field.
A few weeks into this I left the dishes piled high and the laundry piled higher, my mother asleep and medicated and took the dogs for a walk in view of the house. January in the Pacific Northwest is magical; barn swallows diving over the fields in graceful arcs, the cows swinging their tufted tails against the newly hatched flies. Color was just beginning to bloom in spiny hay shoots and garlands of new-green bud tips hanging from fir trees. I walked aimlessly, to shake off the fog of sleeplessness. Her two Scottish Terriers hopped this way and that, burrowing after field mice and pouncing on phantom tails. We hadn’t talked again about her death-vision of flowers but when I abruptly fell face down in the mud fifty yards from the house several thoughts came to me with absolute clarity:
That garden of flowers she saw could be right here in front of me in this dirt.
I was here to do this.
Perhaps this was the most important thing I could do.
When my stepfather arrived home off the ferry, I barely gave him time to take off his coat, making my passionate proposal in the kitchen hallway. He went inside to the couch and kissed her, murmuring those things they said to each other, then slipped on his stained farm boots. Raised on a Scottish dairy farm, he was always and absolutely game, especially if he could use tools. He rose at four each morning to tend the animals, help my mother and take the ferry to work. Married only four months when she was diagnosed, I held my breath every day in gratitude for his devotion and fear he had had enough. He filled two wine glasses to the brim with the boxed Gallo red he and my mom loved, then opened the screen door.
“After you,” he said, in his bemused brogue. As the sun set we paced out a rectangle, shuffling our feet to lay out paths, shouted ideas at each other, our coats and arms waving.
“Wait ’til you see my sunflowers,” he shouted, the ‘r’ rolled deep in his voice.
We debated how to enrich the dirt, estimated how many months, who could help us.
At the gate we paused and looked back on our footsteps. The plot was going to be gigantic. Gigantic was good, I thought. Make something beautiful from the ugly.
“I will make a bench — here — to sit on,” he said, as he secured the latched.
In the farmhouse, flushed with anticipation and the large wine, we talked over each other as we ran to tell my mother the details. After dinner, David sat next to her and tucked her head against his hip, a glass of single malt whiskey in one hand, a gardening book in the other. I sat in a nearby chair and drew out the garden in colored pencils, the pad balanced on my knee, my drawing talents not so different now than anything I drew in second-grade, but detailed none-the-less. Lines of highest to lowest growth, pinks and purples, showers of blue and white bloomed on the page.
“What do you want to plant?" I looked up and asked her.
“Lots of Shasta daisies and sweet peas,” she smiled. David handed me the garden book. The page was open to “flower symbolism.” I read:
Shasta daisy: new beginnings
Sweet Pea: goodbyes
Our paper garden was ready.
The following weekend my husband flew up from San Francisco. I eyed him with skepticism as he stepped out of the rental car, a flash of white ankles. Of all the help I needed, this did not seem to be the one he actually could handle. I handed him the extra work gloves. “We are building a garden today,” I informed him, “did you bring socks?” He slowly drew the cracked leather over his soft fingers with a tiny wince, went straight to the tractor, hiked up into the seat, fiddled with the starter and spent the rest of the afternoon scooping up manure then dumping loads into the garden for fertilizer.
I reported upstairs on our progress. When she heard that my husband was handling cow pies she pulled her thin legs over the side of the bed, donned a multitude of sweaters, a scull cap, a barn jacket and with my help carefully negotiated the stairs to harass him from the porch swing.
The day was peaceful. The tractor droned across the back field. David hacked out stones from the garden rows, the pick ax ringing against ancient stone. Later, the mudroom full of wet dirty clothes, my mother teased the men unmercifully about ruined tasseled loafers, blistered hands and the superiority of boxed red wine. It was a weekend of laughter, sweat and family. We turned the tables on cancer that weekend. What to remember: living counts even more when there is dying.
As my mother’s body slowly faded, the opposite was happening in the garden. The plants reached to the sky wild and high, a veritable kaleidoscope of color and shapes humming with birds and bees and butterflies. The sunflowers were eight feet tall, the cosmos reached my nose, the sweet peas used the cosmos to climb to the sun, tangling along the way through the bachelor buttons. The crows and sparrows carried off seeds heads from dawn to dusk. My stepfather took his morning coffee on the bench and sometimes was even able to carry my mother out to sit with him. The cows hung their heads over the gate in longing.
Sunflowers: faith and unconditional love.
There was calm: we had hospice care now, morphine that I could administer, no more pills or scones, just a dropper and awareness that pain was the enemy now. I lay on her bed in the mornings and talked to her even with her when she was able, ambling through the past and even the future. She asked me, “tell me about your children.” I asked her if she thought I would see her, afterwards.
Bachelor buttons: hope and remembrance.
My husband came to the farm every weekend now, becoming an expert with the wheelbarrow and carrying his favorite wine on the plane. Unknowingly, our first child was conceived late that summer under a strawberry moon as we managed, in the darkest of days, to find each other again and grow some good from this bad. She died at home at the end of August.
The day of her funeral David and I met at the garden gate at sunrise. Scissors and clippers in hand we cut the entire garden down. I hung my garden gloves on the fencepost one last time, then carried all the flowers to the church, filling the sanctuary with her blossoms. Just as she had envisioned.
There was no answer except this one.
Alexandra Dane writes memoir and essay by the sea in Seattle and Boston. Her memoir-in-progress explores coming of age twice at the mercy of cancer; first as caregiver, then as patient. “The Language of Flowers” is a piece of her story. Her essays been published in River Teeth, The American Writers Review 2020, San Fedele Press and elsewhere. Read her thoughts here. Alexandra Dane knits to think.
