Cathy’s Roses

§  The week that Cathy lay in a coma on life support in the hospital, I walked out on my patio one morning, and there before me were my rosebushes, astonishingly covered in buds.  §

A friend passed away a few weeks ago, dying suddenly and unexpectedly as a result of an auto accident. Saddest of all to those of us who knew Cathy from our Monday night meditation group was the fact that we heard too late about all of it: the accident, her hospitalization, and her passing. We learned of the tragedy only on the evening after it had all ended. Her family, burdened and dealing as best they could with unbearable stress and sorrow, perhaps not even knowing how to contact Cathy’s friends, hadn’t been able to reach out to us.  That was tragic, for we, the members of her spiritual family, would have been there to sit at the bedside and give them respite; to hold hands and gently rub tense backs; to bring cups of coffee and meals; to pray with them; and, at the end, to stand beside them as the terrible decision to remove life support had to be made.

It was mere coincidence that one of our number, stopping by to visit Cathy at home, had been told by a neighbor of the accident. Hurrying to the hospital, he arrived just a few hours after her passing. Instead of seeing her one last time, he, shocked and grieving, had to carry the dreadful news to us that night at our gathering.

That shock echoed within me for days. As I commented once when I had been spared a severe auto accident (The Sunflower Rescue, August 21, 2018), life often hangs in the balance on very slender threads.

But this time it was roses, not sunflowers, which caught my attention.

Cathy, you see, was an amazing gardener. A farmer for much of her life, she’d once planted 6,000 trees on her land. She often brought seedlings to share with us on Monday nights; just a few weeks prior to her death, she’d given me a half-dozen tiny coleus starts. I’d gone out in the rain that same evening to plant them in my flowerbed—and only a few days later, bitterly discovered that little brown bunnies had dug up every one of them and eaten the roots! (Damn you, little brown bunnies!)

The week just prior to her fatal accident, Cathy had been lamenting the vanishing honeybee colonies, agonizing about the fate of the planet as we destroyed our pollinators. Veering from that thread, I’d fussed about the condition of my beloved roses.

Unlike the talent Cathy had, I myself have absolutely no green thumb. I can grow only a few plants: roses, morning glories, coleus, violas. All the others take one look at me, turn up their toes, and die on the spot. I’d spent way too much money buying two small rock geranium seedlings in the spring, I mentioned to her, planting them around my mailbox; only one survived, and that by the skin of its little flowery teeth. But my poor Knockout roses….   Damaged by a polar vortex a few winters previous, they had never really recovered. Pollinators or no, they simply wouldn’t bloom. In the past two summers, my three plants had produced a total of seven blooms.

I tried everything. I fed them multiple brands of rose food. I aerated the roots. I watered them. I used insect control. I pruned them, talked to them, praised them, sang to them, prayed over them, gave them Reiki. Finally, I threatened them. Nothing worked; the bushes leafed out, but refused to bloom. The abundant rainfall of the spring had ended, anyway, and hot, dry weather had begun; I knew the bushes would go dormant, and be unlikely to bud again until the fall, if then. I doubted that my roses would ever bloom again after all this time.

“Come the fall,” I told Cathy, “I’m going to dig them all up.  I’ll plant new roses next spring.”

But the week that Cathy lay in a coma on life support in the hospital, before any of us her friends even knew what had happened, I walked out on my patio one morning, and there before me were my rosebushes,  astonishingly covered in buds. Buds on every branch. Even the sickest of the three bushes, the little one that had barely come back into leaf that spring, was budding.

I had been out to work on the roses only two days prior, and had seen no buds at all. But now my roses were literally singing with new life.

And on the day Cathy died, those buds burst into bloom. Heavy, thick, rich blooms opened everywhere. Branches weighty with blooms and buds and new leaves threw out crazy, joyous arms in a dance of ecstasy beneath the sunlight.

Two weeks after Cathy’s passing, my roses were still blooming—still budding, still blooming even in the hot, dry weather. I strolled about my rosebed, praising them and thanking them.

As I told this story to the other members of my Monday night group, we all agreed: Cathy’s gardener spirit, wandering free of her damaged body, went walkabout; decided to heal my rosebushes; had paced around them, reviving them and stirring them into renewed life.

“After all,” one of our members laughed, with the tight, sad smile one pastes on while recalling humorous moments from the life of a lost friend, “Cathy never could sit still!”