Watching Flowers Die
A meditation on aging as autumn tends toward winter.
I picked the last of the late summer blooms just before the first frost. Plump-cheeked dahlias and frilly, lace-cap hydrangeas. The late afternoon sun shone through them, amber and rose, more perfect than an Instagram filter. But there wasn’t room for them on my desk. Work required my space and attention.
I traced the arching bracts of fennel flowers as my sister-in-law summoned the courage to share the news that she carried like a ticking brown-paper parcel.
My brother has had a heart attack.
The flowers had lost their yellow brightness and drooped dramatically next to sprigs of lavender that retained their calm composure. I tried to catch their scent as I listened to whispered breaths from the other side of the deep, deep ocean.
“He’s in the hospital, he’s okay — conscious, didn’t lose consciousness. He’s had meds and they’re doing tests and ... We’re waiting to hear what will happen next.”
My brother is five years older than me but now we’re both settled into our 60s, it hardly matters.
Autumn has arrived. My beautiful bouquet has changed from decoration to meditation as the flowers fold in on themselves, conserving their energy.
I take my daily walk along the shore under heavy grey skies, fog blurring the horizon with the stone-grey sea.
I am one of a community of walkers my age who frequent the beach in the middle of the workday. Getting our steps in, exercising the silver-muzzled family dog, having a think. We nod to each other but we don’t chat.
We are the retired and semi-retired. We smile at families of sandpipers scurrying to and fro at the water’s edge like iron filings responding to a trickster magnet invisible beneath the sand. A quiet walk is our respite from the tide of daily demands, our responsibility for elderly parents and concern for adult children.
Thankfully my niece was in town when my brother took ill. She called the ambulance.
We are at the midpoint between the equinox and the December solstice, halfway through autumn. The flowers in the vase fade imperceptibly moment by moment but my daily meditation catches and measures the change from day to day.
The petals of the dahlias recede making the sunset-colored centers seem more vibrant; asserting their purpose even as all around them grows ragged.
My brother calls. He is home.
He looks worn and pale. His daughter sits next to him, only a slice of her visible in the camera frame. There is something that he is burning to say but he can’t harness the energy he needs for it. It’s okay, I already know what it is.
The architecture in the vase is shifting. The soft seeds of the grasses have hardened and look wily, ready to jump. Amazingly, one purple zinnia looks almost fresh-picked though the dirt-brown head of the other is dangling at the end of a withered stem.
As the collection settles and falls away, one perfect green orb is revealed. A dahlia bud doomed by hope and hiding in plain sight.
The terrible nearness of death isn’t new for my brother and me. Our younger brother died in an accident four decades ago. So much of what lives in our family is rooted in that long-ago beginning of a summer day.
We have all grown from David’s dying. Like oak grows around a jagged knot of iron.
The red-gold glory of autumn is over and it’s time to fetch wood for the fire. What was fresh is now composting and transforming, seeds going to earth and secret sleep.
The lacy hydrangeas, hardy perennials that they are, have turned brittle and dry. Charles Dickens spinsters with rouge on their cheeks, dowdy but not yet dusty. I move them to a north-facing room knowing the ghostly spiders of the house will be pleased to weave their homes in them given time and privacy.
As the evenings lengthen, far from the bright star of dawn, I’m glad there is still some use and comfort to be found in the husks of a soon-forgotten summer.
Thank you so much for reading.