Life After Death

My father died suddenly and unexpectedly in his sleep, some time during the early hours of this past Christmas morning. It’s not a very uplifting start to this article, I know—and it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with organic gardening—but please, bear with me.

In the days following my dad’s passing, a number of sympathetic and well-meaning friends and family members sent floral arrangements to the house. They were lovely, all of them—and the thought behind each bouquet was much appreciated by my mother and me. But, here’s the thing about cut flowers: they die. And when you have other, graver things on your mind besides changing the water in the vases and trimming the ends of the stems, they die pretty quickly. Before you know it, you are surrounded by dropping petals, drooping blossoms and dried-up leaves. Trust me, the last thing that you want to look at when you are mourning the death of a loved one is a bunch of dead flowers. They are a much-too-real reminder of your loss.

However, two of my environmentally-conscious friends did not send a traditional cut flower arrangement. Instead, they sent an organically-grown indoor garden. The small, soil-filled table-top basket was planted with an assortment of green tropical plants. Artfully interspersed among these leaves were a sunflower and a few other blooms, their stems encased in water-filled tubes that were embedded in the soil. As these flowers started to die, the tubes could be easily removed and discarded, leaving the basket full of greenery that, theoretically, would continue to flourish.

Neither my mother nor I have ever been much into gardening—organic or otherwise. To put it mildly, neither of us possess a green thumb. In fact, I can vividly remember throwing out the sad remains of a cactus plant when I was in high school. Although it could apparently survive hot, dry, desert conditions, it could not survive my care. But there was something about this little organic garden that made both my mom and me want to rise above our past failures and help it thrive.