With Flowers
I’ve tried to tell this story before. Let me try again. This time with flowers.
My mother died on Mother’s Day. It’s nearly impossible for me to comprehend, because she was my mother. Every store window was crowded with flowers and mother-daughter bullshit, and my to-do list still said pick up flowers after she was dead.
The air was warm for early May, and crocuses were everywhere. Rhododendron buds plumped and darkened on every bush, azaleas too. Magnolia trees mired in the muck of their fallen petals, surrounded by festivals of bees and gangs of scavenging wasps. In short, the world was full to bursting and utterly on the brink of garish spring obscenity.
We found out she was sick alongside azaleas and irises. The first surgery happened with sunflowers; the second with wild roses. Radiation lasted through snapdragons and hydrangeas; outlasted marigolds. She grew thin alongside slender bachelor’s buttons and fierce echinacea. Her hair fell out while the rose of Sharon flung its fleshy blooms against the grass. She changed medications as the amaryllis poked out of its pot on the mantel. Dead with allium and buried with peony.
I have tried to write about this day a hundred different times. I have tried to capture the cold, hard facts. The metaphor and meaning of the moment. The chronology. The things that were said. But the bare heart of the situation dodges and weaves and refuses to be pinned down. It squirms out even from a clenched fist like an earthworm. I don’t know how to tell a true death story, but I do know that we threw irises on her grave.
So, to try again. With flowers.
We planted bulbs on my mother’s sixty-second birthday. Irises, crocuses, daffodils. November didn’t feel like the right time to plant anything. The air was cold and getting colder, the ground hard and getting harder, the sky grey. Every tree in the yard had been stripped bare, and dead leaves scraped across the driveway with the wind. My mother stood at the side door, shrunken in her heavy purple coat, shrouded in pashmina scarves. My sisters and I moved dutifully about the yard, hunched against the air and digging shallow holes with fingers cramped around trowels that were new when we were children.
Here’s the thing about bulbs: the cold is part of the process. When you plant a bulb, it grows a root system that reaches below the frost line. Once the earth freezes, the bulb undergoes hormonal changes that convert carbohydrates into the sugars needed to propel the first wave of stem growth come spring.
But it can’t happen without the cold. It’s pinching your cheeks to make them pinker. It’s breaking a rib during CPR. It’s jumping into the ocean in February and running out of the water screaming, breathless. It’s cutting the soft underside of your arm with a knife so your body tells your brain YOU’RE ALIVE, GET UP, THIS WON’T LAST.
Sometimes the body needs to receive a message it can’t deny before the mind catches up. The fire that burns your hand makes you pull it away. The earth that freezes your papery layers sets the scene for the blooming—
The sight of a purple crocus and its golden stamen poking through the snow is the release of a long-held breath. It is the first step towards the righting of winter’s cruel wrongs. It is proof that the cycle does indeed go 'round, in defiance of—in spite of—
My mother turned sixty-two when we planted the bulbs. And when they grew out of the earth, she went into the earth. And the flowers went into the earth, absorbing themselves and growing deeper roots. And they grow out of the earth in springtime but she is still in the earth, and the flowers will die and regroup and regrow and she will still be in the earth and the flowers will die and regroup and regrow and she will still be in the earth and—
Every week, my mother bought a bouquet of alstroemeria from Trader Joe’s for four ninety-nine. Something that I’ve always hated about alstroemeria is that it’s very difficult to tell when they’re dead. They stay bright and vivid and perky and plump. Until you touch them, and then the slightest contact sends all the petals tumbling across the counter and the floor, leaving you with ugly stems in a vase of cloudy water.
Kimaya Diggs (@kimayadiggs) is a musician and writer based in Western Massachusetts. She was a 2017 Callaloo Fellow in Poetry, and in 2020, she headlined the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Tell It Slant Poetry Festival alongside U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Her work has been published by Malarkey Books, Meat for Tea, Abandon Journal, Wax Nine, Rathalla Review, FreezeRay, and more. As a writer and musician, Kimaya has written soundtracks, libretti, and themes for several operas, plays, and podcasts. She currently works as a speechwriter and is working on a hybrid memoir. Her second full-length album was released in March 2023.