The Garden Bloomed on the Day We Buried Her

My mother's rose was her pride and, after she got ill, her grief — a climbing rose by the back door she'd tended for thirty years, that had, in the two winters of her decline, sickened and died. Brown, brittle, leafless, unmistakably dead; my father had talked, sadly, of digging it out, but hadn't had the heart, so it stood there against the wall, a dead thing, all through her final autumn and the terrible winter she died in.

She died in February. The funeral was set for the first week of March, a raw grey week, nothing growing anywhere, the garden bare.

On the morning of the funeral, my father went out to the back step to have the cigarette he'd secretly resumed, and the dead rose had a flower on it. One flower. A single perfect deep-red bloom, open, fragrant, flawless, on a plant that had been brown and dead for two years, in the first week of March, when nothing blooms and certainly nothing blooms on dead wood. He called us all out and we stood on the cold step and looked at it, this impossible flower on the dead rose on the morning we were to bury the woman who'd grown it, and nobody said anything for a long time, and then my father, who is not a fanciful man, cut it, carefully, and it went on her coffin, and we did not discuss what it meant because there were no words that wouldn't break us.