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.

We scattered her ashes in that garden, by the rose, a week later, as she'd asked. And the day after we did, the flower — I should say, the plant had held that single bloom, perfect, uncannily fresh, through the whole week, refusing to wilt — the day after the ashes went into the soil at its roots, the flower closed, and browned, and dropped, and the rose was a dead brown thing again, and has been ever since. It bloomed once, for the length of her farewell, on dead wood, out of season, and when she was finally, fully in the ground it loved, it let go.

My father hasn't dug it out. It stands there still, dead, by the back step, and every March he watches it, and it does nothing, and he's glad, I think — glad it was a once, glad it was for her, glad it isn't the kind of thing that happens twice, which would be harder to live beside than a dead rose that flowered for a funeral and then rested. A horticulturalist could tell you about dormancy and stress-blooming and last gasps. He'd have to explain the timing, though — the morning of the funeral, the day after the ashes — and the two dead years before, and the browning the moment she was home. My father doesn't ask him to. My father just leaves the dead rose where it is, and nods to it, sometimes, on his way past.