A Rose Bush

With death, comes life.

It was really Elena’s idea to get a rose bush for my mother. My input as to what gifts to get for family or friends usually consisted of one word acceptances of her ideas. The rose bush would have been no exception if Elena didn’t know me as well as she did. She asked me about the rose bush and I said that it would be fine.
“What’s wrong with a rose bush?” she asked, turning down the car stereo. I felt her eyes pressing for an answer.
“What do you mean ‘what’s wrong with it’? I said it was fine. It’s a good idea.”
“Yeah, but you paused too long and only said that it was ‘fine’.
I glanced at her, feigning confusion to cover the sense of doubt about her idea that she had picked up on. “Elena, it’s a good idea, more than fine.”
“Good, but not great.” she said slowly, her words lingering in the silence between us. I turned the radio back up.
“I just don’t remember my mother being much of a gardener,” I admitted. “She never had rose bushes before. I don’t know if she’d want that for mother’s day.”
“Ya know Mark,” Elena insisted. “Maybe she never had a rose bush because no one ever gave her one.”
Regretting having admitted that it wasn’t totally ‘fine’ with me, I retreated to my agreeable self. This time, I was more careful. “Elena, I think that a rose bush would be great. You seem to know what gifts are best for people. I’m not good at that stuff so let’s go with your idea. You’re probably right about no one ever giving her one. It might help her to take care of something again.”
To take care of something again. My own words rattled in my head. They were simply words to end a sentence, but their true meaning crept unbeckoned into my consciousness. My mother had spent 8 months taking care of my grandmother in the ICU at North Shore Jewish Hospital on Long Island. Every waking moment of that time became a desperate attempt by my mother to rouse my grandmother from a nearly constant, semiconscious daze. My grandmother’s body had been beaten down by kidney failure and dialysis, heart failure and valve replacement, diabetes and needles, an ulcer, glaucoma, arthritis and of course, age. But, tucked in between the countless hours of watching her lie motionless, gasping at the stale hospital air, were moments of clarity. These were moments of hope, a flame kept burning by my grandmothers fiery spirit. We’d go into the hospital room, expecting to work the hand cream into her cracked finger tips and soles made hard by non-use, while listening to the elevator music left on for stimulation. Sometimes, we’d turn the corner into her room and the music would be off. Instead, some soap opera star would be announcing that she was leaving her lover or a game show host would be declaring the next contestant a winner of a brand new Buick. My grandmother would turn and smile like she’d been expecting us for weeks, with no realization that the day before, the only signs of life were her gasps and the heartbeat amplified on a monitor. We thrust ourselves into the moment on these days, making every second count. We’d massage her hands and feet because she would tell us how they’d been bothering her for days now rather than because they looked bad to us. She’d complain about her chapped lips and how the nurses never got her meals right but promised to knit each and every one of them an Afghan anyway. On these days, I had my grandmother back. It was like her soul had crept back into the shell it had abandoned. And with that soul came her tremendous heart and courage.
One day when her voice wasn’t working as well as she felt it should, she beckoned me to come closer to her with a frantic wave of her hand. I went to her bedside. She motioned for me to lean over and hear her whisper. In a New York accent as thick as the August air in Manhattan, she said to me;
“Mark, they can poke me and they can prod me. They can stick needles in me and steal my blood. They can hurt me and they can keep me in this damn bed. But they can’t kill me. I’m not going yet, not till I say so.”
And that was the essence of my grandmother. She always kept her humor, always showed her quiet pride and always showed her spirit, courage and strength.
Elena and I lived in Massachusetts and tried to come down every weekend and vacation that we could during those eight months. It was a lot of traveling but Elena made sure I stayed motivated. She was my inspiration. Even towards the end, when I was weak and ready abandon all sense of hopefulness, Elena would give me her strength. With a gentle nudge, we’d be on our way to Long Island. In that way, she actually reminded me of my grandmother; strong but gentle and never selfish.
It was a Wednesday night when I spoke to my mother. She told me that after 8 months of clinging to false hopes, she gave my grandmother permission to die. It had been weeks since we’d seen the last signs of responsiveness. She told my grandmother that we knew she’d fought hard and had refused to let the diseases win. But, we knew that she was tired of fighting and that if she wanted to go, she could. We loved her and we would understand. We were finally ready. My mother’s sobs traveled the miles of phone lines to swirl into my pool of emotions. Just as my mother had given my grandmother what she needed to hear, I gave my mother the validation she was looking for. The next morning, having waited until we were ready, my grandmother died. Even in dying, she had been true to her own words and consistent with her own actions throughout her life. She had met the needs of her family and waited until we were ready to say goodbye.

November 7th was the day. I stood on my porch lost in the slate gray morning as my mother gave me the news over the phone. Autumn had set in and the trees had retreated into their winter’s slumber, leaving behind their dried out, crumbling remnants to tumble with the breeze across the lawns and sidewalks. Winter in New England always seemed to be fast approaching and all that was dying would certainly be dead in a few short weeks. I had never known winter without my grandmother’s chicken soup waiting to cure my colds. I shivered at the thought.
On November 8th, a day stricken of both sun and warmth, we buried my Grandmother. My vision distorted by tears, I tried to follow the prayers in the prayer book as the Rabbi’s voice rose up in a challenge against the howling wind. His chants provided the soundtrack to a movie that flashed on the screen of my mind. I watched as my grandmother handed an eager eight year old a pile of two dollar bills that she’d put aside from her restaurant cash register. I watched as the newcomers to her Passover feasts nearly keeled over when they saw the tremendous amounts of food laid out before them, more than we’d all be able to eat in a week! I saw my grandmother telling the nursing home food service staff how they should make their chicken soup. I watched my grandmother knitting a sweater for my wife. She wasn’t my wife at the time or even my fiancé yet, but my grandmother found something that I hadn’t yet discovered. Somehow, my grandmother knew that Elena was my soul mate.
“This is for Elena,” she said to me once when I was visiting her at the nursing home by myself. This was only two months before she went into the hospital for the final time. “I know she likes purple and you’re going to marry her someday.”
“Grandma, we’ve only been together for....”
“Mark. You listen to me. I already know it. You’re going to marry her. If you weren’t, I’d only knit her slippers. For family, it’s a sweater.”
The words slipped away like autumn mist on a cool, New England pond. I was back at the funeral, Elena, my soul-mate, holding my right arm. There was silence now as the Rabbi’s chanting ceased. He climbed the mound of dirt beside of the open grave, his shoes slipping across the surface. From the top of the mound, the Rabbi pulled out a shovel and with another Hebrew prayer, drove the shovel into the mound of dirt. The Rabbi carried a shovel full of dirt to the grave and held it carefully over the hole in the ground. When he turned the shovel over, the dirt hit the coffin with a resounding thud breaking the silence that had melded with the starkness of the day. My mother and I, my grandmother’s two closest relatives, walked to the mound and pulled out the two remaining shovels. I only realized that I was shivering when I watched the end of the shovel quiver as I carried a mound of soil to the grave. I don’t know if the shivering was from the sharply bitter wind or whirlwind of emotions infesting my muscles. Peering into the grave site, I saw the dirt and stones spread out from the center of the mahogany coffin’s cover like trails of blood from a gunshot. I turned my shovel over and watched the cascade of earth tumble over the coffin. The sound rang in my ears for months afterwards, hollow like the way my grandmother’s eyes looked an hour earlier at the viewing. I dragged my suit sleeve across my face to clear the tears and continued my duty, shoveling until the top of the coffin was no longer visible. Afterwards, I collapsed into the driver’s seat of my car, overcome. While there was no denying the sense of pride in literally taking part in the burial of a loved one, there is also no more brutally, torturous task. As we drove away from the cemetery, the first snow flakes of the oncoming winter put a final seal on autumn. All that was dying, now had died.

The darkness of winter surrendered to spring as it always had before. The cold persisted through March that year and even into the beginning of April. The rest of the month delivered rain and May had brought the blossoms always promised in the song about showers and flowers. The convertible top was down letting the sun soak into our toughened winter skins as we headed down to the Island. The rose bush, sealed in a damp box sat alone in the back seat covered by my spring jacket. I was happy once we bought it and got on our way.
The smell of a barbecue tickled our senses as we pulled into the driveway of my mother’s home. It amazed me how the simplicity of the azalea blossoms surrounding the house like a fortress made it’s outdated, weary exterior sparkle in the May twilight. The cedar shingles had washed out and not been cared for since my parents split up 10 years earlier. Every time I came down to Long Island, I promised my mother that I’d do something with the outside of the house next time I was there. I just never knew what to do.
During dinner, we talked of work and vacations, hockey and the Mets while swatting at the flies that lazily buzzed about the patio. My mother briefly reminded us that tomorrow would be her first mother’s day without her mother before asking if we wanted dessert. In the spirit of my grandmother, my mother laid out two heaping bowls of Hagen Daz ice cream despite our insistent protests that we were both trying to eat healthy. Watching us eat made her feel better. So, we ate. Before we retired for the night, I checked on the rose bush, still in the back seat of my car. It looked just as it had when we bought it earlier that day.
The next morning, the sun broke through the blinds, drawing me from my sleep. My mother was already awake, sipping coffee in the kitchen. She smiled at me as I came down the stairs but I knew she’d been crying. The telltale tissue box and crumpled refuse alongside it sat patiently beside her coffee cup. I wished her a happy mother’s day. Once Elena woke up, we brought my mother to the car and gave her the rose bush. Elena had been right. My mother beamed as tears welled up in her eyes.
“Tears of joy this time,” she joked as she hugged us both. “I’ve never had a rose bush before.”
Elena shot me a patented “told you so” look and I shrugged
“So? Where would you like to put your first rose bush?” Elena asked.
My mother said that she wanted to look around the property until she found a spot that “felt right.” A short stroll up to the top of the driveway was all we needed.
“Right there,” she said, pointing unquestionably at a twisted, dead stump. The stump was from a bush we’d cut down a few years back. It was on the side of the drive way, pressed into a corner surrounded on two sides by a wooden fence. I never realized how unalive this big, dead stump looked in this prime piece of garden.
“I’m sick of having that twisted looking thing staring at me every time I pull the car out of the garage. I want that to be pretty again.”
“I don’t know mom. I don’t know if that stump feels much like leaving. It’s stuck in there pretty good.” We had tried without success to get the stump out the day we took down the bush that was there.
“Mark, this is mothers day,” my wife reminded me. “If that’s where your mother wants it, that’s where it should go.”
“Mark,” my mother said. “That stump has been there long enough. There’s good soil here and we need to let it have life again. It’s springtime and the rest of the world is coming to life. That stump is dead. I need to have life there.”
I kicked softly at the stump. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
After five minutes of futile struggling, I pulled my shirt off and threw it at the garage door, watching it fall anticlimactically to the driveway. The stump defied me, challenged me to tear it from it’s dead yet still powerful roots.
“Sometimes death seems stronger than life” I thought to myself.
I thought about the tools that might be hidden away on some shelf in the basement then decided that I needed to do this with my own bare hands. With a deep breath, I reached down and pushed at the top of the stump, my muscles straining against my quivering skin. The stump moved ever so slightly. I backed off and went around to the opposite side and pushed from there. The stump protested but reluctantly moved a little bit more.
“Can’t put in new life until you get past the death,” I thought.
I alternated sides, pushing with every reserve of energy I had, every cell, every molecule of my being. Ripping this dead stump from the ground was now a mission. While it stood courageously in it’s death grip to the earth, I began to hear and feel it tearing away from it’s roots, hollow thuds like the dirt falling on the coffin six months earlier. With the image of the coffin in my mind, I was soon rocking the stump back and forth, roots snapping beneath the surface like cables ripping from a collapsing bridge. I swiped my bare arm across my face, wiping away the sweat that had begun to fall into my eyes, blurring my vision. In my mind, I heard the Rabbi chanting his somber funeral songs. With a scream that came from some primal, hidden place, deep in my soul, I gave a final pull that sent both me and the stump tumbling back onto the driveway, dirt and stones spilling over my naked torso onto the pavement. With the stump still resting on top of me, I just lay there, exhausted, waiting for my breathing to slow down. I laid there until my mother and Elena came running to me from the house. They had heard my scream and saw me lying on the driveway. Elena knelt down by my side.
“Mark, are you okay?” She brushed her hand through my hair.
I smiled at the two of them. “I did it.” I tossed the stump to the side and let them help me up. The two of them brushed the dirt off of me the way only a wife and a mother would. Once I fully caught my breath, I asked about the rose bush. My mother quickly scurried off and returned with the bush. Elena carefully read the directions and we removed the bush from it’s box.
My mother held it delicately in her hands so as to not upset the roots.
“I don’t know much about rose bushes but these look like some strong roots.”
“Ya know mom, strong roots produce strong branches,” I said without thinking.
“Once it’s in the ground,” Elena began, “It will need a lot of attention. Roses grow best when they’re well cared for.”
My mother handed the bush to me. “You just get it into the ground. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry about that. This rose bush will flourish and branch out and show the world it’s beauty for a long time to come.”

It’s been ten years since we planted the rose bush. My mother remained true to her word until she passed away in January. Each fall, she would trim down the branches, carefully preparing the bush for the oncoming winter. Each spring, she would water and feed it just enough and each summer, the rose bush sported the finest, most beautiful and delicate red roses I‘ve ever seen. Now, we have moved to the Island. It’s May again, my first mother’s day without a mother. We’re here now with our children, Jeffery who is almost 9 and Stephen who is just 4. The rose bush has stretched it’s branches and grabbed hold of the top of the wooden fence. Already, it has dozens of glorious roses creating a dazzling red cascade from the top of the fence to the ground. A few feet away, our boys have discovered a space that needs a new life. I give them the shovels and watch as they eagerly begin to dig. We all admire the roots as we set the new rose bush into the garden. We know that it too will flourish and it’s branches will grow. For as life fades away to earth and air, new life awaits to take it’s place. And while it’s true, that even in death, roots can cling tightly to the earth, they are no match for the roots of new life, taking hold, ready to shine.