The Gift for the First Year Without Them

My friend Isadora lost her father in March.

Not suddenly. He had been sick for two years and the decline had been gradual and she had done the work of preparation that people do when they know what is coming, the practical work and the harder interior work of trying to get ready for something you cannot get ready for.

He died on a Tuesday.

She called me from the hospital parking lot, the second time in this story that a parking lot is where people call from with news that changes things.

She said: he went about an hour ago. He was not in pain.

I said: I know. He knew you were there.

She said: I am going to sit here for a little while.

I said: sit as long as you need.

The year that followed was the year it followed. She went back to work and kept her life moving and had the bad nights and the unexpected good days and the particular vertigo of the first holidays and the first birthday and the first March morning when she woke up and thought: it has been a year.

I had been thinking about the anniversary for months.

Not to mark it loudly. She was not someone who needed the marking to be loud. She needed to know she was not alone in remembering.

Her father had kept a garden. A very specific garden, all flowering perennials, designed so that something was always in bloom from March to November. He had spent thirty years refining it. She had grown up in that garden and she associated every season with what was flowering in it.

I reached out to the local nursery he had always used. The owner remembered him. She told me his name and the owner said: oh, Gilbert, yes, he came every spring.

I bought a perennial he had not yet had in the garden, a specific hellebore, an early bloomer, the kind that comes up in late winter before almost everything else. I had it delivered on the anniversary with a small card that said: he would have loved this one. Plant it somewhere he would have chosen.

She called me after it arrived.

She said: how did you know about the garden.

I said: you told me about it the first summer we were friends. You described every flower.

She was quiet for a moment.

She said: I did not know you were keeping all of it.

I said: I keep everything.

The garden is still there. The hellebore comes up every February, before anything else, the way he would have wanted something to.