Gaps

I pulled out my debit card in the sunlit Elkhart greenhouse Tuesday before last, April 28, to pay for the dozen spikes I needed for my geranium project.

“I’m so glad I thought of you,” I told the lady.  “The greenhouse downtown doesn’t have their plants in yet.  And I’d rather get them from a place that grew their own plants anyway.”

“Oh, I planted these in January,” the greenhouse lady said with a maternal glance at my flat of tall green grasses.  “And I actually thought of dividing them again, so you’ll get more than one out of some plants.”

It was as if she hated to part with the plants she had tended through the winter months when the snow was flying outside.  Perhaps, if the other spikes on the greenhouse shelf could think, they too were wondering where their green leafy friends had gone, and why their was a gap on the shelf they had shared for four months, growing from tiny shoots to towering grasses.

I went home and with the help of about fifteen neighbor kids and five boxes of ice cream, we planted ten giant geranium pots in a flurry of potting soil dust, empty plastic dirt bags, and a trail of mud up the stairs to my faucet.

It was at the end of this planting session that I received the message that my student of six years breathed her last, giving birth to her son.

Standing there in the geranium pots and mud, I couldn’t comprehend that a 25-year-old beautiful, athletic friend I had known ever since childhood could be gone.

The one with three spoons in her lunch box.

The one who fought hard in any sport, flinging dodge balls with ferocious speed, even if victory was impossible.

The one eating the ice cream and never getting fat.

The one who read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee with the other three high school students, in preparation for our South Dakota trip, where we then stood on the Wounded Knee memorial for a picture.

The one playing checkers with my sisters and I, and sneaking with us into my brother’s house to celebrate the midnight hour on New Year’s Eve on that Christmas vacation when they were no longer my students, that Christmas that I was not doing well and the fun times were like medicine.

That one who was so beautiful, you almost didn’t want to take a picture with her.

A few days later, my sister text me a snapshot of her obituary, side by side with the obituary of her infant son.  Again, this time leaning against a counter at the hospital, I couldn’t comprehend.

A few days later, we scooped clods of dirt onto the top of her casket, beneath which her body cradled the body of her son, and dropped roses on the pile when it was complete, and I slid my photo of the four high school students sitting beneath the four faces on Mt. Rushmore into the clods as well, and we took pictures of the three high school students left from the original four on the picture…

“Why didn’t we have that South Dakota reunion we always said we would have?” the remaining three ask each other.

Beyond the piercing sadness of the toddler and husband and sister and parents left behind, besides the knowledge that we will never have that reunion, there is a sense of being geographically lost…

• …perhaps like coming back to your home after years of absence to find it owned by someone else and remodeled.
• …perhaps a bit like Berlin or London after World War II, when refugees came home, and the landmarks they had thought would always be there, were in fact not there.
• …perhaps like watching a centuries-old tree fall in the forest, and realizing the gap will never be repaired in your lifetime.

We realize that if the permanent characters in our life can leave us, then our existence on earth is not only fragile, but downright uncertain.

Surely “In Loving Memory” cannot be the right phrase for someone so full of life.

I remember the greenhouse lady who “planted them back in January”, and watered and tended the plants and wondered if they should be divided, and almost hated to see them leave…

….maybe, those of us standing around the grave are like the other green spikes left in the greenhouse, wondering why the twelve spikes that stood beside them since January are leaving now.  The separation makes no sense to them.   They only see the gap in their shelf.  They do not see that the missing dozen spikes are now spreading all over Brady Street.

They do not see, so they cannot understand.

But the greenhouse lady who planted them and tended them through the long cold months, the gardener who loved them first and best, knows their purpose, and understands.