Wildflowers and the Meaning of Existence

Glacier Lily - white phase

The grief pamphlets Hospice has sent us make reference to numbness as being a stage in the grieving process. Apparently I am in the numb stage. I have been tromping around the woods and fields, rummaging in our house, and working in my office - which is the room in which Mom died - and have felt very little so far. I look around and wonder where Mom is but at the same time feel relief for the freedom I have received in her dying. And I look around and wonder where my daughter is and wonder why I live so far away from her but that feeling isn’t new to me. I have felt it ever since she and I started living in separate places.

I admit to feeling lost. My days are no longer defined by caring for Mom so Juan and I have been dutifully planning how to make money by doing our art. But on a deeper level all he or I can really think about is when can we go fishing and hiking. The remainder of our lives feels so incredibly short - twenty more good years, if we’re lucky - and the only compelling pull anymore is being peaceful in the frequency of nature. That and being with my daughter. Those are the two things that matter most to me.

Yellow Fritillary

Balsamroot

Shooting Star

A dear friend sent me a huge pile of wildflower seed packets so I have sown those around our small parcel of land and have thought of Mom with each toss. I bought a pound of flax seeds and sowed them as well, thinking of my daughter with each toss because suddenly I felt like I was being Miss Rumphius, the white-haired woman in one of Mikaela’s and my favorite childhood books, who sowed lupine seeds everywhere she walked leaving behind a legacy of flowers. I still cry when I read it.

In the face of the earthquake in Nepal and the 7,000 people who died and reports of a 4- month-old and a 102-year-old pulled from the rubble days later in good spirits, my confusion feels indulgent and pointless, but I am left with the ultimate question of what is the point of my existence. Why the hell are we here? What was the point of Mom’s life?

Every time I write at my desk and look out at the mountains, I am surrounded with bits of Mom's legacy: the shamrock plant she and I revived by transplanting it; the huge geranium that Mom rooted from a broken stem, something I would never have realized could be done had Mom not suggested it; one of Mom's handmade baskets that now holds my outgoing mail; a couple of her watercolors; her wooden angel that Juan hung on the wall above where she died; her ashes in one of Grandpa’s pots; a few photos of Mom, my favorite the one in which she is bent down gathering something from the forest floor, her butt way up in the air, which is the position I most remember Mom being in. She was always gathering something.

Pasque Flower

Glacier Lilies and Alumroot

Balsamroot and the Mission Mountains

The spring flowers are coming on several weeks early this year. After digging myself out of the pile of paperwork that buried me after Mom died I have managed to hike a little with friends and photograph the flowers.

Wildflowers are my unbreakable thread that David James Duncan writes about in his beautiful eulogy to his mother titled "The Unbreakable Thread." They are my conduit to the essence of what it means to be alive. Their frail, bold, breathtaking beauty in the face of wind and snow, drought and hail, feet and hungry ungulate teeth always tosses me back into my skin when I am tottering on the edge of existential confusion. If anything explains the point of living it is the beauty I experience when looking into the face of a flower. So in the wake of Mom’s death I plant wildflower seeds, plan some hikes with friends and a trip into the wilderness with Juan, and book a flight to be with my daughter.

Sugar Bowl

Lupine leaf

Lomatium