by Amy Newmark
~Julia Lucas
Mom’s Garden of Three
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
~Wendell Berry
When my mother passed away, many of my closest friends gave me spring blooming bulbs as gifts because they knew that my mom and I had shared a love of gardening. Mom could happily spend hours working in her garden and she’d passed on to me her delight in welcoming old flower friends each spring, and also planting new ones. We both adored that sense of renewal and liked nothing more than to put on our gardening clothes and get our hands into the dirt.
My mom had died rather unexpectedly in the cold, grey month of February. My heart felt broken—like it too had a heavy cover of snow, and I just couldn’t imagine how or when it would thaw. It was too cold to plant the lovely basket of bulbs from her friends, so I set them aside in my cold storage, thinking to myself that I would plant them in the fall and dedicate one of my beds as a special “memory garden” to honor my mom.
My mother was an amazing person—she was one of three triplet girls born to Scottish immigrants in 1927 in Brantford, Ontario. And let me tell you, those three girls were a handful! They were all extremely creative, social and more than a little mischievous—they loved playing tricks and surprises on their friends and families.
During the spring following my mother’s death I spent many hours working in my garden. It was one of the things that lifted my spirits. I was trying to decide where I should create her memorial garden. I am lucky to have a large beautiful yard with many lovely spots and I just couldn’t decide. Should it be back by the fence where I could see it from the kitchen window? Or should I put it close to the house so I could feel her near me? There were so many places I could choose from and I just couldn’t make up my mind. I decided to wait for inspiration to hit.
One day I noticed a mysterious plant that had somehow “appeared” in an empty garden bed right under my bedroom window. It looked oddly familiar. I knew it wasn’t a weed, but I also knew I had not planted it. I was completely puzzled so I decided to just let it grow and see what developed. Day by day the little plant flourished. One Saturday afternoon as I was working in my yard, I realized that it had done something unusual—it had separated into three different stalks of the same plant. I knew I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember where. I ran inside to look in a gardening book and saw that it was a plant called “four o’clocks.” And then I knew why it had seemed so familiar. It was one my mom had planted many times—we had always had them in the garden at our family cottage at the lake, and also in the flowerbeds of our family home in London, Ontario when we were growing up. But I hadn’t seen one in years and had certainly never purchased one. So how could it be growing right here — when I knew I hadn’t planted it?
I felt a shiver run up my spine — and then I got it. I smiled as I said out loud, “Okay Mom, I get the trick. You helped me decide, didn’t you?” I truly believe that my mother sent me this little “tri-plant” as a sign to tell me, “I’m still here. This can be my garden and I will always be just a glance away if you need me.” She chose a four o’clock because it had a history with our family so I knew it could only have been sent from her. And she had made it separate into three, like those mischievous and marvelous triplets — so I couldn’t possibly miss the symbol—or the surprise! My decision had been made. I knew where to plant her garden and where to add the bulbs from her friends.
And the messages didn’t stop there. That first Christmas, my mom’s absolutely favorite time of year, we had the whole family over to our house for dinner. I had inherited two of her African violets when she passed away. I had never had luck with violets before, but I repotted them, put them on my table and hoped that they’d survive. On Christmas Day, while we were opening presents, I suddenly heard my husband say, “Beckie! Take a look. There are flowers on your mom’s plants!” I glanced over and both African violets were blooming. And guess what? Three little blooms on each!
Over the years there have been other signs too numerous to mention, the last one being a few summers ago. I had taken a much-needed, short holiday at a friend’s cottage and we were creating a garden for her. The island where the cottage sits is mostly rock so we had to bring in dirt and plants and create gardens out of the stone at the water’s edge. At one point, as we were hauling large rocks out of the water and were up to our elbows in dirt, my friend said, “That’s weird—there are daisies here—how can that be? We never had flowers here!” I looked over and sure enough, there were three little daisies — my mom’s all-time favorite flower. I knew again in that moment she was watching over me. I’d hardly ever had the time to take a holiday just to rest and relax because of my job and she’d always been telling me to slow down and take time to smell the flowers. She would have been so happy to see I was doing this for me.
But my first sign is still the best—her little memory garden under my bedroom window. How fitting that she wanted it there—where I can see it every day all spring, summer and fall, and think of how much she loved me, and how much I’ll always love her.
Thanks, Mom.
~Beckie Pruder
Fleur-de-lis
Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.
~Gloria Naylor
After some success as a writer over the last five years, I had been chosen as a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Miraculous Messages from Heaven. It was a wonderful day when the first copies of the book finally arrived. I took my time, carefully opening the package and removing the top book. The house was quiet and the afternoon was slipping into evening. I went into the bedroom, removed my shoes, and settled into the massive pillows on the bed to view my story.
Opening the book for the first time, I found the table of contents, and ran my fingers down the page searching for my name, my story. I didn’t get far. Finding a story called “Hi, from Dad,” I stopped, my finger holding its position. The title caught my breath; it captured my attention. Almost without thought I opened the book to its page and read the story. Simply enough, it was an eloquent story of a young woman who had lost her father and received a message from him in a miraculous way.
Memories of my dad flashed in my mind. Closing the book, I found myself reliving the difficult days of his illness and the grief of his passing. Here it was three years later, and I still found myself doubting some of those tough decisions, hoping that in the end he knew I provided the best care I could under the circumstances.
Similar to the author of the story I had just read, I wanted to know whether my dad was all right and if love extended past this physical life into the next. But my fear and my doubts until now had stopped me from looking for any continuing connection. I had been afraid to ask and have silence as my only answer.
Reading this story encouraged me. Perhaps it was time to request a sign from my dad. Just a small sign, I told myself. Something clear that I would understand. Looking around the bedroom, my eyes settled on a brown metal box with a large fleur-de-lis on it.
Perfect. My dad was from New Orleans and the fleur-de-lis, the lily-shaped flower, was a decorative symbol found throughout the city. “Okay, Dad,” I said in the quiet of the room. “Please send me the sign.” Closing my eyes, I sent my request to the heavens.
Over the course of the next few days I followed suggestions provided by the Chicken Soup for the Soul publicists and arranged a book reading at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. They welcomed the chance to feature local authors and even encouraged me to see if another author featured in the book might want to join. Making arrangements with my contact at Chicken Soup for the Soul, I soon connected with one.
She was a young woman, excited to join me.
“What’s the name of your story?” I asked as we exchanged information over the phone.
‘ “Hi, from Dad,’ ” she told me.
“What story?” I questioned. Softly she repeated it.
Ho
w could that be? Of all the authors in the book, I spoke with the one who had inspired my quest. What a strange coincidence.
The following morning I turned on a local TV news station to catch the weather, but they were in the middle of a sports report. The New Orleans Saints’ helmet flashed on the screen, prominently displaying the fleur-de-lis symbol.
Leaning forward, I immediately thought of my request for a sign from my dad. There it was on the screen in front of me!
“Coincidence!” I proclaimed to the empty room. Simply that. Dismissing it as invalid, I turned it off. After all, signs don’t come through your television. But my small inner voice wondered. What did I know of signs? Until now I had been too reluctant to ask for one. And despite the appearance of exactly the requested sign, I just couldn’t believe that was it. Refusing to give it any more consideration, I pressed on to other issues and put any thoughts of the fleur-de-lis aside.
Determined to make the book reading a success, I designed a colorful invitation and made arrangements with friends and colleagues to help me pass out the cards. One of my last places to drop off the invites was the small salon where I’d had my hair cut over the last few years. The owner had been kind enough to offer to display some of the invitation cards in the shop. She immediately stopped working to look over the cards and announce my event to the women in the salon.
I quickly added that a second local author, Laura Johnston, was going to join me. “Laura Johnston?” said a questioning voice from the corner waiting area. I turned to respond to her question, but no words came out. I stood frozen in disbelief, looking in the woman’s direction, not making a sound. On the wall around her hung magazine racks displaying the latest hairstyles and issues of People. But it wasn’t the magazines that caught my attention; it was the design on the racks themselves. They were decorated with an assortment of fleurs-de-lis.
My sign! I gasped. Not one fleur-de-lis, but a collection of them! Rushing forward I placed my hand on the rack, my palm resting on a fleur-de-lis, trying to collect myself. In his quest to make sure I truly got his sign, my father had also added a bit of irony. The fleurs-de-lis were on magazine racks. My dad, during his younger years, had lived in New Orleans on Magazine Street, a house we had driven by so many times with him during our visits.
“Okay Dad, I get it,” I said to myself, my eyes tearing, my emotions confused, unsure. Then I understood; one clear emotion had found its place inside me. Gratitude. It overwhelmed me. Looking upwards I sent words of gratitude for the sign and gratitude for our life together. Above all, gratitude to my dad, that through it all, his love remains.
~Diana Creel Elarde
Brotherly Love Bridges the Gap
The great men of earth are the shadow of men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts.
~Henry Ward Beecher
After my father died, my brother George persuaded me to leave South Carolina and attend college in Virginia so he could keep an eye on me. He said, “You know, the eyes are the windows of the soul.” Right—because when I goofed up, he saw through my eyes and through my lies, all the way to my soul. Oh, the sermons he delivered during my liberal-thinking, beer-drinking, buck-naked streaking Sweet Briar College days.
And yet, George was my “Google” before the Internet, my confidant before I had wise friends, and my best cheerleader, whatever the endeavor. Being fifteen years my senior, he showed me the meaning of perseverance, resourcefulness, integrity, temperance, humility, hope, humor and happiness. As the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined, so I learned to enjoy life to the best of my ability from his book: The Joy of George.
I loved my big brother the moment I was born, and I love him now and every minute in between. He gave a meaning to my life that I had no right to expect, that no one can ever diminish. I never knew a world without him in it, and I never wanted to. So even in death, George found ways to connect with me.
I’ve been blessed to hold the hands of many people as they drew their last breaths, but my brother is the only one who continued to communicate after death. I don’t pretend to understand how it happens—whether ESP, or God, or George’s sheer will.
George collapsed while dressed to attend a funeral. My sister-in-law, Margie, performed CPR while waiting for the ambulance. He lived three unresponsive days on a respirator with no brain waves, according to the tests. I couldn’t understand or accept the irony. How could my brother, a neurologist, be without brain activity?
My husband, Ed, and I traveled 500 miles and reached George’s side on the third day of the nightmare. As Margie led me to his room, she told me to talk to him because he could hear me. The sight of my brother with tubes and wires attached sent such a wave of hopelessness through me that I couldn’t speak. Not to George, or anyone.
How could this healthy, slender, seventy-three-year-old man be dying? His cardiologist said he didn’t have a heart attack; his heart just stopped. I asked myself how a man’s heart could be beating, beating, beating — and just stop? Then I remembered.
I’d asked George years ago if he jogged. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I believe a man has just so many heartbeats allowed him, and I’m not going to waste one of them on jogging!”
When the doctor said he could do nothing else, my heart broke. George had made the decision in a living will to discontinue ventilator use, so the family gathered to say goodbye. After the doctors removed the equipment, Margie, Ed and I went back in his room.
He looked better, more approachable, without the wires and monitors. There was no beeping. Margie laid her head on George’s right shoulder and said her last words to him.
I inhaled deeply and leaned up to his left ear. “George, I need you to know how much you’ve meant to me. You’ve been there at every fork in the road, helping me make good decisions. Everything a brother should be, you have been. Your example has made me want to be a better person. All that I am, and ever hope to be, I owe to you. I will miss you and everything about you, and I’ll love you till the day I die.”
With her head down, Margie didn’t see George open his right eye. Thinking it was part of the dying process, I reached over to close it. But he opened it again. When he opened his left eye, a huge tear rolled out onto the pillow beside me. He took one last breath, then resolutely closed both eyes. I gasped and covered my mouth to stifle a cry. Awed, I looked at Ed who whispered, “He heard you.”
George’s action appeared volitional—one last attempt to convey love, one final farewell among the living—and it turned out to be a promise of things to come as well.
• • •
Making our way home through the Shenandoah Valley the day after George’s funeral, Ed and I saw a deer standing off the highway — right in the sunshine. Bucks don’t tend to come out in broad daylight, but since George had been a wildlife commissioner and one of our last outings was a hunt, it struck me that this deer could be a sign from him.
After returning to South Carolina, we plugged in the Christmas tree lights. Later those lights went off for no reason, but the electricity never blinked in the rest of the house. It surprised us when the Christmas lights came back on by themselves an hour later.
That evening another enigma astonished us. My daughter brought a piece of paper downstairs that had just come through my office printer: my brother’s eulogy—which I’d written in Virginia. The document didn’t exist on the computer upstairs, but on a flash drive in my pocket. I hadn’t been upstairs since coming home. We still have no explanation.
More events shocked my rational mind that week. George might truly have been communicating with me. So I addressed him in a loud voice, begging him to come to me in a dream if he was responsible for these happenings. I demanded it be that very night, none other.
Never one to be late, George showed up right on cue! He and I were in a small room with our backs to each other. Turning around we both understood we weren’t in the same realm — his spiritual, mine physical. Yet reaching
out, we touched. Realizing I could feel his physical body, I wrapped around him like an octopus—as I did when I was five and he was twenty. Knowing it might be our final chance, we said things one rarely says in this life. After a while someone tapped my shoulder. I heard, “Time’s up.” I cradled George’s face in my palms and gazed into the sky blue windows of his soul one last, long time.
Despite my lifelong skepticism of the supernatural, every intuitive bone in my body tells me that George, our Renaissance Man, has discovered yet another field of proficiency—a miracle in my estimation —love strong enough to bridge the gap from The Great Beyond.
~Janet Sheppard Kelleher
Send Me a Penny
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
~Jack Lemmon
“A penny for your thoughts.” That’s what I used to say. Before. That old, lovely saying has now grown even richer and more personal for me and my family. It has become, for all of us, “A penny to let you know that I am thinking of you.”
It was August 2001. That day was an early morning workday like any other. I got up, poured a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal and sat at the counter to read the newspaper. When I got to the “Dear Abby” column, there was an article about pennies from heaven. Without thinking much about it I said under my breath, “Send me a penny, Daddy.”
My father was the apple of my eye. He was crotchety and opinionated and my two sisters and I loved him like crazy. He had been a widower for twenty years, and so our lives, our friends, became his. He was my best garage sale buddy. He had lived at one time with both of my sisters, in California and North Carolina, respectively. He now had a senior living apartment near my home in Oregon. Dad had injured his lungs severely ten years earlier torching what he didn’t know was lead paint off the exterior of my cousin’s house. He was now seventy-six years old and had adapted well to his limitations and continued to do most things he loved, if at a slower pace.
