The year my mother died I laid flowers at the feet of giant redwoods. On the morning of her birthday we packed our car and drove toward the coastal forest in Occidental. The air was cool when we arrived and light filtered through giant trees like lace, making patterns on the forest floor that felt familiar, motherly. My son quickly found a stick and used it to measure his step, to lean against as he tilted his eyes toward the expanse above. I carried bundles of wild flowers in my arms, wrapped in velvet ribbon and tied to a wax-sealed note. I left the bouquets there in the woods—three of them, one for my mother, one for me, one for my father—for other wanderers to discover. One tucked into the nook of a tree, one resting underneath a burned out hollow, the last laid on a picnic table.
It was June 15th just three months after she passed. Going to the redwoods seemed important, more urge than desire.
The flowers were an afterthought, a ghostly premonition. A desire to share something beautiful, like my mother would have. To somehow mimic her ability to speak in flowers, to tend the garden, to arrange things until they held you rapt with their artistry. So I picked up hand-arranged bouquets from 7th St. Flowers, tied them with ribbon and included a note. If I had not photographed them at the time I wouldn’t recall what I wrote on each note, or even if I desired anything in return. But I did leave a way for people to contact me, if they should choose to, and I left them without expectation but cloaked in a shawl of longing, and then walked away. Perhaps my grief was so new, my motherhood so all-consuming at the time, I failed to fully absorb what happened next in a meaningful way. So here we are, unraveling it together.
Three women found flowers in the forest that day. Even recounting the stories now, they are unbelievable, like the kind of fiction you scoff at but secretly want to press against for its unabashed kinship with something like fate, something like hope.
The first woman found the bouquet on her birthday (a trait she shared with my mother), but it was not just any birthday for her, it was the first birthday without her own mom—the dawn of another year of life without the woman who gave you yours. I know this feeling; it is a part of me now. She was hiking with a friend, another motherless daughter, and she shared with me that they hope to continue the tradition of leaving flowers somewhere on their mothers’ birthdays. Every July I look for them. Either way, I think of this woman every passing June and try to reach out when I remember; it’s nice to have someone to send wishes to on this particular day.
The second woman to find the flowers grew up going to a cabin in nearby Rio Nido on the Russian River. Her father’s family owned the cabin for generations and her family would spend warm summers near the river surrounded by woods. Her parents were friends with another couple who had a daughter around the same time and the two young girls became fast friends, and eventually chosen family. They spent their formative summer years in that cabin, weaving their lives and memories together over the years; and then life does what it only knows how to do and both women lost both of their parents within just a few short years. So, when they came back to the woods it was with a deeply important purpose: to spread their parents' ashes. Having saved the ashes for the right time and place, they returned home to the river. They mixed their parents' ashes together and tossed them into the river in Rio Nido and Guernville, “dancing together one last time.”
The next day, as a final act of release, they went hiking in the wise quiet of the redwoods where they came upon the second bouquet: “that burned out old tree was like a room that drew us in....and there to our great surprise was your beautiful bouquet sunlight streaming right on it; we both thought we were imagining it....we came to, saw the note attached and we debated to read the note or just leave it be knowing it was...sacred.”
Eventually they did. As they walked on—two women with one bouquet of flowers—they stopped to take a photo and noticed the third and final bouquet, perched upon the giant trunk of a redwood.
“We thought it kismet we both find one....once we read your sweet notes and why they were placed there and we were going through the same thing and we find these beautiful gifts to your mom from you in the forest we sought refuge in, from the loss of losing our moms—it was a crazy, cool and beautiful a thing to happen...Daughter in the Dust WE are I said.”
I love imagining them leaving the forest, arms full of flowers and each other, a sacred vision. The morning they left the river they decided to set the flowers free, taking them out on the water strapped to paddle boards and then releasing them into the water—down and up and toward the shore, blessed and wild and free. A lot like my mother.
A year later, on my mother’s birthday, I drove by myself to Point Reyes, without a real destination in sight. After a stop at the local bookstore (naturally), I was lured out to the Point Reyes Lighthouse. It was the opposite of the dense and quiet redwoods. I think I was drawn to the edge of it, this beacon carved out into the Pacific, a warning sign. I met cows and birds and wildflowers on the way and they pulled me along, but when I parked and started the walk to the lighthouse, there were tourists everywhere and I stuck out like a floral bandit, laden with three colorful bouquets from my friend at Juniper Lane. Somehow, I managed up the hill and down to the lighthouse and placed two bouquets along the steps as covertly as possible, finding refuge behind a tree for a respite so as not to be seen again as the woman who awkwardly left flowers behind. Anonymity has become the essence of the gesture; I only want to connect with someone if they feel moved to, otherwise the mystery is part of it, a recurring lesson in letting go.
Back in the car I drove to a nearby beach and left the final bouquet perched on some driftwood in the sand. Carved on one of the logs just above it was the word “BLUE.” It was a quiet and windy day on the beach; I was bundled up in a jacket and jeans and there weren’t many people around. So I like to imagine that this last bouquet wasn’t found at all, but swept out to sea, bright pink and wildly green against the deep blue immensity of water. The other two were found:
This past June we had an intimate family picnic on a grassy knoll in Sonoma to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Her sister’s handmade blanket on the grass, birds and lizards, and a little gin (mother approved). It was sunny and slow and less of a pilgrimage than the previous years. Instead of being alone, I was with a group of close family, and it was a joy to hear my son’s squeals of delight amid the sounds of nature. He climbed tree limbs and collected leaves and seed pods and my mother would have loved it all. The flowers were less of the main event and more of a epilogue this year, a period on sentence well won.
As we packed up the picnic—sun warmed blankets and sandwich crumbs and thirsty glassware—we left one bouquet on the picnic knoll, one on the way out of the park, and the other on a bench just off the square in Sonoma. I only heard from one person this year, but it felt like exactly the person it was meant to reach. In some other world my mother would have also been a 70-year-old mom and grandmother in town to visit her daughter on her birthday.
I’m still trying to weave all of this into meaning; maybe there’s no tidy epilogue for this. But I wanted to share this not to say “look at this thing that I’ve done,” but more to understand how grief is not just my(our) own but a collective experience. Shout into the void and it might just answer you back; leave flowers behind and be amazed at who finds them. It’s a tradition I plan to continue each June: a way to spread beauty, to mitigate the pain, and a way to weave myself into the collective.
I’ve become a bit mad about flowers, a genetic predisposition or reflex I’ve developed over the years to be close to my mother. Her chosen language. I thought of her when I lugged two floral arrangements on a camping trip when we had absolutely no room left in the car, and my husband fought with bags and car doors and camping supplies to make them fit; and when we went on a family trip to Tahoe last month and a vase of golden Sunflowers and droopy Loves Lie Bleeding jostled next to my son for three and a half hours in the car. I think perhaps the antidote to grief, which we understand to be love with no place to go, is to simply find a place to put it. To undo yourself so that someone else might be made whole, even for a moment.
My mother and I used to always share this quote back and forth, so today I will share it with you, with one final sentiment: always send flowers.
“since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.”- e.e. cummings
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I love this so very much.
Your post filled me with WONDER….your processing of grief, abiding love for your mother and finding ways to connect with her essence. Then the connections that made with other women experiencing the same emotions! Amazing…