I gave my mother flowers while cancer slowly stole her life. Her legacy continues to bloom.
The year before my mom passed away, I remember bringing tulips home to her after school every week.
Upon entering our suburban Chicago home, I’d find her on her bed upstairs, where I’d jump up and collapse into her, flowers in hand, both of us bursting into laughter. Then she’d speak: “Cole — you shouldn’t be spending all of your allowance money on me like this.” I’d simply smile. “I want to.” She’d ask what I was learning in class, and I’d tell her. She always found ways to help me with school projects, bake sales or her favorite subject — my crushes. We’d talk, too, about all that was to come the following year, in the halls and the chapter that came next: middle school.
My mom and I had six months of sixth grade together — though it was more like four before the lymphoma began to set in — the cancer she had been trying so hard to hide from me and our family. A few weeks after my 12th birthday, she died.
Walking home after my mom was gone, I no longer had reason to stop at our neighborhood florist. When I started seventh grade, I yearned to tell her of the things I was learning — topics I loved such as spelling and grammar. One of the lessons I remember most was on compound sentences — a sentence connecting two independent clauses, made possible by a comma. It was the comma that indicated something was to follow. The lesson stayed with me so strongly, I seemed to inhabit it throughout my teens and 20s — seasons of improv classes and “yes, and,” and moments of me championing the comma in my writing and beyond, such as dressing up as one — an Oxford comma — for Halloween.
The night we said goodbye to my mom in the hospital, my life was forever split in two — what came before and what came after. Two independent clauses — but what came next? How did life go on without her? I still don’t know — but somehow, it did. Middle school, high school, college; apartments, jobs, cross-country moves. But I’d find myself looking for my mom in all of it: sunsets, our favorite books, her recipes — and, of course, in flowers. Tulips, purple and pink — her favorite.
A couple of years ago, I turned 35 — the age my mom was when she had me and the age at which she was diagnosed with cancer. I was happily single, but I started to think more about having my own children; I thought about freezing my eggs. But at the onset of the pandemic, present-day life took priority. Mainly, the family right in front of me: my father, autistic brother Daniel and brother Kevin, the natal unit we had held together decades after our mom’s passing. I tabled the egg freezing and hoped — prayed — that if the day came for me to do it, I wouldn’t be too late.
In the meantime, I bought myself flowers, always taking some of them to my mom’s grave. At one point, I realized I could do more — I could plant them. In late fall, I went to a garden center to purchase bulbs, but the cashier looked concerned. “You know it’s really late to be planting, right?” I didn’t — I didn’t know a thing about planting — but I remembered the words of a friend. “Plant your garden and hope. Mother Nature will handle the rest.” So I did. I went to the cemetery, and right above my mom’s headstone, I planted nearly a dozen bulbs. And I waited.
By the time spring rolled around, I was ready to wait some more. I froze my eggs. And, surrounded by literature on peak fertility ages and by several friends having babies of their own, a small part of me worried it was too late. In the middle of the multiweek process, I visited the cemetery to see what my mom had to say about it. And for the first time, I noticed something new in her headstone — each of her life roles, separated by a deeply carved comma: “Beloved Wife, Mother, Nurse, and Friend.”
I could see the commas, telling me the myriad ways she had lived: as wife, mother, nurse, friend. But I also saw where it all stopped — her name engraved in stone, confirming everything that was done.
Then, I looked up. There they were, countless buds of life above her headstone, a family of tulips blooming in a tableau of pink and purple that I had planted.
And I realized — her life, her legacy — it did continue. It continues in me.