Resurrection
In a week I should know. Today I walk through the Botanic Garden, trying to think about important things—death, love. But I can focus only on small things: the expanse of daffodils, crocuses like gold bullets vertical against dark soil, blackbirds scratching in mulch, cackling tuis, fantails flying drunkenly across my path.
I’m careful not to slip on the path, grass worn almost to mud, and remember when I was sixteen and broke my leg skiing. I woke from the anesthetic thinking I’d been resurrected. One minute I was watching the ceiling panels roll by, the bored face of the orderly pushing the gurney, my mounded body under the heavy cotton sheet and next, nothing. Then I was alive again. After that, the idea of dying didn’t frighten me, only the possibility of pain.
In the alpine section I have to duck as I walk past the flax that should be trimmed. I notice my frayed shoelace that needs another knot, lift my head and see a man my own age approaching, a grandfather pushing a stroller and holding the hand of a child walking beside him. I smile and say ‘nice day’ and he nods. Another time, a younger day, I might have stopped and talked about the election, the price of petrol.
She told me two weeks ago, sobbing she hadn’t known until she gave blood, a local drive for new donors. Unusual in older female heterosexuals the doctor said when the report came later. I kept ringing but always got her answer machine. I went to see her. We could work though it, couldn’t we? It wasn’t a death sentence---necessarily. “Don’t come again,” she said. She was moving north where her daughter lives, to be with her grandchildren for as long as she could. I didn’t call her back, admitting to myself I was afraid. Afraid of facing a second wife’s illness.
My appointment tomorrow is for ten thirty. I’d prefer it later, get my walk in, look at the early rhododendrons, bees tunneling in the flowers of ‘Maurice Skipworth’. I knew a Maurice at the nursery, but not a Skipworth. “I’ll have time for leisure”, I told my wife when Maurice and I and others were tossed from the Nursery, like weeds. After her death, there was more time, but nothing seemed worth doing.
I notice the topmost magnolias are out on the early trees. The others are just emerging, their buds like small round caterpillars. A red rhododendron is in full bloom, ‘Choremia’ UK 1933 the sign reads, ten years before I budded into the world. Was the tree planted that long ago? If so, it’s doing well, the spent flowers like blood.
It’s early for the azaleas; now they’re only red-tipped green swellings. The blossoms will be at their full brilliance in two months, three? We could have walked here together. “I can’t,” she told me. Perhaps she didn’t want to come to me flawed, like a marred blossom blighted from within by codling moths.
My sock is slipping inside my shoe, sure to cause a blister. I’ll stop at the florists first, wire her flowers before she goes away, daffodils, I think, a reminder of spring, of possibilities. Then I’ll take the bus back. Watching people get on and off will stop me from thinking about tomorrow, about lab results, medications, side effects, about being afraid.
But everything may go well and I’ll be able to think of important things again---new beginnings, a flight North to tell her I love her, another resurrection.
(c) Martha Morseth. All rights reserved.
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