Since March 2020, I have spent the majority of my days in grief.
My brother began the process of passing away at the end of that month, after a cardiac episode that was both a shock and not a total surprise at the same time. In those early days of lockdown, you and I and all of us were so lonely and scared, grasping at whatever updates we could get, while the truth of what we knew of the virus kept shifting. And then suddenly, here I was, now also losing my only sibling, the only other person in the world who really understood — without being told the context first — what it was like to be in our family.
Nobody is an expert at grieving, although there was a part of me that thought, I survived my father passing away when I was a child, I will get through this too. I could be the strong person for my niece and nephew and sister in law.
But the ugly context of the pandemic and then everything else that happened in the months that followed made it impossible to fully, properly grieve. There was always one more thing, and then a sense of guilt: where was the space for me, when the whole wide world was bereft?
There were moments of beauty, like the hummingbirds that kept coming by my window as I worked from home, and all of the sunrises. We got vaccinated. Our arms started to open back up. And I was able to finally…breathe…and start processing.
And then, just as I was getting back on my feet, more things happened. There was more sickness in my immediate family. A coworker — ok, a client — with whom I was incredibly close, to the extent that she defined my career, unexpectedly passed away.
By spring of 2022, every single thing was always too much.
In the early 1990s, my mom and I moved to Portland, Oregon. We lived in a little cottage near the medical school where she had met my father, and later, where she and my brother and sister-in-law all worked. We had a white picket fence, and loads and loads of roses — if you’ve ever been to Portland, you know: everyone has roses.
My mom then was the age I am now. And at that time, she had a series of crises: divorce from my father, my father’s death two years later, my father’s mother — to whom my mom was incredibly close — dying a year after that. She was also the single parent of a depressed teenager.
In our yard, she planted a rose called Darlow’s Enigma, peeking through the slats of the picket fence. I, the depressed teenager, knew that, hell, everything is an enigma, and this rose was that embodiment. I respected that rose.
Back to 2022, I was looking for something that could mark endurance, a sign of being able to flourish through hard things. Darlow’s Enigma, my mom’s rose that flourished when she was dealing with the toughest time in her life, was the symbol of that.
Here it is.
In spring of 2023, I found myself in a series of ultrasounds and CT scans and MRI tubes, having been bedridden for weeks with an ovarian condition that we were hoping wasn’t cancerous. As I felt the warmth of contrast fluid, as I listened to the banging of the MRI, I focused on that rose now on my arm.
I’m still hoping some day that I’ll take over the yard.