10/04/2023
This is what it’s all about. Honoring your client and paying tribute to the beautiful life they have led. It doesn’t always have to be roses and lilies. ❤️
She did not want roses on her casket. Or lilies. Her specific request was for wildflowers, actually. The flowers of home, of this place & this land where she herself was born & raised, and where she & her husband raised their own family. She was born in Relámpago in 1928, back when the Rio Grande Valley was still mostly wild, when jaguars & ocelots still slinked through the thornscrub & the nights were still brilliant with darkness and stars. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the annual Citrus Fiesta in Mission, & she told stories of making dresses for the event using onionskins. “…so can you add some citrus in with the wildflowers, please?” her granddaughter asked me.
Rogelia helped me gather the beautiful things: Mexican limes, pendulous & heavy on their spiny branches. Valley lemons, the yellow just beginning to color their shoulders. Orange fiddlewood berries & anacua & Vasey’s adelia, all tokens of the riparian wildlands that still follow the river & arroyos to the coast. There were roadside sunflower seedheads & burgundy amaranthus & tropical framboyàn. Zinnias from the flower field & palm fronds & our native seaside goldenrod. I was even able to slip a few stems of corona vine out of the office garden without offending the bees that were nectaring in its pink clouds. After some quiet tinkering in the flower barn, I had something that felt appropriate, kindred even, to this exceptional woman. It was a gathering of very ordinary things, made remarkable by their ubiquitousness & unlikely usefulness in honoring her life. No roses. No lilies. Not a single stem that wasn’t grown here in this place that she called home. I felt grateful for her appreciation of the ditch blooms & the citrus & the monte’s unassuming gifts, grateful that she wanted those things to help speak for her long, beautiful, well-lived life. Her last wishes were a reminder to me of the beauty in our most ordinary days: the unripe hanging fruit, the fading roadside blooms, the stories we share with the people we love. It is all passing away even as we move through it and past it. Our lives are all fleeting as flowers, fragile as onionskins.