Strength Amongst the Sunflowers

Busy work. That's what they call it right, when someone spends hours upon hours doing monotonous work. The type of thing that becomes so routine that your mind ceases to wander, and just seems to run on autopilot until someone or something interrupts the flow of things. Busy work, meditation, "creative hobby" are all synonymous in this sense. She's not really sure what the goal is, nor is she sure that spending all of her time in the garden has an end in sight. What she does know is this.. Spending her time in the garden, that was the only way that she could feel close to Mimi anymore.

April 1st, 2018. Some remember that day as a special holiday. Many people celebrated the holiday that comes on the first Sunday of April, a day to be with family, to make memories and enjoy homecooked meals. Most celebrated that day with their husbands and wives, sons and daughters, grandparents and semi-seen cousins. Some, even the ones who celebrated the first Sunday of April, also celebrated April Fools Day. Teenage boys with an unsolicited prank on their siblings. Husbands who still cling to their younger sides and scare their wives into laughing spells. Most spent that day making meaningless memories with their families, but not her. Not her, and none of her family.

The Jennings family spent that day wishing that it was a prank. They wished it was a cruel attempt at being humorous. Unfortunate for her family, they spent this day watching Mimi take her final breath. She had suffered for months now, spending her days in hospital beds fighting the never ending litany of ailments that followed the initial diagnosis. The fact that two holidays have been simultaneously destroyed for a family by the effects of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, that's something that I don't think any family would recover from, could recover from. It would be hard for any family to go through, but the fact that it happened to their Mimi.. The rock, the one constant, the matriarch.

Losing Mimi was the single hardest event of this families life, but she.. she took is the hardest. She was the one who fought the silent battles, those battles that nobody else can see or hear. But the hardest part wasn't the silent battle, it was the fact that she was never able to take the time to grieve for herself. She was never able to process the trauma in the moment and work through things as most human beings would try to do, but she had big shoes to fill. Without realizing what was going on, the entire family took their grief and channeled it to the new rock of the family. Although nobody would acknowledge her as the matriarch the way that they did with Mimi, the whole family clung to her for strength. A strength passed down to her from her grandmother, she would learn what "being strong" meant to family on that day. A day that no longer would be remembered as Easter, nor would it be remembered as April Fool's. This day was now the day that the family would always turn to her for strength, because in Mimi's passing on to the afterlife, she left her strength with her granddaughter. And that strength, the family would depend on for the foreseeable future because this day was no longer about a holiday. It was about grief.

Strength can manifest itself in many different forms, and there are many times that you cant point to one specific attribute that makes a person strong.. but you know it when you see it. Emotional strength we're speaking of. Physical strength comes by a dime a dozen. Every half bright bro at a gym and a debit card can buy strength. But we're not discussing the kind of strength that comes from a needle and manifests in the form of bulging muscles. This strength is the type of strength that you cant distinguish with a single characteristic. To some, its being the financial support or "The Bread Winner" in the family. To some, its being the constant silent type. You know the type, the dads from the 1960s who grew up hard and cant process emotions properly, so everything gets an intellectual response. Its all reason no emotion to them. But here's where Mimi's strength lied. It was about being the glue. The one they clung to for advice. The one that every single one would go to for their problems, their pain, and their suffering. She was always there for them, because she loved them more than they could ever possible understand. And to her, love meant that nobody will have to go through anything alone, but the irony of this strength is such that whenever there's a problem in the strong persons life, they're too strong to go to another. They feel as if its weakness to ask for her, ESPECIALLY when you're the one everyone runs to. So the strong ones tend to bottle up their feelings and emotions to help the ones they love, and often times that was to their own detriment.

Thats why she never got to process Mimi's passing. And thats why this sunflower garden is so important to her.

Ever since she was a little girl, whenever Mimi would come to visit, she would bring a sunflower to the occasion. One for each of her girls, and they came in threes. Her mom was always the first to receive a sunflower, which made sense seeing as she was her eldest daughter. You would think she was the pride and joy, which might have been true 25 years ago. but being the "pride and joy" was not a title that she held anymore. Then came the baby girl, Lizzie. She was the younger of the two daughters, and she was a ball of energy. Always running around yelling and excited by her Mimi's arrival, very outward and jovial with her admiration and affection. She was always loud and energetic, as most toddlers are. Lastly, there she was. She was always the one Mimi would see last of the girls. She would embrace her with a hug that was just ever so tighter than the previous one she gave. She would hold onto her for the longest embrace, and she would always pick out the brightest of the sunflowers. She was her Mimi's favorite without a word ever being spoken about it, and Mimi was her favorite human being on the planet.

So yes, busy work. Digging around in the dirt, sweating her ass off underneath her big straw hat that used to be Mimi's. Rain or shine, she was always working on this garden. It was never good enough in her eyes. The flower were never tall enough, never bright enough, never lasted long enough. She nitpicked her garden down to the molecular level, nothing could be unfinished or out of place. She spent at least three hours a day digging around in that garden, pulling weed and mulching, checking for unwelcomed guests (bugs or any animals), and maintaining a pristene garden. But she never found pristene, that was a fallacy made up in her mind in order to always continue working on this garden. For this was her way of coping, because she was never given the opportunity to process her trauma.

Her family just thought it was a cute little homage to Mimi, building a sunflower garden as a memoir to her legacy. They just thought it was a cute little hobby, but that's what they couldnt understand. They had already processed the trauma themselves, and were at peace with it. They're emotions only overwhelmed them on the anniversary of her passing and the not-so-often outburst that only happened about once a year. But you see, She didnt get to process the trauma, because she was the strength of the family now. She was never given the opportunity to talk through things with someone who would understand, she was never presented with some time that she could dedicate to processing her trauma herself. It was always about the others, and eventually She bottled it up strongly enough that she could function without processing it. But subconsciously She knew what she was doing. In a twisted way, her spending all of this time in the garden was her way of keeping Mimi's spirit alive. Being the strong one, obsessed in a hobby that fixated around the spirituality of a loved one. This was her alone time that she never received when the trauma was fresh, that has now become a hobby aimed at perfection. But for Her Mimi, it was never good enough. She deserved absolute perfection, and she would work endlessly to provide that perfection. But the truth that she failed to realize was that there was no such thing as perfection, her effort would have been more than enough for Mimi.

But something peculiar happened on this day in the garden. Most days it was just monotonous work in the soil bed. Shuffling the soil around, making sure each individual stem had enough water to support health and growth, keeping the bed free of pests, that sort of thing. But today while she was analyzing the petals of her tallest sunflower, there was a flash of red by her eyes. Quickly whipping her head around to follow the red in her peripheral vision, she stopped when she realized what it was that had caught her attention. A lone cardinal has flown into her garden and perched itself on the west side of her perimeter. The tumultuous gardening that she had accustomed herself to doing every day ceased to exist. She looked at the cardinal, and in that moment she started to get tunnel vision, soley focused on the cardinal. The chirping began to sound musical, almost like one of the lullibies that Mimi would sing her on those crisp fall nights when She would stay over. The chirping began to blend with the lullibies in her head, and it was in that moment the cardinal turned and locked onto her. It churped twice and tilted its head, never breaking eye contact. They say that if you see a cardinal, that means that God has sent an angel to check on you. That he has sent one of your guardian angels to check in on you. And thats when she knew. She knew that it was her..

Suddenly she realized that the garden wasnt what mattered to her Mimi. Although the garden was a fun hobby, Mimi never cared about material things like that. Family was all that mattered, and she came to remind her of that fact. The tears began to roll down her face, only breaking stride on her cheek to touch another freckle and continue down to her chin. She realized that Mimi was proud of her, this was her reward for her strength. A visit from her guardian angel was all she needed.. or so she thought.

And in the blink of an eye, the moment was over. The cardinal jumped off the ledge and took off to the east. She followed the cardinal as it left her field of vision, a smile accompanying the last of her tears. She was taking in the entirety of the moment, when she glanced down and noticed something unusual in her garden. In the midst of all of her sunflowers, she noticed a flash of burnt orange in an otherwise yellow foreground. Confusion overtook her emotions, and she began to kneel down to further investigate. "How in the hell??" she thought as she realized what she was looking at. A pair of Marigold Flowers. Burnt orange in color surrounded by a trim on powerful yellow petals. This was a sunflower garden, HER sunflower garden. Every single inch and particle of that garden had been constructed BY HER. How in the hell did a pair of African Marigold flowers end up in her hand crafted sunflower bed? And how in the hell did it manage to be in full bloom without her ever catching a single hint of something alien being in her garden. In a flash of realization, the chain of events began to hit her. The culmination of things hit her like a thunderbolt, and rocked her psyche. The Marigold flowers, there was a reason. A reason there were two of them. There was a reason she only noticed them right after the cardinal had come to visit. There was a reason these two flowers stood apart from the rest in this sunflower garden.

Mimi.

This was her doing. Somehow, some way, this was her doing. She manifested the marigold flowers into the sunflower bed, but why?..

Strength. The answer is strength. These flowers were planted in the sunflower garden by Mimi to remind her of the truth. Sunflowers, as bold and as beautiful as they are, were Mimi's present of choice. They were gifts, given by her. But they were never HER. She gave them as gifts to her family to remind them that they were bold and beautiful. But she... She was a marigold flower. She wasn't the biggest, the tallest, the brightest or the boldest. She was the strongest. And in her passing, what happened to her strength? Her strength was shared with her favorite sunflower. The heir to the strength was passed down, to Her. And with this transition of strength, came the transition of shape. She had ceased to be a sunflower like the rest of her family. Now, She had become a marigold flower. A symbol of strength just like her Mimi.

And in that moment, she realized.. she didn't hurt anymore. The pain of missing Mimi wasn't there anymore. Instead, that pain was replaced with the beautiful realization that Mimi was proud of her.