All Roses Are Beautiful

For Father's Day this year, I sent coffee, cake, and half-and-half. I sent it on Friday, ahead of the weekend, to beat the rush.

I did not send flowers.

Part of it was the cost — the arrangement I was looking at came to more than I wanted to spend on something that wilts in three days. But the honest truth is, there was another reason underneath that one. And it caught me off guard.

During our last visit, I learned that my Dad has been keeping every rose bouquet he has been given over the past couple years. Not the memory of them. The actual flowers. He lets them dry, and then lines them up along the wall of his living room — a row of bouquets, each one from some past occasion, standing there in the open where anyone can see them.

When I first pictured it, it gave me a small chill. I won't pretend it didn't. There is something that unsettles me about a wall of flowers that are no longer alive — about keeping the thing long after the life has gone out of it. My first instinct was to look away.

So I said something about it. The way you do when you're not quite sure whether you're allowed to find a thing strange.

He didn't get defensive. He just said: all roses are beautiful. Dried or alive.

I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

Here is the both/and I've been holding this week:

I was unsettled by that wall — and I think my dad may understand something I am still learning.

Because what is a dried rose, really? It is the same flower. Same petals, same shape, same fact of having once been handed to him by someone who meant it. The life has changed form. The beauty has not left. He is not keeping death on his wall. He is keeping every bit of love that has ever come through his door, and refusing to throw any of it out simply because it stopped being easy to look at.

I spend my days with people living inside anticipatory grief — the grief of losing someone who is still here. And one of the hardest things I ever ask them to do is exactly what my dad does without thinking about it: to hold the beauty of what was at the same time as the ache of what is changing. Not to wait until it's over to call it beautiful. Not to look away because it's hard to look at.

You are allowed to find something beautiful and unsettling at the very same time. You don't have to resolve that into one clean feeling. The chill I felt and the truth he spoke are both real. They are sitting on the same shelf.

This is Recognize, and it is Embrace, in the plainest terms I know. Recognize: I notice what unsettles me, honestly, without pretending I am above it. Embrace: I let his truth be true too, even when it complicates mine.

I still didn't send flowers. The coffee and the cake will get used this week, and that mattered to me. But I sent them thinking about that wall — about a man who has decided, quietly and without ever announcing it, that nothing given in love really stops being beautiful.

What in your life have you been looking away from because it stopped being easy to look at — and what might change if you let it be beautiful, dried or alive?

— Heidi

Recognize. Embrace. Align. Live.