There are no good words for this loss; it seems more appropriate to use the language of things she loved instead, to speak in the vocabulary of gardens & birds. She grew herbs in her backyard, daily adding them to homemade sourdough, Sunday dinners, & along the edges of serving platters. At the end of a meal, when dining conceded to conversation, she would often pluck parsley from a cleared platter & chew on it thoughtfully as she listened. “Don’t you love the way basil smells when you water it?” she asked me once, standing beside her plants, hose in hand. Did she know how carefully I was paying attention? How much I delighted in her English rose catalogs or her recalling the flora of Colorado? “Have you ever seen a columbine?” she asked me during one of these conversations. I had not. We were climbing Mt. Casco when she pointed one out, & I marveled at its pleated blue petticoats, grieving that nothing so delicate & beautiful could grow in our punishing heat. Maidenhair fern was her favorite. She shared this while visiting my neighbor who tended a backyard wildscape, a haven for all kinds of birds. The green jays were less common then, & Marilyn wanted so much to see them. We visited Mrs. Gill together, sat in the light streaming into her sunroom & marveled at the brilliant jays. We were leaving when she noticed the maidenhair spilling out of a pot in a shady corner. “The faucet above it leaks,” Mrs. Gill explained. “That’s the secret. The fern loves the constant drip.” I tuck sprigs of my own maidenhair into Marilyn’s flowers now. I learned to grow it from Mrs. Gill too, all those years ago. I want to write Marilyn’s story like this, in the tendrils of the wild passionvine that scrambled up her back fence, in the soft purple of her cherished Birkenstocks, in the stones pocketed on Colorado summits & other sacred locales. Let the peonies & clematis tell of her youth in the mountains & the sprigs of pigeonberry & anacua speak of her love for the Valley & its treasures. Let me gather feathers & nests & eulogize her with a nod to warblers, vireos, & ruby-throats. Let all of it be for her a sort of botanical epitaph, & let it honor her story well. She was such a consequential part of mine. 

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 ubiquity & 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. 

White is for the shells, scattered along the beach, a thousand souvenirs from the deep. White is for the wave tips, wind-kissed and whispering as they slip shoreward. White is for the belly of the fish, flashing iridescent scales in sunlit shallows. White is for the clouds, with full and mastless sails adrift on their own blue ocean. White is for the beachgrass blooms, waving their feathery plumes against the drifted dunes. White is for the gull’s breast, white is for the sea foam, white is for the smiles shared along this stretch of shoreline. White is for the wisdom that has woven itself into the beard and blowing hair of this fisherman, teacher, father, husband, brother, friend.

…And roses. Roses for this beloved man who grew and loved and shared so many in his own garden. Roses that honor the life that he lived and the love that is left and the celebration he has surely inspired on that far shore where lately his ship enters its port, white sails full against the brave blue sky. “Here he comes!”

White is for Heaven. 

He loved being outside. And he was always busy doing something. Always adding color to the flower beds or trimming trees or tinkering. And he loved this old tub. He bathed the dog in it and used it for yard work. I know it’s just an old washtub, and I know it’s kind of dinged up… but it reminds me of him. He loved this thing. Do you think you can fill it with flowers and maybe add in some potted plants that we can put in the yard once the flowers have faded?

He loved the ranch, and we want something that reminds us of that: mesquite trees and whitetail deer, maybe a few wildflowers. Also- he had a favorite tree. It was an oak. If I bring you some branches, can you use them in his casket cover? I think he would have loved that…for his tree to be part of the service…