When You're Older . . .
You'll Agree With Me
I bought myself flowers recently, something I’ve only started doing since the divorce started three years ago. I had told myself and everyone around me that I hated flowers as a gift. And I think this was true. Or at least it was true when I first started saying it. I thought that flowers were fleeting and useless. I mocked people who planted flowers in their yards instead of the far more practical vegetables and fruit trees that I chose. Those could feed you. What did flowers do? Nothing.
If this sounds like a contradiction for someone who had decided at age five that she wanted to be a writer—an artist—it is. But it wasn’t a contradiction I noticed. For me, writing wasn’t creating “beauty.” Writing was creating stories. It was creating books, which were real objects, not just intellectual property. Writing was practical. It took time to enjoy. It taught lessons. And history. And skills about understanding what other people meant when they said the exact opposite.
I hated fashion. I was a “not like other girls” kind of girl. I spent no money on haircare. I’d never had a pedicure (still haven’t had a manicure). I cut my own hair, dyed it if I wanted it dyed, and permed it myself. I wasn’t vain about my appearance. I didn’t decorate my house with beautiful things, only with photographs of family members and later my book covers. Those weren’t objets d’art. They were factual information about my profession and my accomplishments, like putting up my diploma from my PhD program at Princeton (all in Latin).
I don’t know when I changed. It must have been before the divorce, right? I’m not just reacting to that one moment. I changed in so many ways (which caused the end of my marriage, ultimately, because as he was proud to tell anyone interested, he did NOT change). But I don’t know when I started to love flowers.
It might have been when my daughter Mercy died in 2005. So many people did so many wonderful things for us. Many people brought us food, the most practical of offerings. It’s certainly still the thing I hear most people suggest as something that everyone can use (since I was constantly vomiting, I actually couldn’t use it and had to clean out the freezer and spend hours trying to save it for later).
But it was the people who sent flowers who I remember most. My sister sent roses and I still remember the smell of them. A woman in my in-laws neighborhood created a beautiful rose wreath for the funeral, and then someone else dried the rose wreath and put it in a glass case and sent it to me. Roses are now my favorites.
Other friends sent me paintings of Christ with children. I bought myself a dozen statues of children with angel wings or who reminded me of my daughter in other ways. A friend cross-stiched my daughter’s name and framed it for me. Another friend took a photo of our dead baby in black and white and colorized it. My sister (yes, the same sister) drew me a giant portrait of my daughter with her eyes open, something I had never seen before.
Beauty somehow became the only thing that mattered. When death takes a life, sometimes all that can fix the gaping hole of pain is beauty. And no, it doesn’t really fix it. It doesn’t fill it. But it does—something.
And when the divorce hit, I bought myself flowers that first Valentines Day because I decided that I needed to tell myself that I was loved and yellow roses did that. Then I began buying flowers more often. And now, I buy them almost every week, as soon as the old ones are dead. I tell my daughter that flowers buy me 5% more happiness, which matters when you’re fighting suicidal depression constantly. (She suggests I should buy twenty times more flowers, but unfortunately beauty doesn’t seem to have a cumulative effect like that).
I’ve also become a yarn artist. I made afghans before the divorce, but only afterward have I begun to conceive of yarn work as purely a work of art, something to hang on the wall rather than to keep you warm in the winter. I don’t sell this kind of art, either, though I’ve had a number of offers. The art is entirely mine. It isn’t for commercial sale. I’m not trying to make a profession of it. The fact that this is beauty I spend months and months creating is only for my own enjoyment (and the occasional person who comes to my house) makes it more valuable to me, not less. It is outside of capitalism, and no one else gets to influence what I create next. It is entirely mine, all this beauty.
Recently I told my son, when I had purchased a new vase of flowers and told me he found them annoying and cumbersome, that I used to think of flowers that way.
“But I’m going to change my mind when I’m older and agree with you,” he said mockingly.
No, no. That wasn’t what I meant at all. I have no idea the ways in which he will change. But I am sure he will. I’m pretty sure he will almost never agree with me. Maybe someday he will value beauty. I hope it’s not under the circumstances that I found it vital to keep living. But maybe he’ll start enjoying car mechanics. Or really expensive pens. Or cowboy boots. Life changes us, if we let it. And even if sometimes the change comes at a cost, it isn’t always bad. It can be beautiful.