The Garden - Tierney Ragsdale

       I was stuck there, unbearably itchy inside my body and fidgeting in the church pew in between my father and my cousin. I could feel something raging inside me, trying to reach my awareness. But I lacked the ability to unlock its cage and let it have its way. While I was being suffocated by the void spreading through my mind, I saw the preacher standing at the pulpit trying to summarize a most iridescent spirit. I couldn’t hear the impersonal condolences and bible verses he spouted to the church crowd. He couldn’t describe her in anyway. His service was a lie, unable to help any of us who grieved for such a loss. His service gave no sense of relief, no reviving breath to those who had died a little along with her. Then he was done and “I Hope You Dance” started to preside over the babbling of the packed church, which gave much more hope than anything the speaker had tried to say.
      
        Finally I was out of the church, I moved fast from one imprisonment to the other. Now, I was sitting beside my grandmother in the car, he as numb and unchanging as my mind was. But as I watched the rain drip past the windows, I figured out what was battling inside me. He was grief, but I couldn’t remember how to let him go, how to access him. He had flowed from me so freely just the day before.
      
        The memories were so sharp. I remembered seeing her face in the pictures at the calling hours. Her eyes were staring back at me and there was her radiant smile, but I’ll never see her green eyes for another moment. I won’t hear her warm infectious laugh as long as I live. Can I remember her forever? Will those memories of summers at her comforting country house, be as clear twenty years from now? I had to get out of that funeral home. I thought I had escaped when I got outside in the lively heat, yet out came the principal of her school with a beautiful sign that her students had made for her. So many people loved her. Who could not? She was the most loving person I had ever known. What she loved above all was her family and her flower garden. She was always either doting on her daughters and husband or out tending to her flowers. So on that April day, instead of being imprisoned by the grieving in the funeral home, I spent the day with the trees and the flowers and all the extant wonders of nature that assured me that life was still present in my damaged world
      
       But I could not stay away from the grievers forever. I had to go back to stand next to my mother and watch them pass by her body, which now was just an empty encasement, to say goodbye. I couldn’t face a goodbye; I couldn’t look upon the face that used to be filled with a mother’s love and all the vivacious color of a pink rose. How do you say goodbye forever?
      
        I hadn’t the answers and my grandmother’s lost expression did not give me any. I found nothing that day that gave me answers. Not in the nebulous charcoal skies. Not in the constant sticky drizzle and the sleek grass. Not in the words of my family. Not in the lowering of the casket or the final words of the preacher man. Nothing.
      
       It was not until we went back to her house that I found what I had been looking for; what I had already started finding outside the funeral home. As everyone went inside her home, I wandered over to her flower garden. Then I finally knew that her presence in my life would never cease. Her love would always live inside of me and everyone else that she loved. She will never truly be gone from this world as long as the people she loves are still living. I miss my Aunt Val everyday and I still love her. If her loss has taught me anything, it is to love without reservation and appreciate everything beautiful and dear to me in every moment. It only takes a moment for God to take earthbound angels back.