I bought Karen an orchid at the end of the evening on what became our first date. We were walking up Carroll Street and passed Key Food, which has a flower merchant in front of it. So, just before hailing a cab to send her back to her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, I bought a purple and while orchid for her to remember the evening. Some months later, when the pregnancy was confirmed by her doctor, I stopped at a flower shop on Seventh Avenue and bought her another orchid. This one was potted and a bit more exotic looking than the first one. We even talked about using orchids in the wedding, but opted to not because they were excessively expensive.
But if orchids factored significantly during our time together, they have become even more so since she's been gone...
Almost a year ago, I went to Florida to visit with Karen's family. It was the first time I was seeing them since they were back in New York for the funeral and only my second time with them in Florida. While I was there, Diane, Karen's mother, told me about the orchid plant in their front yard that had recently, and somewhat out of season, bloomed with several new flowers. She took me outside and showed me the tree on which the plant clung. They were a gorgeous shade of purple, close to the color of Karen's bouquet. I took this picture of them.
As remarkable and inspirational as that was, recently another blossoming has occurred that I wanted to talk about.
While it is not a Jewish tradition to send flowers to mourners (it has to do with Judaism's disfavor of beautifying or adorning death), I nevertheless received many lovely arrangements - to be clear, I appreciated them all very much notwithstanding the tradition. One friend of my family's sent a lovely potted orchid, which stayed in my mother's apartment. The flowers lasted for months, well into the summer. As the blossoms shriveled, they fell off one-by-one over time. The last one, remarkably, dropped from the plant almost one year after the funeral.
My mother kept the plant in her apartment even after all the flowers were gone and it was merely a stem with two leaves at its base. And there it sat, all but unremarkable, in her apartment for the past few months. I suppose she didn't get rid of it for the very same reason that I keep certain things exactly as they were before Karen died. But unlike the inanimate objects around my apartment, the orchid refused to remain as is. Recently, my mother noticed a few new buds on the ends of the bare stem. These have now opened to reveal several radiant blossoms.
Now, as I said, I'm not much of a flower person and it could very well be that this regeneration is perfect normal and natural. However, whatever the case may be, seeing these deep purple flowers (again, similar to the color of her wedding bouquet) appear once more on the otherwise bare stem is a fantastic reminder of not only her but of the resiliency of nature and the human spirit.
