The Flower Delivery

Buuuuuzz.

The doorbell’s droning hum vibrated through the banister, an electrical impulse shocking my muscles into an unnatural tension.

“That’s impossible!” I shouted into the carpeted stairs, my foot still suspended above the first step.

“Mh… Ma’am?”

Damn. Louder than I thought.

“Go away! Leave me alone!!!”

“I uh… I just have a delivery. Flowers.”

Flowers. Just flowers. Mutilated bits of once-living things, now slowly wilting in every corner of mom’s house.

“Not his fault,” I mumbled to myself. Alone. Disheveled. Turning around and opening the door.

“Sorry about that,” I blurted, feeling the strangeness of those words in my mouth. “Thank you.”

“Oh, no I… understand,” he offered, handing me the wreath. “I also lost my dad a few weeks ago.”

The first bouquet came as a pleasant surprise. Mom was a woman of few words and even fewer affections. She never quite learned to speak the language of her adoptive country, the country she brought me up in, without stumbling over small embarrassments and looking trapped and mortified in corners. Knowing that someone, out there, was missing her, gave me unexpected solace – especially as I grappled with the guilt of having noticed she was gone only days after her accident.

But then, the flowers kept coming – Ten, twenty, sixty deliveries since this morning, often only minutes apart. Each came with a note in her language, a language she had never shared with me. They began crowding countertops, stockpots, buckets, pitchers, jars, rain boots. A confusion of color barging into my life with the same abruptness of her passing, leaving me as helpless and overwhelmed as when I found her, lying rigidly on the bathroom floor in a pool of dry blood.

A haunting flash. I gasped for air. Deep breaths. Just a few, deep breaths. But how to breathe without inviting the decaying, nauseating smell of a thousand carnations deeper into my nostrils?

I had to get out of there. Blindly, I reached into the multitude of hues, grabbing the first stark-white envelope I could identify, and walking out into the sharp, late-January afternoon with nothing more than my coat, phone and keys.

Five minutes later, I collapsed into an empty chair at the nearest café.

“Dear Ana,

Your words saved my life”, read the translated letters dancing across my phone’s screen. “You taught a generation how to grieve. I am forever indebted to you.”

Trembling, I looked up mom’s full name in her language's alphabet. “What the River Took,” 1997; “The Sky We Couldn’t Carry,” 1999; “Letters to a Land That Forgot Me”, 2011; and, finally, “The Quiet Between Our Names”, 2025.

For the first time, I could feel the blurry contours of my mother’s face come into sharper focus, carried by whispers of a voice I’d never heard.

My mother the poet.

My mother the involuntary mute.

My mother the solitary soul, resting under disorganized bunches of withering flowers.