The church doesn’t look anything like a church. It’s a yellow house on a quiet residential street—no steeple, no parking lot. Inside, it’s bright, with big windows and maybe a hundred wooden chairs, set up in horseshoe rows. No crosses, no hymn books, not even any Bibles that I can see.
William was the one who suggested this place. He calls it a meeting house, and he’s allowed to invite us to have the memorial here because he’s a member of the Religious Society of Friends. I told Dad it sounds like a cult, but he just laughed and said it’s another name for the Quakers, an old and well-respected branch of Christianity.
“The Quakers still exist?” I asked, picturing William and dozens of other people sitting around in funny hats like the guy on the oatmeal package.
“They do,” Dad said, “and if you’re thinking of the oatmeal, don’t worry. They wear modern clothes now. They get together to meditate. Sometimes people stand up to speak if they feel it would be useful. Uli went a few times. He knew lots of people there through William, and he liked the quiet.”
So here we are. Nikko and I are the youngest by far. My parents are next.
They’re making a big effort this weekend. Mom’s been here almost twelve hours, and I haven’t heard a single angry word between them. Dad and I picked her up at the airport at midnight. Mom travels a lot, but whenever we picked her up at the airport in Montreal, she’d be in stretchy pants and a comfy sweatshirt. Last night she was wearing tight, stylish jeans and a purple, wraparound sweater. Dad did a double take, but I don’t know if Mom noticed. She was going on about how much I’d grown and how she liked my hair tied back. Eventually, she let go of me, hugged him and said he looked good, that he’d lost weight. He smiled. Things were starting off well.
Now here we are in a Quaker meeting house packed with people. Dad was shocked when he realized how many people Uli kept in touch with. We’ve spent weeks letting people know about this memorial service.
“Chloë, could you set up the photos, please?” Dad hands me a display board and points me to an easel in the far corner. I squeeze through the crowd to arrange the four pictures Dad rummaged out of a box this week. The first is black-and-white: a small boy in shorts holding the hand of a woman in a kerchief. I think of Uli’s story about the apple tree. That’s my great-grandmother, who escaped with Uli in her arms, saved the seeds and died before she could get to Canada. I wish I’d asked Uli if I look like her. I’ve squinted at her until my eyes hurt, but the picture’s too small for spotting any resemblance.
In the next photo, the little boy has grown to a man. He’s wearing a suit and standing beside a woman in a wedding dress. My grandmother Gwen. I don’t know how they met. Dad says he doesn’t know either. (How did he go forty years without thinking to ask?) Dad’s in the next photograph, a baby in his mother’s arms.
The last picture is of me with Uli, at a Tibetan restaurant the week before he died. I remember groaning when my grandfather asked my father to take the picture. My hair had been stuffed in a hat all afternoon. I had a soup stain on my shirt. But I’m so glad Dad didn’t listen to me. Uli’s arm looks awkward around my shoulders, and even though he was usually serious around my dad, he has an almost goofy grin on his face. It’s a good picture. Our last one together.
Four generations of my family. Dad and I are the only ones still alive. We should have more photos. I should have more stories. How can we pretend to celebrate Uli’s life if this is all we have to show of it? Why didn’t I ever take a picture of him in his garden?
“I am so very sorry for your loss.”
I turn. William holds out his bony, gnarled fingers. It occurs to me that Uli and William were about as different as two people could be. Uli must have towered over his friend, for one thing. This small man is always very neatly dressed in a collared shirt and pants. He’s so formal and polite, compared to Uli’s gruffness. I wonder what they talked about all those years.
I let go of his hand and remember his frail arms around me when the paramedics carried Uli to the ambulance. I blink hard. “I’m sorry for your loss, too, William. You knew him better than I did.”
“That too is a loss, my dear. Your grandfather was a fine man. Not a perfect one—no one ever is—but a fine man nonetheless. I do hope you got to see some of that in him in your short time together.”
I swallow and look away. I want to be back in Montreal. Back in a time years ago, when my parents were still happy and before I knew my grandfather. A time where I didn’t know what I was missing and what I was about to lose.
“I’m sorry.” William squeezes my hand in both of his and then makes his way to the line of chairs.
I stand there wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole. Mom places a vase of flowers on a little table next to my mostly dead family, and as if she’s read my mind, she offers me a reason to escape into the kitchen. By the time Nikko and I have the coffee mugs lined up and go back to the main room, most people are already seated. Nikko and I find a place to sit, too, in the front row, next to my parents.
A thin, old man in a powder-blue suit stands to welcome everyone. He explains that we’re here to honor Uli with quiet meditation but that we’re welcome to offer a story if we feel led to do so. He sits down again. Everyone is quiet.
Most people have their heads bowed. I do, too, but I sneak looks around the room. I wonder if any of the people who gave him seeds will stand up to tell a story. I can hear people shifting in their chairs and my father breathing next to me. I fidget. The silence feels like we’re all waiting for something to happen.
Finally Dad stands up. At first, he hadn’t planned to speak: What would I say? That Dad and I didn’t see eye to eye on most things? Everyone there probably knows that already. But then a few days ago, Dad started worrying. What if no one says anything? What if we sit there for a whole hour, and no one has anything to say? That would be the worst send-off ever.
I guess Dad’s decided to get the ball rolling. He clears his throat. I close my eyes to listen.
“My father began planting vegetables the summer my mother died.”
My eyes spring open. I look up at my father, standing next to me. He’s never talked about his mother dying. I only know it was cancer because I asked Mom. Now he’s sharing with a roomful of strangers a story he’s never shared with me.
I see Mom slip her hand into his, something I haven’t seen her do in years.
“I was eleven,” Dad continues. “My father brought home some seeds and said we needed to plant them.”
I wonder who the seeds came from. Were they a gift, or did he get them at a gardening shop or grocery store, like most people do?
“We dug up the whole lawn and planted rows of carrots, peas, lettuce, green beans—and a pumpkin,” Dad says, smiling. “A huge pumpkin that weighed almost as much as I did. There’s a picture of it somewhere.”
I never knew he helped with the garden. By the smile on his face, I can tell he enjoyed it too.
“Gardening was what my dad and I did together to heal. He told me we needed to grow something, to add new life to a year that had been all about sickness and death.”
Like Uli had done with the apple seeds after he watched his mother die.
“For as long as I lived in that house, that garden was a place where I could go to think and just be. We worked side by side for hours, sometimes talking, but lots of times just being quiet together. That garden was where he taught me that even when everything feels too hard to bear, good things can grow.”
I never imagined my dad working in Uli’s garden and loving it just as much as my grandfather did. But I’m glad to know now. I like picturing them there together. I wish I knew what happened to change all that.
Dad sits down. A few people smile at him. He nods back. I wonder why he’s never told me any of this before. Did he always know he felt that way about the garden, or is it something he’s just figuring out now?
A woman behind us stands up and talks about meeting Uli years ago at the diner where she worked. Right away I know who she is. It’s the woman who gave him the cucamelon seeds. A man in a wheelchair tells how Uli brought him tomato sauce every summer and sometimes wheeled him over to the garden, just to sit close to the tomatoes that his mother used to grow. One after another, people stand to tell everyone just how much Uli meant to them, how he cared about little things that other people didn’t bother with. He paid attention to details and was a great listener. That starts Dad crying again. Mom puts her arm around him. He leans into her. I put a hand on his knee. He grips it just as hard as he did in the hospital.
Nikko glances sideways at me. I try to smile back to show him I’m okay, but I doubt it’s very convincing, because I’m crying at the same time.
Story after story about seeds, memories, little kindnesses and the garden. Every story involves the living museum behind his house, which will one day be sold and maybe bulldozed to make room for something new. It’s the worst kind of end for a museum. Part of me almost wishes we could stay in Victoria, just to look after the garden and make sure the plants live on.