When I received a call on a Saturday morning from my aunt to tell me that my father had died in his sleep, I spent much of that day in the house. Pierre was in the city attending a meeting with his company. I remember reading The New Yorker magazine, trying to laugh at the cartoons. I flipped through some travel books about pyramids in Egypt and mountains in Peru.
That evening as I prepared dinner, I felt an urge to go out into the garden and see if I could find any late summer flowers for our dining-room table. I grabbed my father’s small pair of pruning secateurs and stepped outside. There wasn’t much left. My father had been away for two years already. The apple tree had fallen a week after he’d flown back to Brussels. The raspberry bushes had withered the following year. The day lilies had succumbed to the cold September air. There were no more irises, but there, clinging to what was left of the rose bush, was one white rose. I thought of the white gloves on my father’s hands as he rode Charlotte in the Royal Park when I was a girl.
I looked at that single flower: white petals overlapping like folds in the ocean tide, the stem with its strong grip onto the flower. I thought about how my father had planted that rose bush so many years earlier. Hava would have said it was beautiful.