Loss, Flowers & Comfort

Last week my best friend’s father died from a stroke unexpectedly. She was there, miraculously in town visiting her family for Memorial Day weekend. In some ways I am sure that gave her solace. But there really is no peace when you lose someone so loved and cherished. Everyone who knew him, or knew of him, respected this man. He lived a life full of integrity and accomplishments.

His death is a loss not only to my friend, her family, and especially her mother, but also to many larger communities, including the field of marine biology. He was a humble, generous man, charming and funny, a highly regarded scientist, professor, musician, husband, father, grandfather and friend.

I imagined my friend’s mother’s home filled with flowers, like my mother’s was after my father’s death, so at first I didn’t send anything. Then it dawned on me that I was a product of a businessman’s family and that we express ourselves much differently than academics. Turns out I was correct—only her father’s doctor had sent a bouquet. Their friends and family were sending long, heartfelt e-mails, and setting up a student scholarship in her father’s name.

Finally I could be useful in the sea of pain I feared. I wrote a long e-mail and sent flowers. For some reason her mother wrote back to an old e-mail account that has been turned off for years. I would never have received her beautiful thank you note if Charming Baby hadn’t been screwing around with my computer over the weekend. My in-box was flooded with junk correspondence from the old e-mail address.

As I cursed sharing my Mac with a seven-year old, I weeded through it all before deleting anything because of my Type-A first-born neurotic tendencies. I now feel very blessed to have a busybody son and that I received 2,247 e-mails to go through.

I found my friend’s mom’s gracious words and a photo attachment. It humbled me that she took the time to photograph the flowers I sent and send it to me. She was able to illustrate for me how much she is going to miss him. “In 46 years we never ran out of things to share, even if it was just the fact that there was a steller jay in the bird feeder and the one who saw it wanted the other one to be able to see it too.”