The Irises and Missing My Father
Revisiting a meditation on grief and hope
My dear readers,
The irises are reaching again, this year in new places. Because of this, I wanted to revisit and share with you again this piece about missing my father, about interstellar stars and things we grieve and yet, still hope for.
As always, thank you for reading.
Brandi
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They came with the house: a small clump of purple bearded irises beneath brittle crepe myrtles.
I didn’t know the irises were even there until that first spring, when the backyard revealed all its secrets to us for the first time (a spindly rose bush struggling in the shade; a rusted horseshoe buried beneath a box hedge). Our house could be “the iris house” because the original front door features an iris in stained glass. Did the original owners love them, these ancient flowers devoted to Mary and a symbol for Christ’s passion and resurrection? Or did someone else plant these purple ones, whose petals are as thin as tissue?
I don’t know, but in the nine years of living here, the irises have grown overcrowded, their rhizomes spilling over each other as they grope for fresh soil and space. Although each spring almost every iris sends up a flurry of broad leaves, they flowered less and less until last year most didn’t flower at all.
They are, in essence, starving.
They are dying.
***
The Orthodox are still in the midst of Great Lent, and this year, I am especially sad. I don’t know why it’s so bad. My brain tries to make sense of what seems like completely irrational grief - It’s hormones! It’s getting older! It’s Great Lent, after all - everything is harder during Lent! - but I find myself sitting down in the grass or in the middle of my son’s room and crying anyway.
Our little boy is getting so big, and that’s probably part of it. At three-and-a-half his language has exploded. He’s funny. He runs around the yard in full-throttle play, muttering storylines and imaginary scenes of whatever he’s creating, like a movie. He sits on mounds of bagged soil I haven’t yet moved into beds and eats apples. We climb a chair in the backyard every Monday and Thursday afternoon and wave to the city trash truck man, who honks exuberantly as he drives down the alley when we come into view.
My father would have loved my son so much.
I know, I know. My father does love my son, as much as love has no beginning or end, time has no texture, the universe has no edge. But I want to touch that, as I can touch my son’s warm back as we lay on a blanket on a mild afternoon.
I want to hold onto that with certainty like an iris grasps the earth.
***
I remember crying in one movie with my father.
It was 2003, and I was 22. A baby still. Throughout those early college years, I was captivated - along with everyone else - by the Lord of the Rings adaptations. When the final movie in the trilogy, The Return of the King, released, I saw it and walked in a daze back into the bright sunlight of day, utterly overwhelmed.
When I learned my father had not yet seen it, I went with him to watch it again. We always watched movies together, loving science fiction, mind-bending premises, ridiculous humor. We especially loved movies with powerful scores, and my father - a school band director - was always interested in whatever music I had discovered. “This must be what heaven sounds like,” he told me once when we listened to Patrick Cassidy’s “Vide Cor Meum” on the Hannibal soundtrack together. So I couldn’t wait to see my father’s reaction to the Return of the King.
But it was that final scene, in which Frodo turns to his friends to reveal he is leaving them to sail to the Undying Lands, that I will never forget watching with my father. Frodo’s wounds from carrying the ring had become too much to bear; he could not live in Middle Earth anymore. Sailing to the Undying Lands gave the mortal hobbit a chance at life, but his friends didn’t know he was leaving them until it was time to step onto the ship.
As the White Ship sailed away on azure water lapping like a fountain against a gold and dying day, Frodo’s stunned friends cried at the shore. At that moment, I turned to my father and saw tears streaming down his face. It was one of the only times I remember seeing him cry; the other when the news his mother had died arrived in the middle of the night not long after.
I knew what he was feeling in that darkened theater, but not what he was thinking, because I was feeling it, too: the beautiful and unbearable parting scene was a form of death. It echoed the love and hope of every death we had yet experienced, and maybe the ones we didn’t want to experience yet.
It left us both weeping.
We didn’t talk about that final scene as we walked to the car, but seven years later, I would stand stunned on a different shore, in a white ship of a hospital room, as my father unexpectedly left me, too. A golden sunset would stream in from a west-facing window, and I would turn toward it when I could no longer watch chest compressions on my father’s cracked sternum.
“What in your life is calling you,” I read somewhere, maybe by Rumi, when
The meetings adjourned...
The lists laid aside,
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest...
What still pulls on your soul?
My father sailed away on an unseen boat, and the knowledge the rest of my life would follow without him pulls me still.
***
One morning last week, a nearly-full moon shone through the car window on our way to school.
“Baby, do you seen the moon?” I asked my son. We are always looking for the moon. It started with pointing with chubby fingers to moons in books. The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, Owl Moon, A Moon for All Seasons: here the moon appears in its various phases, like faces of flowers opening. Like our changing faces - mine growing older, my son’s growing into recognition.
Then last autumn my husband and I took our son into the backyard to view Jupiter’s moons through the binoculars. Jupiter’s perigee was unusually close to the Earth, its moons hovering like unstrung red-gray beads. The planet that gleamed like a star was suddenly more. Moons took on new meaning.
“There is it!” my son yelled in the car, pointing to a moon quickly dimming with the rising sun.
“Did you know that God made the moon?” I asked him as I came to a stop at an intersection.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factually. And then with the bobbing of his head, continued: “God made rocket ships and traffic lights and cheese and tea.”
Rocket ships, traffic lights, cheese, and tea. A beautiful, holy litany of what involves a little boy’s days.
And it reminds me of another movie I wept over, but didn’t get to watch with my father. In Interstellar, the story’s hero, Cooper, leaves his ten-year-old daughter to embark upon a mission to discover a new, habitable planet. Earth is dying, humanity having destroyed her through unconstrained excess, and what people are left are slowly starving and suffocating to death as blight consumes the last sources of food and oxygen.
As Cooper’s daughter, Murph, cries on her bed, hurt and angry with the revelation her father is suddenly leaving her, he holds her and tries to explain:
After you kids came along, your mom, she said something to me I never quite understood. She said, ‘Now, we’re just here to be memories for our kids.’ And I think now I understand what she meant. Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future … I can’t be your ghost right now. I need to exist. They chose me. Murph, they chose me.
“That’s exactly why you can’t go,” his daughter replies. “I figured out the message. One word. Know what it is? ‘Stay.’ It says, ‘Stay,’ Dad.”
But, of course, he can’t stay.
“I love you, Murph. Forever,” the father tells his daughter. “And I’m coming back.”
I tentatively rewatch the movie later, transfixed just like I was three years after my father’s death when I saw it for the the first time. I am consumed by the inconsolable grief of the scene. Cooper drives away, knowing the only hope for his daughter’s future life - for the life of all - is in his leaving.
And I think of my father’s final words to me, as I stood sobbing at an operating room’s doors before they swung shut to a place I could not enter:
“Do not worry. I am not worried. Do not worry,” he told me.
It was a lie. I knew he was worried. But he’d sheathed his fear and put on bravery and calm for his child who felt her world slipping into chaos over what was uncontrollable, who just wanted her father to stay and be okay.
“At the end of my suffering,” Louise Glück writes in “The Wild Iris,”
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.1
Cooper (at least for most of the lifespan of his daughter) appears to be “buried in the dark earth” of space. When he finally returns to Murph - and he does - the miracle and perplexity of time travel through inter-dimensional space reveals they have been co-heroes all along, but they are bitter-sweetly reunited at different ages. In one final scene, he walks through her door, anxious to return to her, for it has only been a handful of conscious years for him since they parted. But Cooper finds Murph an old woman. Dying.
“And everyone, once a child, wants to look into their own dad’s eyes and know he saw,” his elderly, dying daughter explains to him. “Nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come back.”
“How?” he asks her.
“Because my dad promised me.”2
“You who do not remember / passage from the other world,” Glück’s poem continues:
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice …
I wonder if someday - hoping I am an old, dying woman then, having lived long enough to see my son into adulthood - I might look up and see my father suddenly standing in my doorway, too.
I hope I see him as a younger man, as I remember him in my childhood and dreams, having crossed whatever mystery in Mystery God decides to ferry to me, when the time comes for this particular ending.
“Do not worry,” I want him to say to me. “I am not worried. Do not worry.”
“God made rocket ships.”
***
And so here I come to the crux of Great Lent, at least what it means traveling it for me. Here we all wait for the return of our King. For the fulfillment of a Promise. For a Ship that will bring us back into life.
I wait - and live - in grief, in hope, in bright sadness, knowing, of course, that it has all already arrived.
It arrived long ago. It is arriving now. It will arrive again, like irises unfurling in the sun, like a moon that draws closer again and comes into view.
***
Spring is here. The crabapple across the alley pops white blossoms overnight; a robin perched on the garden arch glows like an ember in the morning sun.
The irises cannot survive where they are, so I dig them up. Ruthlessly. My husband cut down the crepe myrtles, which had been irreparably damaged during a severe freeze a few years ago, and I plunge a spade beneath each bone-colored rhizome and lever up, the dull sound of roots popping beneath the soil becoming a beat of loss but also hope.
When each iris releases its grip, I trim its leaves and roots with scissors and pitch it into a bucket of damp garden soil. I hope by lunch to replant them all elsewhere, but my best-laid plans are delayed. The irises are abandoned, inert, in their bucket. For exactly three days.
I’ve wasted them, I think when I finally return to them. But irises are tough, one of the few flowering plants that tolerate - even defy - our hot, dry soils.
When I replant them, almost in a frenzy, I put them everywhere: into corners in the front beds, around a live oak, into a strip of pitiful, dry earth that borders our driveway. I expect the worst but water anyway.
And now: amazement. Almost every iris has begun to grow new leaves. The leaves unsheathe like swords with bravery, growing fuller each day. Beneath the soil, the roots stretch and search, sighing into new space.
I know with care this time next year they will bloom again. From the center of a green fan, a flattened bud will miraculously appear, and it will grow taller and taller, reaching for the sun. Reaching for the moon or perhaps other moons.
And a huge purple flower will emerge. It will unfold in space-time, like a scene from a movie, returning from the oblivion of its sleep with a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
And I will hope, again.
***
Did you enjoy this meditation? If so, please feel free to comment or consider sharing it or Writing from the Desert Places with others. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Louise Glück. “The Wild Iris.” https://hellopoetry.com/poem/20581/the-wild-iris/ Note: you can listen to the poet reading her poem here.
Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, Interstellar: The Complete Screenplay with Selected Storyboards (United Kingdom: Faber & Faber Ltd., 2014). Available https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a1c2452268b96d901cd3471/t/5b95b7b0032be4f0cd3a8db2/1536538544682/Interstallar.pdf
Beautifully written. I often find myself sadly envious of people who grieve like this over the loss of a parent. But I also know in the resurrection all things will be made new including my complicated, tense relationship with my father and our reunion will be in the love of Christ.
I was captivated by this reflection! Just beautiful! There's more to be said I'm sure but I don't have the words.