Dead Flowers

I wrote this piece in 2004, and it was published in a different form at Referential Magazine and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011.

Send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave

In the spring, when everything is beautiful, I start thinking about planting things. Then I remember that I kill everything I touch, so I go to my husband's grave with a package of wildflower seeds. I hope that if the seeds sprout, his family will stop littering his grave with Wal-Mart silk crap.

They should know he hated fake flowers. I tried over and over to convince him that the only way our flowers would live is if they were never actually alive to begin with. "I don't have a green thumb," I said. He wouldn't hear any of it. He was determined to have flowers in our yard, because they are beautiful, and they smell good, and if we had flowers, that would mean we were grownups.

He'd rather have no flowers than fake silk crap. At Christmas they stabbed two sprigs of glitter-coated silk poinsettias into the dirt, one on either side of the footstone. By the time I finally noticed it, Christmas had been over for nearly two months, but there stood the "flowers", fading and ugly and coated with glitter. I grabbed the flowers, stuffed them under my sweater, and drove directly to a dumpster.

So I pour out the seeds onto the grave. It's been fourteen months, but still no grass has grown. I'm sure that thanks to the Carolina red clay he's buried in, the flowers probably won't grow, either. Not to mention that I'm the one "planting" them.

I'm just not good with living things. I don't know how to take care of anything. I've tried having plants in my house; I've even tried planting flowers outside. But then I either forget about them or just stop caring, and I let them die.

This is the part where I don't have to say what I'm thinking, because everyone already knows.

I haven't been back to the grave, and hopefully I'll move away before I feel the need to take another look. I hope the seeds will sprout, regardless, because in spite of everything, he still deserves something real.