“Queen Anne’s lace?” she asks.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” I say.

The flowers of Queen Anne’s Lace are white or pink with a small purple-black floweret in the center. Legend has it that Queen Anne pricked her finger while tatting lace. A drop of blood fell onto her lace, leaving a single dark spot in the middle.

The four of us gather every July for our birthdays. We’re all 85 this year, all living alone. This year, as promised, I’m bringing cupcakes, along with the flowers I’ve foraged from the swamp behind my house.

I think back to when my wife died, freeing me from catastrophes and caretaking. For a decade I’ve dreamt she’s alive again. But we had a funeral! I tell her. Do we have to go through this again? Lately, though, those dreams have stopped. In their place, I picture scenes from our first 30 years together and feel her with me, watching. Would she condone the deception I’ve planned?

As Jeanine drives, a little too fast, I ponder “85.” I’ve got typical complaints: wobbly balance, creaky knees, a little hearing loss. I don’t drive any more, by fiat of my children. But I’ve still got all my marbles, don’t I? I fiddle with the bouquet in my lap and steady the box when Jeanine careens around a corner.

My destination, a saltbox house festooned with ivy, comes into view at the end of a gravelly path. I heave myself out of the back seat, clutching the offerings, then inch my way along rocky unevenness to the door. Minding my feet as if they’re errant children, I guide them across the transom.

My old friends Emily, Lulu, and James are seated around the kitchen table. Having known them since college, I’ve never gotten used to their old-people’s hair—silver, white, gray, missing. Emily, who owns the house, wears a halo of baldness on the back of her head. They all look up and nod, but don’t rise to greet me. How hard would it be to get up for a hug?

I glance from one to the next, mentally cataloging their lives: their achievements, their loved ones, their health. I start feeling superior, till I imagine what my wife would say. Enough with the competition, Arthur. Why tell yourself useless stories, at this stage of the game?

I hold out the weed cupcakes my daughter made. “These are from Allison,” I tell my friends. “She thinks we’re a hilarious bunch of old potheads.”

“They’ll take the edge off. Thanks for bringing them,” says Emily, taking the box and bouquet to the kitchen. James gazes out the window.

The Queen Anne’s lace plant is entirely edible, with a long history in herbal medicine. However, the forager must learn to distinguish it from the poisonous wild hemlock, which it closely resembles. The umbrella shape of Queen Anne’s lace is flat-topped, while the hemlock umbel is rounded. The stem of Queen Anne’s lace is hairy and thin, while wild hemlock has reddish purple blotches on a thick stem.

Emily motions to me to sit. Paper, pens, and envelopes are spread across the table. My friends resume the letters they had begun, exchanging news about children and grandchildren. I’m quiet awhile, thinking about how loud the katydids are this year, and about my first great-grandchild on the way.

“I don’t think we should do it.”

“It was your idea in the first place, Arthur,” says James.

“Remember the alternatives,” says Lulu. “Out of money, bedridden or demented, forcing our kids to take care of us.”

“People weren’t meant to live this long,” says James.

“I know, we’ve been over it every year,” I say. “But now that we’ve reached the magic number, I have second thoughts. I can’t say if it’s cowardice to want to keep going, or courage. Or both.”

“We’ve psyched ourselves up for a long time,” says Emily. “To choose our own fate, not wait for random events. Not to mention spare our children.”

“We all have to decide for ourselves, Arthur,” says Lulu.

The others murmur in agreement and return to their letters. They retreat to their own thoughts, but each one glances at me from time to time, eyes soft or wary. Finally, I get up and walk out into twilight. No hugs on the way out either.

I get another death-defying driver for the ride home: Miguel in a white Subaru, not a talker. In the back seat, I take out my phone and start messaging my friends’ children. There will be hell to pay, but I’m willing.

All parts of the wild hemlock plant are toxic, especially when ingested. Death through hemlock poisoning was a common punishment for ancient Greek prisoners, Socrates most famously. Ingesting six to eight hemlock leaves can be fatal for adult humans.

I imagine the scene back at Emily’s house. Emily serves the cupcakes, then returns to the kitchen. She separates the flowers from their newspaper shroud. Her fingers brush their thin hairy stems as she peels off leaves, ten for each person’s bowl of salad. Admiring the purple spot in the heart of each flat, lacy flower, she arranges them in a vase to grace the table.

I also imagine my wife surveying the scene: a wry smile, a gentle rebuke. You know what they say, Arthur. To fear death is to think oneself wise when one is not.

From Seed to Tree to Fruit: A Daughter’s Memoir of Grief and Healing

by Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk

    For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways. “This remembrance is a poignant love letter to the father Mlynarczyk has spent a lifetime grieving.” — Kirkus “Haunted by her father’s psychic crisis and his early and unexpected death, Mlynarczyk brings us on a poignant journey, exploring her father’s violent breakdown and coming to terms with a past weighted with fear and silence.” — Julia Miele Rodas, author of Autistic Disturbances “This memoir exemplifies the healing power of writing as a path through pain.” — Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir “From Seed to Tree to Fruit does what good memoirs must do: explain the present by helping us to understand the past.” — Wendy Ryden, co-author of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes and Noble.

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