I almost missed the iris this year! I made it home from Hawai’i at the end of May to catch the tail end of their bloom. I’ve always loved the curvy shape and deep color of an iris. And these days, more than anything else, they make my think of my friend Teresa and her story about her mom (which she shared in more detail in a post last spring).
Teresa moved back to Boise in 2016 after a particularly difficult time in her life. One of the many things she mourned leaving were the iris bulbs from her mother’s garden that she had transplanted into her Montana yard. She had moved in winter when the ground was frozen, and so she could not dig them up.
Teresa began to rebuild her life in Boise and was able to buy a beautiful cottage that called to her. The first spring when flowers began to bloom, Teresa discovered her new home was surrounded by irises. She knew she was in the right place. Or as Teresa put it, “God is fancy.”
I am so grateful to know that story. I love feeling that leap of love–that connection to my dear friend and her mom–when I see an iris.
It has been a gift to gather these photo stories for our virtual memorial. Thank you for sharing your heart and honoring your loved ones here.
Artifacts of Loss and Love
This elephant pin cushion belonged to my granny. I remember as a very young child (probably around 6) that my granny would pull this down off the shelf for me to have something to play with when I’d visit. I would pull the pins out and redesign the pattern of the elephant. Now that it is so old it has faded to the pattern it is now so there is no redesigning it anymore. I imagine I was the last one to place the pins where they are now. Funny to think this is the toy a 6 year old would play with but I sure did love it and am so grateful I have it now. Patty Marks These shadow puppets belonged to my close friend, Alberta Dooley. They hung in her therapy office, her college office, after retirement in her living room, and after her death on my wall. We shared our lives, our families, and our confidences for forty years, but there were bits of herself she always kept in the shadows. Mary Ellen McMurtrieMy sister-in-law Cheryl made the urn out of my brothers’ ashes, after they both died within a month of each other in 2016. I think of Cheryl’s hands shaping this, pressing the lip into place, brushing the blue-green glaze, her favorite combination of colors. She used her tears as slip for the clay. Now Cheryl is gone, too, and her fingerprints are all that I have left of a friendship that started even before she met my older brother, over 40 years ago. When I pick up the vase, I imagine my hands over hers as we both hug these men, each in our own time. Ana HallandI was living in Yuma and my brother Miles was living in Tucson and we would meet to go hunting. These were some of the best times I spent with Miles before things got too bad. We were by the campfire one night and he told me how much I meant to him and he gave me this buckle. It was made by a favorite artist of his in Tucson, and I knew it was hard for him to give it to me and that he gave it to me because he loved me. To tell you the truth, I never wanted to remind Miles that he gave me his buckle because he might want it back. So I never brought it up. The whole thing meant so much to me, I wasn’t taking any chances. John WestoverGrowing up, I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s, whether it was after school or over the weekend when my parents were on an adult trip. My Grandma always had a cup of coffee, some type of homemade sweet on the counter, and she was always cold. Whenever I said I was cold, she would always ask, “would you like a robe?” My grandma had many robes over the years, enough to cultivate the perfect idea of comfort when looking for a robe based on season, weather, and time of day.
My Grandma passed away in late November of 2020. Upon bringing home one of her robes, there were moments that I would just pick it up, hold it close to my face and smell the comfortable scent of my grandma standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling on a cookie. With each day the scent of my grandma has lingered farther and farther away from the fibers themselves, but each time I put the robe on, I am able to be comforted and warmed up by my grandma one more time. Ali Smith
Grandma Frances wore this watch the years of the later part of her life. I remember her drumming her fingers while she thought about something I had said or something she was thinking about doing. I also remember it flashing while she played her organ and sang “The Green Green Grass of Home.” Now I wear it most days while I teach and it reminds me how much she loved me, and would have been cheering for me to be myself.Lori Messenger
Jane Stavoe was my wife, mother to our daughters, and friend to many. Jane passed away April 2019. We bought our home in 1964 and that began Jane’s love of gardening. Jane would gather with neighbors and friends and share her joy from playing in the earth. She decided that young people needed a better understanding of where their food came from and invited 60 fourth-grade children to plant vegetables. The school garden went on for seventeen years until we sold our home of forty-nine years and moved to a condo.
Each year when I start planting our terrace garden and see the “Friends Rock” which was given to Jane by one of the fourth-grade classes, it makes me think of the many friends with whom Jane had shared her garden. Ron Stavoe
My mother, Jean Ingles Bedingfield, was born in 1910 and so even though this is just a broken plate of what was once a beautiful set, it has “lived” for at least a hundred years. The set was precious to my mother and each time I look up at my shelf and see the piece I , of course, think of her with love and smile. I picture my mother smiling, too. The set was precious, but my mother was a realist and had a wonderful sense of humor. She would love that I kept the piece and that I display it. Our connection is not broken. Our relationship endures. Carol Buick
This plaque hung in my grandmother’s kitchen and I would sit and read it every time I visited. It made me laugh as it read with a Norwegian accent telling how to make “scandihuvian” lefsa. Besides the fact that my grandmother was an amazing cook and taught me how to make lefsa, this plaque depicted a side of my grandmother that I loved. She had a hard life growing up on the plains of North Dakota and Wisconsin. But despite the hardships my grandmother had a fun and silly side. One winter when I was 9 or 10, we made Christmas ornaments out of felt. And my grandmother said ‘that sure was some funny feeling felt’. I replied ‘I never felt any felt like that felt before’. We bantered back and forth making funnier ‘felt’ sayings and phrases for our description of felt. We thought we were extremely funny, laughing uncontrollably and nearly driving my poor mother crazy. From then on that was our running inside joke – that funny feeling felt, that we had never felt any felt like that felt before. So whenever I look at this plaque that is now in my kitchen, I warmly remember the fun loving side of my grandmother. Cam Victoria
Every time I see Rudy the Rooster, I think of my friend Susan Gardner. She loved to go to Jim’s Diner, Rudy’s former home, for breakfast on her birthday. Theresa Madrid
My mom was an incredible artist and left a treasure of her art work for her loved ones! I have many in my home! This particular one brings me closer to her each day! We share a love for flowers especially purple iris! Sometimes I stare at one of her paintings and realize how incredible it is to look at her brush strokes and feel connected! Grateful for the gift she left for us! Teresa McDonald
While cleaning the house in order to put our house on the market, this is one of the few old objects that made the “keep” pile. My grandma made this magic square for my 15th birthday. I can feel the love and care that she put into each stitch. It helps me remember the many blessings of the time spent with grandparents. Sandy Blethen
My mom died in her sleep ten years ago this summer. This is my stepdad who I call Papa. When I am with him I feel closest to my mom because they think and react the same – with big love. Lorelei McDermottThis glass monkey was given to me as a keepsake from my close friend Allie, who passed away. She purchased it to remind her “Not my Monkeys!” It reminds my of Allie’s gentle soul and struggle with co-dependency. I laugh when I see it because it’s just like her to get all fancy about the props she uses as reminders. Roxanne AbramowitzThe object in the foreground is a lava lamp which belonged to my grandfather, Victor L. Bedingfield. Possibly fearing a probate battle among his grandchildren for this treasured, incongruous item, he gifted it to me on my thirty-fourth birthday, approximately six months before he died. The faded labels on the base include a line that he spoke to me over the phone probably three weeks before his passing: “I think about you every day.” This shocked me. My grandpa had many things, and many people in his life to think about. But in a world where we often receive the message that we are NOT special, or unique, or cared about, here was a deep voice of authority countermanding that message and reminding me that I was being thought of. The clarity of that message was startling and palpable and life changing. And I realized that, indeed, I thought about HIM every day. And so many others (as I know that I am not the only person that my Grandfather thought about each day). There is room in our hearts for all. So every morning, as the connection is made and the electricity surges through the filaments in the bulb, which then heat the orange globules producing the same strange shapes my siblings and cousins and I marveled at in our grandparents old fashioned house—I think, I remember, and I rejoice. Kevin BuickThose of us who are able-bodied are sometimes referred to by the disabled community as “the temporarily able-bodied.” It does put “the em-PHA-sis on the right syl-A-ble” as Mr Ellfeldt, my beloved childhood music teacher used to say at choir practice.
My husband Gordon went from able-bodied to quadriplegic in the time it took for a tire to blow out. This mouthstick was a tool of his trade. It was more comfortable and easier to use than the earlier ones with just two prongs. This one has a mouthpiece molded to his bite which was easily held and manipulated. The remaining marks from Gordon’s teeth are a surprisingly intimate and lovely reminder of him. He used it for turning pages on his lapboard (a lapboard I am using right now to get the trackball down within reach after shoulder surgery) as he read aloud to me as I cooked or folded laundry. He had always read to me, though now there were pauses as he picked up the mouthstick out of the docking station on his wheelchair, turned the page, replaced the mouthstick, and continued on. When he was first learning to turn pages in rehab, I couldn’t see how it would ever work at all. He used it even more constantly on his keyboard at the especially designed desk which came up to his chest. In time, his neck grew strong. In fact, his shirt collar increased two sizes.
The mouthstick was a godsend and yet it was slow and laborious to use. As I sit here with one arm in a sling, I’m amazed he wasn’t more frustrated than he was. He had helped to develop speech synthesis in the years I first knew him and here he was editing the monthly church newsletter one keystroke at time. Gordon died nineteen years after his accident. There’s so much I didn’t keep, but this I have still. I’m sorry I didn’t keep the plate-guards – they’d come in handy for me now. Louise Buck As John and I built our life together, I became more aware of what I lost in never having had the chance to meet his mom who died in 1999, three years before we got together.
I came to know Grandma Dean through stories John’s daughters told and from John telling me how much she would enjoy my sons. Soon after we met he told me how his mom said when he was a teenager, “You better learn to speak better because someday you’re going to meet a cute English teacher, and you’ll open your mouth and it’ll be all over!” (She was wrong about that last part. :))
Some of the objects Dean loved grace our home. We have a few prints on the wall, an antique hutch with a marble top, three plates from Portugal decorated with peaches. And we have a drawerful of the chunky jewelry she wore that never fit my style or frame. John recently pulled this turquoise and silver cross from his nightstand and said, “This is sooo my mom!”
With the weight of it in my palm, I think about the objects and the places and the people Dean loved. I think especially about how close she and John were and how I know and love this man more with each passing year. It is possible, I now see, to grow a relationship, to grieve a relationship, with someone I never met. Laura Stavoe
More Resources
This American Life ran a show titled Good Grief last week that is right up our alley! Here are the episode notes:
So many of us, we don’t want to think about death. We avoid grieving when we lose someone, distract ourselves, look away. In this episode, at a moment when so many families are mourning, we have stories of people figuring out how they’ll grieve, and doing a pretty good job of it.
A new podcast related to end-of-life matters is 70 over 70 in which one of my favorite interviewers Max Linsky talks with seventy people who are over seventy years old. I found recent episodes with Norman Lear and Sister Helen Prejean particularly touching.
If you are inspired by these photo stories and want to read more about expressing grief through creativity, Heart Art is a Tending to Endings post from last summer that includes an essay on the topic and some resources.
To read Teresa’s story in her own words (and see the cottage surrounded by irises!) and other stories from readers, go to April 2020’s post: Your Words .
And if you like Tending to Endings, please become a subscriber by leaving your email below. Each installment will arrive in your inbox the first Friday of the month. Tending to Endings is cost-free and ad-free. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com or in the comments box below. I would love to stay in touch!
