Betsy’s Flowers
Sunday, the youth group at church was selling “mums for mom,” so everyone was buying them and giving them to everyone else. Sweetness. My own mother is 2000 miles away, so I gave a bouquet to the elegant Fasia instead, who has dubbed herself my “African Mother.” She hugged me as usual, which I love because then I get to spend several hours afterwards smelling like her perfume.
Last year I gave a bouquet to my Neighbor Mother, Betsy. I couldn’t this time around because she died in February. She still gave me flowers, though: the pansies which she planted by her driveway last fall are still brightly in bloom. Her irises were especially beautiful this year too, as were her daffodils and columbine. Her Lenten roses began to bloom almost as soon as she left us, and one plant has blooms on it yet.
I miss Betsy.
She surprised us, at first, with her way of walking into our house without knocking. Neighbors around here used to do that, I guess. She taught us how to be neighbors, in a world that hardly has them anymore. We mowed her lawn and she gave our daughter piano lessons in exchange. Summers, we regularly trouped back and forth between her screened porch and our back patio, laden with potato salad and wine.
During baseball season, she’d invite our son over to watch our team with her on cable (which we don’t have), and the two of them would share popcorn and shout themselves hoarse.
She didn’t want to live like a sick person. She laughed raucously, kept up with a million friends, and continued to play with the symphony.
She wanted to go to a place she remembered in the mountains one last time, so a group of us took her there. She read us a letter from a friend who’d died of cancer, because the friend had the Words Betsy wanted. She took off her wig and let us kiss her cute head, and we laughed. Raucously. We didn’t know she’d only live a few weeks more.
She died at home. It worked out. We took turns staying with her that whole last week, when the night nurse wasn’t there. And I couldn’t have done that, made all those phone calls, spent all that time, if I’d had a job.
All this past year, Betsy has been very worried that I didn’t have a job. She even told me she’d find me one! I was able hold her hand as she lay on her couch and finally tell her that seemed to be working out, too.
The million friends showed up at her funeral, where YES a few of us even danced. All the viola players in town seemed to be booked with La bohème that day, but Rachel’s soaring violin was so beautiful it made us cry. And at the first symphony concert, after Betsy had died, they honored her with an empty chair.
I know it’s a few days late (she’d tease me for that, too) but Happy Mother’s Day, Betsy!
