Burgers and Butterflies

Burgers and Butterflies

"I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day." 
~ F. Frankfort Moore

The doctors had recommended “a facility” but Mom and I had other plans for her last few months. With her doctors’ concurrence, she rejected aggressive cancer treatments with, “I’ve lived a long and full life and I want to live while I’m here. I’d rather go home to my flowers, birds and butterflies.” I joined her in that wish, tough decision though it was, and moved in to stay with her, to read poetry and drink tea in her garden, rejecting hospice for a while.

For decades, Mom’s “garden of love” had been a place that nourished her soul as she nurtured it, a place where she turned in times of loss, anger, fear, joy, and gratitude. There she would bury her frustration or feed her exultation, pulling weeds and planting seeds… sculpting her yard.

A delightful young woman stayed with Mom while I finished teaching my university classes. During the late spring, I cooked on the grill and we dined at her old picnic table amid the flowers and shrubs. About once a week, though, I’d call on the way home from class. “How about I stop by Dutch’s and pick up some hamburgers?”

“And French fries,” Mom said, relishing foods with salt that she’d long ago foresworn.

Early and late in the day, we’d walk, and try to ease each other’s fears, and grieve the coming goodbye.

When I arrived, our helper would leave and Mom and I would picnic at the red cedar table in the backyard, with her dog by her feet. At first, the roses were flush. Then the sweet honey fragrance from the arbor of Carolina jasmine shouted over the burgers and fries. In that quiet spot, we ate and laughed as we remembered our years together in many flowerbeds and lawns across Texas.

When butterflies would light on our shoulders or hair, she’d say, “Remember… a butterfly’s kiss is a kiss from God.” She’d said that as long as I could remember. That saying lingers in my heart.

The heat, mid-summer, sent us inside to air conditioning. I’d read aloud to her from a book of poetry, taking comfort from the wisdom of old souls. Her young friends and neighbors would drop by with hugs and cookies and a chat about business and politics. Mom enjoyed staying abreast of the world.

Early and late in the day, we’d walk, and try to ease each other’s fears, and grieve the coming goodbye. When her disease advanced, she’d ride in her wheelchair over her lawn, checking out what had bloomed, what needed tending to, and most often just pausing to admire. She had planted flowers, trees and shrubs so that there would be “something blooming every month that I can cut and take in the house.” And we would cut and take color into the house for this woman who had been reared in the Texas Panhandle, where the sky’s blue dome might be the only hue contrasting with the tan earth.

My classes started again in August, and we took up our routine of “want a burger... and fries?’”

As the summer heat waned, we moved back outside, to a patio those young neighbors, whom she called, “my angels,” had built. It included a wheelchair ramp. By now, Mom napped more than wandered. On one late, cool September afternoon, I strolled around her backyard. When she awakened I said, “Mom, looks like your fall flowers are up… they’re a copper red… in among your roses.”

“The asters,” she said, her eyes bright as the first star at night. A childlike glee swept her face.

“Let me take you.” I helped her into her “chariot” and rolled her to her favorite flowerbed. She strained. Her vision had deteriorated even more, from macular degeneration and perhaps “the disease process.” She followed my hand as I pointed out the flowers. “I see them. I see them. Yes. It’s them,” she said. And then, a small yellow butterfly landed on her hand, “a kiss from God,” she said, as usual.

We did not know that would be our last outing. Late that night she succumbed to the pain and the weakness and stopped going outside. Only a few more nights and days remained when she could call my name. A few days of ragged silence followed, her breathing labored, and then stilled. Within moments, as if in salute, a pair of mockingbirds flew figure eights through her front porch and patio. “She can see them now… and hear them,” a friend who had stayed with us said.

In that time between the dying and the burying, that time between so much to do and so little, I stopped for a burger and of course added the fries. When I returned home, the young woman who continued to help, departed. Mom’s rascally dog and I kept company at the red cedar picnic table.

And then a winged visitor joined us. A rust and copper butterfly, about the size of a silver dollar and unlike any I’d ever seen in Mom’s yard, fluttered around. It lit on strands of my hair, kissed my eyelids, my cheeks, my nose. It flew from ear to ear with stops on my shoulders, circling and circling, then down my arms to my hands, resting for a bit on my knuckles, then hopped to the burger. Its forefeet rubbed together like a child’s hands in anticipation. While I ate, the winged visitor nibbled my burger, then hopped to the French fries, then back to the burger, then up my hand and back to my face, then back to the burger. And the fries.

“Thanks, Mom. You’re present in a way that only you and I would know. Enjoy the burger and fries; you’ve lifted my heart.” I sat beneath her bush of bridal wreath and ate. And smiled… perhaps for the first time in days. The butterfly stayed, nibbling, and dancing between the burger, the fries, and me… a “kiss from God” she would have said. But for me, in this time between passage and memorial service, the butterfly and burger combination signaled a kiss from Mom.

Today, another year later, her house now my home, I sit beside her bridal wreath and gaze upon her roses and asters when in season, and enjoy my mother’s passion, her garden of flowers, butterflies and birds. When the cloud of grief drifts by, not as severe as those early days, I still go to her “garden of love and hope.” And while I’ve never again seen that particular species of butterfly, Mom’s spirit blossoms and my memories of her bloom in this, her place of solitude and treasure.