Journal of Sacred Work

Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.
   –The Little Prince, Antoine de St. Exupery   

   I cannot offer you an image of Saturday’s rose because she is gone. She was cut, in innocence, by my wife who didn’t know I was writing this series for you. The rose is in good hands now, off in Boston where my wife flew with her on a trip to see our children, their spouses, and our grandchild.  Our rose has performed her service for you and endures, now, on what water she sips through the straw of her cut stem.
   What is, after all, the role of a rose? From her standpoint, she has no "role" since role’s are masks humans take on. The rose can only be true to who she is – beautiful and pink and delicious across her prime, now dying in a land far from where she grew…   

    Some of you saw how she had already begun to fade by Friday, her edges
showing signs of the weathering of the week. From bud to bloom to
trimming, she has been seen and enjoyed by more
people than see most
roses. And I have loved her as I did one of her Wisconsin ancestors (left) that I photographed in black and white a quarter century ago and still gaze at each morning.
   Unconscious of her
beauty, unaware that you and I were watching her, this pink rose must wonder about her sudden departure from the ground that gave her life. I can’t imagine why I would be sad about her cutting. I’ve cut so many roses and handed them to my wife and others as gifts.
   Why would the departure of this one matter? If you don’t cut a rose and enjoy her inside your home doesn’t she just fade and fall to the ground, petal by petal, unappreciated?
   Well, it was just a rose, right? She would, like all of us, die anyway. She would, like the patients we care for, leave us one day.
   But there was something special about this rose and I will miss her. I wanted to be with her in her final days, catch her petals as they fell or retrieve them from the ground, love her as she wrinkled and withered in her sudden old age. I wanted to breathe in her scent a few more times before she fell. I wanted to comfort her in her final moments.
   The Little Prince knows how I feel. He said this about a rose to whom he had given his love: "…in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except for the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

   Beauty and love attach to whatever or whomever we love. For caregivers, it’s hard to give your heart to someone you know will be only a brief acquaintance. Yet the great caregivers always do that. That is our call: to love in the face of certain loss.

   Happy Postscript: What was lost is found. My kind-hearted and compassionate son-in-law, sensing my feeling for this rose and my distress over her accidental cutting, had an idea. On his own initiative, he just sent me this stunning picture of our elegant lady, still thriving, albeit in captivity, and this note which brings with it his sweet, light-hearted eloquence:

…and the beautiful rose ended her short but eventful life sitting next to a loaf of fresh baked banana nut bread in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What a gift. What a loving son-in-law.

-Erie Chapman