Now That Those Roses Are Gone by the Door

When I come home every afternoon, I step up onto the porch and see the furniture that had been in my parent's house for over sixty years. The bookcase with the glass door, the secretary desk, the cedar closet and the Currier and Ives prints that adorn the wall all remind me of a home now gone. Reminders are all over my house. Reminders that awaken memories of a life with my father and mother. A life now gone.

My father passed away over ten years ago. My mother passed away a year ago today. It was when she first suffered a stroke and I went to the hospital to see her, that I first noticed the vase of roses that sat on the wheeled table between her bed and the door of her hospital room. A gift from a young woman who used to take her shopping each week. She loved roses. Over the next two and a half years, on regular visits to the nursing home in which she spent her final days, I replaced those roses, time and time again. And every time I brought them, she smiled, cooed and reached out with the one hand not paralyzed to touch them. She enjoyed them all the way up to the day she left us. I had to write a villanelle for the writing group of which I was a member on the summer of her stroke. After the second stroke, only a few weeks after the first one, and a catastrophic one, she wasn't expected to see the fall. But she beat the odds and lived for two and a half more years until the age of 93.

At her funeral, a few days later, I read this villanelle from the pulpit as her eulogy.

Now That Those Roses Are Gone by the Door
Christopher Bogart

Now that those roses are gone by the door,
And their faded dry petals have littered the floor,
It’s the scent, not the thorns, now that matters for more.

It seems that they had such a limited tour
In their lifetime’s display in a crystalline vase,
Now that those roses are gone by the door.

Once they were beautiful, red by the score,
In your life, their long thorns were your only protection.
It’s the scent, not the thorns, now that matters for more.

Their red once rouged your cheeks in a way most adored,
Your red lips that could grin, that could grimace, just a memory,
Now that those roses are gone by the door.

‘Twas the stems of your sadness, shades of memories before,
And your fears grew those thorns that stood guard by those roses.
It’s the scent, not the thorns, now that matters for more.

We stand now where you once stood upon this sad shore,
As we watch you find fields of more peaceful kingdoms, for
Now that those roses are gone by the door,
It’s the scent, not the thorns, now that matters for more.

Ethel E. Bogart
May 21, 1916 - February 4, 2009