CREEK ROAD GANG
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An Abundance of Roses
Jackie Kearinscopyright 2011
My sister, Doreen, arrived at my house via UPS overnight delivery. I should say, her cremated remains arrived, nearly ten days after she had died.
Her daughter Donna and son Michael had been dealing with all of the messy details of her death in Florida, where my sister had spent her final years. Her doctor was on vacation and no one else was available (or willing) to sign her death certificate. We had to wait eight days for his signature.
Since it was understood that no one in the family had much money, we chose to have Doreen cremated. Her cremains were then placed in a beautiful green urn (her favorite color), which Donna had ordered inscribed with my sister’s name.
When Donna picked up the urn at the funeral home, she drove back to her house with the top down on her convertible, and imagined my sister complaining about needing to have her hair done after it had been blown every which way by the wind. When she called me, she laughed, and it was good to hear the humor and relief in her voice for the first time since her mother’s death.
Donna was adamant that I should receive the remains and that I should take them to Massachusetts to be buried with my parents. So that is why Doreen ended up on my front porch.
I brought my sister into my home and realized that this was the first time she was visiting here. I tried to recall if she had ever been to any place that I had lived since our family home – but could not remember one house or apartment that she had ever seen. A thirteen-year age difference and geography had not helped us to have a real sisterly relationship. Still, my heart ached, and I cried as I opened the heavy cardboard box. Inside were pink Styrofoam packing peanuts which rained down like rose petals as I fished around in the box for the urn. Once I found her, the urn I mean, I held her close to my breast and thought about what had happened in the last few weeks.
August twelfth had been her seventieth birthday. I didn’t want to give her anything ordinary. I wanted to give her seventy roses. Of course, seventy roses would be really expensive, so I ordered silk flowers and a large vase and made a huge arrangement of pink, red and white roses for her. Seventy in all, plus one to grow on… When I spoke to her on her birthday, she had received them and was very pleased. I know this because she said, “There are a shit load of roses in this vase! Christ, I’m old!” Which was a good remark, coming from her.
Only a short month later, she would take a new medication, that made her dizzy, and caused her to fall and break her knee. Her son, my nephew, Michael called to tell me that she was going to be kept in the hospital for a few days. When I spoke to Doreen, I asked if she would need surgery to repair the break and she was very vague and said she didn’t know. They did a CAT scan, an MRI and a biopsy on her knee. I asked her why she had taken the new medication, and she said she had been having tremors from the lupus that had been diagnosed twenty years earlier. That made sense at the time, as she had a very bad form of lupus that had attacked her internal organs and was only diagnosed after she had a seizure that sent her to the hospital. Since then, her lungs had been affected and now her nervous system again.
I continued to call Doreen, Mike and my niece Donna, who soon told me the doctors couldn’t safely perform surgery on Doreen’s knee because of her breathing problems. She had been on a large volume of oxygen for three years. They simply put a cast on her leg and sent her home. The next weekend, Michael called to say that she was back in the hospital with congestive heart failure, but that once that condition was relieved, she had agreed to go to a Rehab facility to be better cared for and to help her knee.
The next Monday morning, September 27, Donna called to tell me that Doreen was not going to Rehab, but instead was going to a hospice, as there was nothing they could do for her. Later that day, the kids said that the doctor had told them that morning that she was “full of cancer” which had apparently metastasized after she had had a cancerous kidney removed nearly ten years earlier. I was full of fear, and yet I was angry too. How in hell could someone have cancer in 2010 and not know they had it? I made immediate plans to fly down to Florida to see her.
That same day, the hospital transferred her by ambulance to the hospice at 4:30 p.m., and by 9:30, she was dead. She died on September 27, which was the same exact date that her beloved husband and father of her children, had died thirty-two years before. I suddenly remembered her and Bill, leaving our house when I was a teenager, their six kids piling into their station wagon. My mother would wave to them and say to me, “Doreen and Bill are like kids themselves, just happy-go lucky.”
She made it sound like a bad thing, but I knew that they were in love.
It seemed somehow appropriate that she died on the same date as he.
I realized that I was on my knees on the floor, crying, rocking the urn, surrounded by pink, Styrofoam, rose petals. I was still angry, but mostly sad and I felt very much alone. Orphaned. In my grief, I felt certain that I would end my days totally alone.
My husband Steve and I left the next day to take my sister up to Massachusetts for the funeral. Doreen sat on the floor behind me as I drove, while our two cats snoozed in a tranquilized fog in their cat carrier above her. Each time we entered a new state, I called out “Welcome to New Jersey… New York…. Connecticut”… and so on, as I had always done for our kids on our way to Cape Cod in the summers.
“Who are you calling out the states for?” Steve asked.
“The cats,” I lied. I was really calling them out for Doreen.
Steve and I settled into the Cape Cod cottage that his family owns. On Saturday morning, October ninth, we drove, with my sister’s remains, up to my hometown of Burlington, Massachusetts. It was a clear, crisp, perfect autumn New England day. We arrived at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, where we would have a graveside service for my sister. Doreen’s four New England, children joined us at our family plot and were joined by other friends and family.
I hadn’t seen my niece and nephews in some time and was surprised to see Billy and Mark’s grey hair, and how frail my niece, Diane, looked, since she had been battling lupus herself. My nephew John looked so much like my father that I gasped. I had asked the “kids” to bring flowers for the grave and they had dozens of roses – yellow, white, pink and red – more roses for Doreen, not a daisy in sight.
I had planned to give the eulogy but trouble was that I had not been able to think of anything to say. I rested a book on my parents’ black marble gravestone.
“Thank you all for coming,” I began. “Would anyone like to speak, today?” “Please, God,” I prayed, “let someone who knew Doreen better than I step up.” No one did.
I gulped and began with something like, “Doreen and I were thirteen years apart so I didn’t really get to know her as my sister. I mean, I remember being the little sister, getting into her make-up and ruining her 45 rpm records, but I’m actually closer in age, seven years, to my oldest niece, Diane, and Doreen’s children and I sort of grew up together.”
I ended with, “Doreen and I may not have been as close as sisters, but I like to think that we were, at least, friends.”
I read the 23rd Psalm and a poem by Sara Teasdale, changing the words somewhat to make them more personal for Doreen.
“The title of the poem is Peace.” I read my amended version:
Her daughter Donna and son Michael had been dealing with all of the messy details of her death in Florida, where my sister had spent her final years. Her doctor was on vacation and no one else was available (or willing) to sign her death certificate. We had to wait eight days for his signature.
Since it was understood that no one in the family had much money, we chose to have Doreen cremated. Her cremains were then placed in a beautiful green urn (her favorite color), which Donna had ordered inscribed with my sister’s name.
When Donna picked up the urn at the funeral home, she drove back to her house with the top down on her convertible, and imagined my sister complaining about needing to have her hair done after it had been blown every which way by the wind. When she called me, she laughed, and it was good to hear the humor and relief in her voice for the first time since her mother’s death.
Donna was adamant that I should receive the remains and that I should take them to Massachusetts to be buried with my parents. So that is why Doreen ended up on my front porch.
I brought my sister into my home and realized that this was the first time she was visiting here. I tried to recall if she had ever been to any place that I had lived since our family home – but could not remember one house or apartment that she had ever seen. A thirteen-year age difference and geography had not helped us to have a real sisterly relationship. Still, my heart ached, and I cried as I opened the heavy cardboard box. Inside were pink Styrofoam packing peanuts which rained down like rose petals as I fished around in the box for the urn. Once I found her, the urn I mean, I held her close to my breast and thought about what had happened in the last few weeks.
August twelfth had been her seventieth birthday. I didn’t want to give her anything ordinary. I wanted to give her seventy roses. Of course, seventy roses would be really expensive, so I ordered silk flowers and a large vase and made a huge arrangement of pink, red and white roses for her. Seventy in all, plus one to grow on… When I spoke to her on her birthday, she had received them and was very pleased. I know this because she said, “There are a shit load of roses in this vase! Christ, I’m old!” Which was a good remark, coming from her.
Only a short month later, she would take a new medication, that made her dizzy, and caused her to fall and break her knee. Her son, my nephew, Michael called to tell me that she was going to be kept in the hospital for a few days. When I spoke to Doreen, I asked if she would need surgery to repair the break and she was very vague and said she didn’t know. They did a CAT scan, an MRI and a biopsy on her knee. I asked her why she had taken the new medication, and she said she had been having tremors from the lupus that had been diagnosed twenty years earlier. That made sense at the time, as she had a very bad form of lupus that had attacked her internal organs and was only diagnosed after she had a seizure that sent her to the hospital. Since then, her lungs had been affected and now her nervous system again.
I continued to call Doreen, Mike and my niece Donna, who soon told me the doctors couldn’t safely perform surgery on Doreen’s knee because of her breathing problems. She had been on a large volume of oxygen for three years. They simply put a cast on her leg and sent her home. The next weekend, Michael called to say that she was back in the hospital with congestive heart failure, but that once that condition was relieved, she had agreed to go to a Rehab facility to be better cared for and to help her knee.
The next Monday morning, September 27, Donna called to tell me that Doreen was not going to Rehab, but instead was going to a hospice, as there was nothing they could do for her. Later that day, the kids said that the doctor had told them that morning that she was “full of cancer” which had apparently metastasized after she had had a cancerous kidney removed nearly ten years earlier. I was full of fear, and yet I was angry too. How in hell could someone have cancer in 2010 and not know they had it? I made immediate plans to fly down to Florida to see her.
That same day, the hospital transferred her by ambulance to the hospice at 4:30 p.m., and by 9:30, she was dead. She died on September 27, which was the same exact date that her beloved husband and father of her children, had died thirty-two years before. I suddenly remembered her and Bill, leaving our house when I was a teenager, their six kids piling into their station wagon. My mother would wave to them and say to me, “Doreen and Bill are like kids themselves, just happy-go lucky.”
She made it sound like a bad thing, but I knew that they were in love.
It seemed somehow appropriate that she died on the same date as he.
I realized that I was on my knees on the floor, crying, rocking the urn, surrounded by pink, Styrofoam, rose petals. I was still angry, but mostly sad and I felt very much alone. Orphaned. In my grief, I felt certain that I would end my days totally alone.
My husband Steve and I left the next day to take my sister up to Massachusetts for the funeral. Doreen sat on the floor behind me as I drove, while our two cats snoozed in a tranquilized fog in their cat carrier above her. Each time we entered a new state, I called out “Welcome to New Jersey… New York…. Connecticut”… and so on, as I had always done for our kids on our way to Cape Cod in the summers.
“Who are you calling out the states for?” Steve asked.
“The cats,” I lied. I was really calling them out for Doreen.
Steve and I settled into the Cape Cod cottage that his family owns. On Saturday morning, October ninth, we drove, with my sister’s remains, up to my hometown of Burlington, Massachusetts. It was a clear, crisp, perfect autumn New England day. We arrived at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, where we would have a graveside service for my sister. Doreen’s four New England, children joined us at our family plot and were joined by other friends and family.
I hadn’t seen my niece and nephews in some time and was surprised to see Billy and Mark’s grey hair, and how frail my niece, Diane, looked, since she had been battling lupus herself. My nephew John looked so much like my father that I gasped. I had asked the “kids” to bring flowers for the grave and they had dozens of roses – yellow, white, pink and red – more roses for Doreen, not a daisy in sight.
I had planned to give the eulogy but trouble was that I had not been able to think of anything to say. I rested a book on my parents’ black marble gravestone.
“Thank you all for coming,” I began. “Would anyone like to speak, today?” “Please, God,” I prayed, “let someone who knew Doreen better than I step up.” No one did.
I gulped and began with something like, “Doreen and I were thirteen years apart so I didn’t really get to know her as my sister. I mean, I remember being the little sister, getting into her make-up and ruining her 45 rpm records, but I’m actually closer in age, seven years, to my oldest niece, Diane, and Doreen’s children and I sort of grew up together.”
I ended with, “Doreen and I may not have been as close as sisters, but I like to think that we were, at least, friends.”
I read the 23rd Psalm and a poem by Sara Teasdale, changing the words somewhat to make them more personal for Doreen.
“The title of the poem is Peace.” I read my amended version:
“Peace flows into her
As the tide to the pool by the shore;
It is hers forevermore.
It will not ebb like the sea.
She is the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky;
Her hopes were heaven-high
And are fulfilled in you, God.
She is the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies –
She is our deepening skies;
Give her your stars to hold.”
My niece Diane offered the Lord’s Prayer for her mother, and we were done.
Diane came over to me. “I remember you used to take us everywhere, Auntie Jackie,” she said, hugging me. “We did grow up together.”
As we left the grave, the funeral director called me back.
“Don’t you want to take some of these flowers to remember her by?” she asked.
“No, I don’t, thank you,” I replied, remembering that each time I picked up a poetry book or my bible, crumbled petals and leaves, from God knows whose funeral, would always fall out.
“But they’re such lovely roses,” she persisted.
“Okay, I’ll take some,” I said and pulled out two pink ones to keep.
Steve and I had lunch with my niece and nephews, and only then did the memories of my sister and my family begin to flood back to me. I recalled the many telephone chats that Doreen and I had shared. Okay, so maybe they weren’t exciting conversations and usually went something like, “How are the kids?”
“Fine, yours?”
“Who’s home for Thanksgiving?”
“Did you cook a whole turkey or just the breast?”
“Did you make the stuffing from scratch?”
Maybe, we really had been like sisters, after all.
Doreen was there at the table with us, in Diane’s laugh, Billy’s good nature, John’s sarcasm and bravado and Mark’s quiet yet frank approach to conversation. I remembered the times that we had spent at the beach, or playing in the yard, or at amusement parks together. The kid’s jostled my memory by recalling things that I had said or done – and how I was their “babysitter” as soon as I became old enough. I recalled how Doreen would treat me like her own kids, making the same remark if I stumbled and fell.
“Did you have a nice trip?” she’d ask.
Or if we, in our youth and innocence stated something that was obvious to her, she’d say,
“No shit, Sherlock!”
My memories began to unravel, and in creating space for them inside of me, my anger began to dissolve. Maybe Doreen really didn’t know that she had cancer. And maybe, just maybe, these people, my nieces and nephews, whose love warmed me and whose memories swirled around me like rose petals in the wind- would save me from being alone at the end of my life, too. I felt blessed, having lost Doreen’s love, only to have found theirs again.
Steve and I went back to Cape Cod and stayed for ten days. In the silence of the seaside autumn, we watched the leaves turn red and yellow, and I began the slow healing process. With one exception, now I was angry with myself, because I had only taken two roses from Doreen’s grave, and I wanted to send those to Donna and Michael, since they had not been able to attend the funeral. That would leave no flowers for me.
One day, I went down to the beach on my own. Grey clouds filled the sky. For the first time ever, I saw adorable little sea gull chicks and wondered why I had never noticed them before. They must be born in the autumn, I guessed, so that they would have time to learn all of the necessities of life, like how to fish and how to steal potato chip bags right off a beach blanket.
It’s always breezy on Nantucket Sound, and my hair whipped around like crazy. I thought about what my niece had said about my sister’s urn in the convertible and how Doreen would have immediately wanted to get her hair done. I started to cry. Finally, long sobbing tears came and would not stop until the sun started going down. Rain began to sprinkle on my face.
On my way back to the car I saw one lonely beach rose still in bloom. I decided that I would solve the “flower dilemma” by sending the graveside roses to Donna and Mike, and by picking this one to go into the poetry book that I had read at my sister’s funeral.
I began to pull at the flower and yelled, “Owwww – I forgot that these roses are covered with thorns!”
And I could swear that I heard Doreen’s voice on the wind:
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Diane came over to me. “I remember you used to take us everywhere, Auntie Jackie,” she said, hugging me. “We did grow up together.”
As we left the grave, the funeral director called me back.
“Don’t you want to take some of these flowers to remember her by?” she asked.
“No, I don’t, thank you,” I replied, remembering that each time I picked up a poetry book or my bible, crumbled petals and leaves, from God knows whose funeral, would always fall out.
“But they’re such lovely roses,” she persisted.
“Okay, I’ll take some,” I said and pulled out two pink ones to keep.
Steve and I had lunch with my niece and nephews, and only then did the memories of my sister and my family begin to flood back to me. I recalled the many telephone chats that Doreen and I had shared. Okay, so maybe they weren’t exciting conversations and usually went something like, “How are the kids?”
“Fine, yours?”
“Who’s home for Thanksgiving?”
“Did you cook a whole turkey or just the breast?”
“Did you make the stuffing from scratch?”
Maybe, we really had been like sisters, after all.
Doreen was there at the table with us, in Diane’s laugh, Billy’s good nature, John’s sarcasm and bravado and Mark’s quiet yet frank approach to conversation. I remembered the times that we had spent at the beach, or playing in the yard, or at amusement parks together. The kid’s jostled my memory by recalling things that I had said or done – and how I was their “babysitter” as soon as I became old enough. I recalled how Doreen would treat me like her own kids, making the same remark if I stumbled and fell.
“Did you have a nice trip?” she’d ask.
Or if we, in our youth and innocence stated something that was obvious to her, she’d say,
“No shit, Sherlock!”
My memories began to unravel, and in creating space for them inside of me, my anger began to dissolve. Maybe Doreen really didn’t know that she had cancer. And maybe, just maybe, these people, my nieces and nephews, whose love warmed me and whose memories swirled around me like rose petals in the wind- would save me from being alone at the end of my life, too. I felt blessed, having lost Doreen’s love, only to have found theirs again.
Steve and I went back to Cape Cod and stayed for ten days. In the silence of the seaside autumn, we watched the leaves turn red and yellow, and I began the slow healing process. With one exception, now I was angry with myself, because I had only taken two roses from Doreen’s grave, and I wanted to send those to Donna and Michael, since they had not been able to attend the funeral. That would leave no flowers for me.
One day, I went down to the beach on my own. Grey clouds filled the sky. For the first time ever, I saw adorable little sea gull chicks and wondered why I had never noticed them before. They must be born in the autumn, I guessed, so that they would have time to learn all of the necessities of life, like how to fish and how to steal potato chip bags right off a beach blanket.
It’s always breezy on Nantucket Sound, and my hair whipped around like crazy. I thought about what my niece had said about my sister’s urn in the convertible and how Doreen would have immediately wanted to get her hair done. I started to cry. Finally, long sobbing tears came and would not stop until the sun started going down. Rain began to sprinkle on my face.
On my way back to the car I saw one lonely beach rose still in bloom. I decided that I would solve the “flower dilemma” by sending the graveside roses to Donna and Mike, and by picking this one to go into the poetry book that I had read at my sister’s funeral.
I began to pull at the flower and yelled, “Owwww – I forgot that these roses are covered with thorns!”
And I could swear that I heard Doreen’s voice on the wind:
“No shit, Sherlock.”
* * *
Biographical Note: Jackie Kearins
was born and raised in Massachusetts. She studied Medical
Assisting in college and has worked in doctor’s offices, clinical
hospital and basic research laboratories ever since. In 2005, Jackie
left her profession to become a full-time homemaker. She began taking
an autobiographical writing class in January 2009. She lives in the
Philadelphia suburbs with her husband, three children and two cats. See Author Index Prose A-K for more of Jackie's stories.
