by Steve Lipman (Forest Hills, NY)
$8.66.
That’s how much a single long-stemmed rose cost me in May at a florist’s shop in the Houston suburb where my mother had lived in a skilled nursing home for a few weeks. She was undergoing rehabilitation to strengthen her for a return to the assisted living facility where she had lived for more than a year.
I bought the flower on a Friday morning in May on the way to visit Mom. I was in Texas for a few weeks while my sister — a Sandwich Generation Baby Boomer who ordinarily took care of Mom’s affairs, while playing an active role in the lives of her adult daughters — was spending a week out of the country with a vacationing daughter.
I was covering for my sister, driving to visit Mom every day, besides Shabbat.
That erev Shabbos I stopped at the florist’s to keep up a long-standing tradition. When earlier visiting my folks in Buffalo (Dad was alive until 2005), and when visiting Mom since she had moved to the Houston area (she settled there the year after Dad died), I always bought her a bouquet for Shabbat. Or for yom tov, if I visited on a chag. Whether she was in her own apartment, or subsequently in assisted living.
She always appreciated the flowers.
Would she this time?
At 104, she was rapidly declining – physically, mentally and emotionally. She recently had been officially diagnosed with the onset of dementia. Though the diagnosis only confirmed the obvious.
Her energy and acuity diminishing, she often spent a day – or most of it – in bed, hardly eating, which further weakened her.
Nevertheless, I brought flowers for Shabbat. That was my mitzvah, my tradition. No one else in the family had done it on a regular basis.
Mom, while not an Orthodox Jew by any means, found the flowers a reminder of the frum home of immigrants from Eastern Europe in which she had grown up.
By the time I spent in Texas recently, it was questionable how much she remembered.
Over the years, each bouquet was different – depending on the weather or time of year, the imminence of any Jewish or secular holiday, my mood or Mom’s mood, my budget or other conditions. Different smells, different colors, different arrangements. One bouquet from a Buffalo-area supermarket one year, for a reason that neither Mom nor I understood, featured an artichoke amidst the blooms; the artichoke did not add to our aesthetic or dietary enjoyment.
Mom would happily display the flowers each time in a vase on the living room table, where she hosted a Shabbat meal for me and some family guests, or somewhere else in the room easily within sight.
At the Texas Friday in May, I had considered not getting Mom any flowers. What’s the point? Would she notice?
In the nursing home, after a recent hospitalization, she was barely conscious, hardly spoke to anyone on the staff or to visitors when she was surprisingly awake, rarely opened her eyes, would mostly mumble a few words. She might not appreciate – or recognize – flowers.
But I decided to get some, to honor Mom and to honor Shabbat.
This might be my last chance, I thought.
I drove to the florist shop on a state highway near my sister’s home.
No full bouquet this time; Mom didn’t have a vase in her room. A single flower, a reminder of Shabbos kodesh, would suffice; a wrapped flower I could leave with Mom.
What sort of flower? I had no preference. Maybe an orchid or a lily. For sure, an actual flower, not an artificial one – as a symbol of life, of hope.
A middle-aged saleswoman behind the counter, sporting a Houston Texans football team T-shirt, invited me to look around. She pointed to groups of flowers on vases scattered around the front of the store and in a refrigerator. The shop was not large, but the variety of flowers was.
“We have more in the back,” she said, directing me to a room where other employees were at work picking and snipping a rainbow’s worth of blooms. I walked into the back room and looked around. A vaseful of tall pink-and-white roses – the pink was clearly introduced by dye via capillaries into the originally white flowers — caught my eye.
That was my choice.
What woman doesn’t like a rose?
“I’ll take one of those.”
One of the workers cut the stem into about a foot’s length, added some greens and baby’s breath, connected them to a small vial of water that kept it all hydrated, covered it with some light green wrapping paper, and handed it to me.
$8.66.
A lot of money for a single flower.
I rarely depend on gematria for writing the divrei Torah that have dominated a significant chunk of my time since my full-time job ended in 2020. But one numerical equivalence seemed appropriate – one gematria of 866 is c’ahavat ha’mishpacha – “as the love of the family.”
My sentiments, exactly.
I laid the flower on the passenger’s seat of Mom’s car, and set off on the 25-minute drive to her nursing home.
In her room, Mom appeared to be asleep.
“Good morning, Mom,” I said loudly.
She didn’t stir.
I repeated my greeting.
“Huh?”
“Today is Friday, and tonight is Shabbos. I brought you a flower.”
“Good.”
“Open your eyes!”
Mom opened her eyes.
I held the modest Shabbat gift in front of her.
“Oh, beautiful.”
Then she closed her eyes again.
I put the flower across the top of a small bedside dresser, so Mom could see it if she turned her head.
At least she, and any aides who entered her room – none of them Jewish – would know that Judaism’s holy Day of Rest was making an appearance.
After a while, I took Mom, helped by an aide into her wheelchair, outside for a while for some fresh air. Then it was lunch time. An aide in the dining hall would feed Mom her meal.
I wished Mom a “Good Shabbos!” and kissed the top of her head, took a final long look at her, and headed back to my sister’s house.
It was the last flower I bought for Mom for Shabbat.
Since the first week in August, three months after I brought the flower, Mom has rested in Houston’s National Cemetery, in a plot where Jewish mesora dictates that flowers are not appropriate.
$8.66 was a good investment.
I thought: $8.66 is expensive for one flower. But it’s a cheap price for a memory.
____
Steve Lipman was a staff writer for The New York Jewish Week from 1983 until 2020.
The Jewish Writing Project 