Roses are fleeting

Beauty in an unexpected place
Montreal, QC
February 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The scene: Saturday, 3:04 p.m. We've just arrived at the hospital in Montreal after the long drive in from London, and the first thing I notice as we walk into my father-in-law's room is a single rose sitting in a glass in the late afternoon light on his window sill.

I ask about it, and his attendant says she believes a rabbi dropped it off the night before, just before the Jewish Sabbath began. He was always quite observant, almost never missing a service, and I smile at the prospect of a rabbi from the broader community taking the time to see him. To the outside world it may not seem like much, a stranger dropping in for a visit. But to us the gesture is monumental.

I mention it to him as I kiss his forehead, but there isn't much response. I doubt he's seen the rose, much less processed what it is or what it means. This is where we are now, in a place where it's hard to tell where he is, what he's thinking, what he's processing.

For a man who as a teenager singlehandedly raised his younger brothers after his father left, who doggedly became an accountant and was the sole breadwinner for his family, who has represented our family's gravity to me from the first time I met him at his front door decades earlier, it's difficult to watch, much less accept. I want to believe he's in there, somewhere, but I can't tell. No one can.

So I shoot the picture. Because later on, I'll show it to him, my phone or my laptop serving as a prop of sorts, a window into pictures that I don't know he recognizes anymore, but I still want to show him.

Because if seeing something as insubstantial as a photo of a rose holds the remote possibility of triggering some kind of response, some kind of memory, then I owe it to him to at least try.

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