In memory of Aunt Joan Feb. 10, 1955 - Oct. 4, 2026
by Tracie Adams
Our bodies, tense and tender, clothed in blood-red earth-churned colors of your fall garden.
Our faces, streaked with tears we’ve wiped away on the car ride here, lifted like chrysanthemums, reaching for thinning light.
Our smiles, stretched like lilting lilies, wired upright in an arrangement that’s beautiful from a distance.
Our throats, constricted in anguish, lumps lodged like meatballs, apologies we never said now dormant as perennials waiting for a spring that will never come, but as we pass your name around among the uneaten scones and pasta, we’ll remember your laugh and we’ll be blooms forced open out of season.
Our fingers, clutching fistfuls of tissues and regrets, will unfurl like fronds of ferns at the first mention of your name, stories of younger you will revive us, you at concerts—The Clash, The Go-Go’s. She was so punk rock, so New Wave, so funny!
Our eyes, wide and glassy, looking at pictures of you. That dress. Those boots. Christmas. Holding a newborn. Our laughter will sprout like weeds quickly out of control, watching you on the screen, mouth wide open, dancing the pony, but when we see that one where you look right into the camera, it will be too much and we’ll close our eyes and there you’ll be in our memories offering handfuls of seeds and cuttings from your garden so life can go on.
Our arms, like invasive vines reaching across aisles, between chairs. Clinging. We’ll make promises to stay in touch. She’d want that, we’ll say, with side hugs and awkward eye contact, while we rummage for car keys, and we’ll mean it, we really will, and we’ll pluck a single bloom from the arrangement, pressing it in a Bible or tucking it behind an ear, because no one will want to walk away without a piece of you.
Our shoulders, sagging with parchment-thin composure that will split like seedpods on the drive home, windows down, while we scream-sing ‘Can’t Stop the World,’ and when the October sky turns from powder-blue to lavender to mauve, we’ll turn up the music and think of your asters and sedum and cling to the hope that at least they’re holding up against the October chill.
Our ears, tuned to buzzing phones on the front seat with “so sorry for your loss.” We’ll drive and sing and cry and scream and wish for something more, for anything else but this, and when the guitar solo reminds us of you in those cat-eye sunglasses, wrapped in ribbons of sunlight and golden petals, we’ll think you’re trying to pierce the veil, trying to say Hey, look at these autumn colors! Look at the dancing leaves!
But we won’t be ready. Not yet.
Tracie Adams, author of Our Lives in Pieces and Not Finished Yet (2025 BookLife Prize Finalist), has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of Net, and Best Microfiction. Her work is in Pithead Chapel, Bulb Region, Reckon Review, Fictive Dream, Hippocampus, Cleaver, and more.
