Houseplants

I’d like to say that I had a ritual for watering my houseplants-but I didn’t. Somehow, they managed to survive.

 
I watered them often, but not with the timely fervor that my father had watered them. It was his daily ritual, merged seamlessly into his life. At 6am, my father would get up, go to the veranda, water the luscious balfourianas, make a cup of coffee and recline in his cane chair as he welcomed the crisp morning air. The BBC Focus on Africa program playing on his radio would echo through the rooms, rousing the rest of the house.

I don’t think those plants needed to be watered every single day. However, my father must’ve felt a sense of duty towards them. He lovingly watered them like he believed that if he skipped a day-they would wither and die.

On the night he died, I moved around in a state of numbness, in uttermost shock that someone who had always there-suddenly wasn’t. The whole thing happened in twenty minutes. He woke up groaning in pain, calling for my mother, who was in the next room. First, he wanted tea, then he wanted some cold water, then he wanted the windows open, and then he wanted them closed. We decided to get him to the hospital as quickly as he could. He died before we left the house. Cause of death-congestive heart failure. There was shock, then the first tears, and after that, there was no time to grieve.

Suddenly, there were people all around, many people, everyone was talking at the same time, we were pulled here and there, we had to answer questions, we had to explain what happened repeatedly, till it became real to us each time we said it.

In the days that followed, the plants were momentarily forgotten. My mother and I were bewildered by loss and occupied with funeral arrangements. We had to coordinate with his church to set a funeral date, deal with the needs of mourners whose attempts to comfort often felt like a burden to us.

It was my mother who reminded me that the plants needed care. We couldn’t control the inevitability of my father’s death, but we could control whether the houseplants died! 

So, I started to water them and continue my father’s ritual. Sometimes, I watered them right after I came home from work. On other days, I forgot. Then I would overcompensate the next day by giving the plants a double dose of water, praying they would forgive me for forgetting, and live. Some of the plants got sick at the root and died, some went to the brink of death, and somehow survived. To save the rest, a cousin suggested we use rice water. The plants sprouted again.

The next year, we went to visit my father’s grave, and my mother took some flowers from the plants to place on the tombstone. I hope his spirit realized that was our way of trying to reach him, hold him close-a promise to always remember.

We have some more houseplants now, more monsteras and aloe vera, some bird’s eye paradise, and snake plants. We’ve assembled the old next to the new and repainted the pots. New arrangements blending with memories. Life goes on. It must.