Lazarus

Recently while my husband was out of town for three weeks, I puttered around our house, doing lots of writing and reading, and tackling little household projects I’d been putting off. Because my husband is our resident chef, I also discovered just how badly I cook.

Actually, I don’t mind being alone; I remember as a little girl having my first friend sleep over. She had come over in the afternoon; we ate dinner and played games. By eight o’clock I was asking my mother when the friend could go home. My mom, alarmed, told me I had committed to an entire night with her, which was quite disconcerting to me. On the Myers-Briggs scale, I’m dead in the middle of E (extrovert) and I (introvert). While I enjoy people, I require silence and solitude built into every day.

I also love household projects I can tick off my list—and, for that matter, I love a good list. One task I wanted to accomplish was to repot a peace lily that had been given to me when my mother died. Five years old now, the peace lily had pushed its roots up to the surface of the soil—begging for a larger bed. His long stalks, though still deep green, were horizontal with the pot. He looked like roadkill in plant form. Painstakingly, I repotted him with fresh, fertilized soil. I watered him and waited patiently, but he didn’t perk up.

The next day I checked, and the soil was dry, so I watered again. And waited.

My mother always talked to her plants, and swore they responded to music, so I even played the piano for him. Each day was like Groundhog Day: He soaked up any water I gave him but continued to lie prostrate, limp and melodramatic. At this point I wondered if I should give up and set him out with the trash.

A friend suggested that I take him outside and dowse him with the hose. I watched as the water seeped throughout his pathetic roots. I brought him back inside, bid him goodnight and checked on him the next morning. His right side was standing up but not his left.

I found myself thinking of this plant throughout the day— researching what could be done. At the end of every day he greeted me from his ICU bed. Channeling my mother, I talked to him, asking him what he needed. The next two days, after I had my morning coffee, I gave him what was left in the pot. This perked him up a bit, but he still was far from healthy. In addition, he was leaking onto the floor around him. I was in a never-ending cycle: Water. Mop. Repeat.

I wrapped a shroud of towels around his pot and named him Lazarus.

Then one evening as I was turning off the lights and going to bed, I noticed the moonlight through the window bouncing against something white. Moving closer, I discovered that Lazarus had bloomed—the delicate white blossom sticking straight out, but not up. How could he be healthy enough to bloom but not to stand? Yet I took that solitary flower as a sign of hope: He was alive. Don’t give up on me, he seemed to say.

A better writer, a true philosopher, could draw some parallels between Lazarus the plant and the parts of our lives we need resurrected— those challenges to which we capitulate too quickly.  

I know I’m too quick to give in, to give up. To choose despair.

Recent events in our country threaten to take away my hope, and I feel paralyzed by the lack of answers I see. But just as the peace lily’s white flowers are a reminder of the peace that awaits beyond life’s trials—hence its stance as a traditional funeral flower—perhaps there are signs in our society that suggest we will get through all the strife, the division, the threats.

Maybe it’s watching the Fourth of July parades, hearing the boisterous voices of children in swimming pools, and seeing the pictures of weary soldiers, jawlines set, that will reignite our communal hope. Perhaps our hope comes in strolling through a wooded park, in hearing the highest notes of a church choir, or in seeing the faces of our family gathered around the dinner table. Possibly hope floats in workplace laughter and the gentle hugs of those who love us.

Could it be that, buried under the vitriol, struggling to rise through the hateful foliage, is a bloom that reminds us that the soil we’ve tilled, the dirt we’ve turned, is good and balanced? That it will survive.

Lazarus stands up a little straighter every day. He is still a work in progress.

And so are we.