The lobelia is dying. Its tiny bluish-purple
blossoms curling inward as though they are
giving up, the stems slack, lifeless. It seems
depressed.

She would ask if there is anything
she could do—but it’s a plant—and she doesn’t
speak the language of plants.

She bends down, takes the lax stems in her
hand and holds them the way she holds the hand
of the elderly woman she cares for when they
have run out of words left to share.

She’s new to this. She has not been fully
responsible for another living thing in many years.

There was once her dogs that she finally had to
surrender that time when she was in California
and wasn’t sure whether she was going to admit
herself into a psychiatric hospital or take a last walk
half-way across the San Lorenzo Bridge.

And there were her sons, whom she left behind on
two occasions because she was going mad in
Massachusetts. When the pressure had grown
too great and her resources too thin, she fled to
California to get away from it all—and both times
discovered she’d brought all her problems with her.

The last time was her Road to Damascus. She
found the dharma at a local meditation center and
brought it back with her. Minus a few difficult hurdles,
she has been equanimous ever since.

She looks at this once resplendent lobelia drooping over
the side of the planter on her deck next to the pansies, so full
of themselves, and the indifferent alyssum, and she wonders
if she can help it live. Or—if not—can she help it die?