After my mom suffered cardiac arrest, I came home to a note with some flower seeds she had sent in the mail just a few days prior: “Thought you might like to plant these,” her note read. “I usually get them around Easter time.”

Upon opening the note, the last I’d ever receive from my mom, I cried.

Never again would I be able to call her on the phone, or laugh with her, or share memories, or ask her advice. 

She was 90 years old, and as she had warned me upon her 90th birthday, “anything can happen.”

And it did.

After Dad fell in their apartment and was hospitalized, my siblings and I took turns staying with Mom and taking her to visit him each day for five weeks.

For 68 years of married life, they were inseparable. Hospitalization was not about to separate them now. Until events took an unexpected turn and Mom died on the Feast of St. Joseph. Dad followed her nine days later.

A striking contrast

It was fitting that just before their deaths, Mom sent me seeds to plant at Easter — seeds that signaled growth, new life, and resurrection.

Life goes on.

But seeds are not planted without toil. Life is not lived without struggle. Death does not come without suffering. There is no victory without sacrifice.

Having teetered for some time with my parents on the brink of eternity, my heart lies fallow amid our 
ongoing surface lives of school and work and deadlines and drudgery and relationships and laughter and disappointment.

The contrast between the spiritual life and earthly life is striking.

Only when you experience the two worlds simultaneously do you realize how much Our Lord must have wanted to pour into our unknowing souls while He was here on Earth.

Only through the Cross do we gain eternal life. Only through death do we rise again with Our Lord. Only through the breaking of human will and submitting to His Will do we learn the humility necessary to gain interior freedom with Him.

Lessons learned 

These are the seeds planted — the lessons learned on the edge of eternity at two deathbeds — that in due time may take root and flower.

Along with these lessons — these seeds — Our Lord plants seeds of love and humility and trust and a desire to please Him. With His grace, we must do what we can to encourage those seeds to grow deep in our hearts so that we can allow Him to rise within us.

“And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me. And that I live now in the flesh: I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Seeds planted 

As I plant my mom’s seeds in my garden this May, I will remember the “seeds” planted in my own heart from Mom — humility, love, child-like trust, kindness, and patience.

Plus, the “seeds” from Dad — hard work, perseverance, generosity, dedication, and using the gifts God gave you to do your best.

With the grace of God, may those seeds — from my parents as well as from Our Lord — flourish in the Earth as well as in my heart.

All in good time.

All in God’s time.