sophie anne edwards

And Then It Only Fluttered

I entered the world with one eye open, she said. Wary of the world. Not sure whether I really wanted to enter it.
I watched her eyes weeping with infection. I watched her eyes close.
By Monday, she was only awake for part of the day. She smiled every time she saw me, or when the nurse leaned toward her face, and when Emilie arrived for a visit. From time to time, very slowly, shakily, she raised her pointer finger to the corner of her eye in an attempt to wipe away the sticky gunk encrusting her eyelids. I’d painted her fingernails blue a few days before. They matched her blue-veined soft hands.
On Tuesday, her eyes only opened for a few minutes at a time. Her hands lay at her sides. Her jaw hung open, revealing the ravaged mouth, the pulpy tongue, the skin peeling away from the inside of her lips, the teeth mossy with yeast. She had first refused food and then drink, everything stinging.
On Wednesday, both eyes fluttered for a few moments when a remembered voice spoke to her.
I didn’t think of the garden then, nor of the seedlings germinating in the greenhouse under Yan’s care. I wasn’t sure what she’d planted of the seeds I’d left with her. There was no world but this one. A bed, a La-Z-y Boy chair, a small fridge, and my mother’s starving body. I have tried to tend toward life—planting, caring, helping my mother, tending to her for so many years. I hadn’t intended death, not in this close way.
Walking through the woods in the snow following Karen’s discarded clothing, finding her body curled in the cold was different. There was the life, and then suddenly there was the death. There was no preparation except the feeling that one should have been prepared. Should have seen, known, intervened.
The nurse called to say there was a hole in my mother’s back. I can see metal. Does your mother have metal in her back? The hardware bolted along her spine after the first accident crushed her back twenty years ago was eroding, the now naked bolt pressured between skin and the wheelchair, skin and bed. The hole felt like a dream entering the daytime hours, a fault line. That Mom hadn’t mentioned the pain or that her pain hadn’t been heard was a silence that couldn’t be spoken.
I thought I had been preparing. The ground had been worked.
Tomatoes can develop blossom end rot, squashes and eggplants, too. Round sunken spots darken the bottom. The fruit rots. The culprit is a lack of calcium, usually from soil deficiency, or from over- or underwatering, which makes it hard for the plant to uptake calcium from the soil. My mother’s spine, spongy from osteoporosis, was crushed when her car went off the road, down the embankment and raced over a frozen mound of road construction waste, from where she flew forty feet to land next to a swamp, the tires of the car splayed. The doors were crushed, too, like her back. A lack of calcium and the loss of estrogen results in bone not being replaced as quickly as it should. For two decades she had taken medication for Barrett’s Esophagus to reduce reflux, the medications further reducing the body’s ability to re-create bone, affecting her stomach’s ability to absorb calcium. The second car accident crushed her hip. A third accident broke her arm. I found a round piece of metal in her ashes when I divided them for me, my daughter Emilie, and my brother.
Seedlings that are too damp can develop what is called damping off—a fungus that develops around their stems and causes them to rot and die.
The rosemary plant, a Christmas gift from my friend Anong, did fine through the winter, then began drying. Small tufts of white fungus gathered at the nodes between the needles and the stem.
The yeast that colonized my mother’s body is naturally present in all our bodies. But the conditions became overly favourable, and so the yeast duplicated and travelled. They didn’t notice her mouth until it became raw and she was unable to eat. They hadn’t noticed her weakly trying to lift her hospital gown to scratch below her belly and the thin hairs of her pubic bone. Please can we have some Canesten, I asked. Can we reduce at least one irritation? They didn’t notice the pain in her belly. She had a urinary tract infection, vaginal yeast. Her eyes began to get sticky. The antibiotic drip intended to reduce the risk of infection post-surgery made her body prone to yeast. They replaced the antibiotic with a medication for yeast but after a week it still wasn’t working—too late, too much yeast, her body too weak, the yeast multiplied.
Plants infested with spider mite get sticky. The leaves roll into themselves. We could treat the UTI and the vaginal infection. She was hydrated through the IV but we couldn’t clean her mouth. It was too painful. The surgical incision along her spine was eight inches wide and four inches down, a red cross that began to become redder, inflamed, puss building behind the stitches.
A few years ago, I transplanted a climbing rose to a south-facing wall, a gorgeous peach colour with a classic heady rose scent. I made a mistake, though. I planted it in a raised box I built and lined with blue insulation. The freeze and thaw of that mild winter killed the roots of the climber, and the other two small rose bushes I’d planted alongside. Those two small roses were simple grocery-store roses, the miniatures in pinks and yellows, dark red that show up around Mother’s Day in four-inch pots with coloured plastic sleeves. Those two miniatures had blossomed into full-size roses with heavy blooms. Come spring, when I pruned them back, it was dead wood all the way down.
There’s a stillness in the body that is like a hole in the back; a dream undreaming itself, a silence that isn’t silence because it’s not just a lack of sound. It’s beyond silence, beyond stillness. Beyond.
I miss that rose. The generosity of her blooms, the grandness of them, the enlivening of the grey siding, the companionship of the blossoms sitting beside my bed. I wasn’t holding my mother’s hand when she died. I had slipped into my own deep sleep, finally, after many nights of wakefulness. And wait-fullness. I lay beside her, the palliative playlist running. I’d stayed awake through the night, counting the seconds be tween breaths, the silences increasing by increments of four until she’d reach twenty-three seconds of held breath, then she began the cycle again. Breathing for a few seconds, holding for a few seconds, then holding for seven seconds…. And again.
I read to her, a flower blooming on her face when she saw me. I lay in the narrow bed alongside her and we looked at photographs from her childhood home: Carcassonne, les calanques, the streets of Marseille, lavender fields.
Plant characteristics change depending on the type of fungus they grow with. This is such a close relationship perhaps we should call them they rather than two separate entities. Much in the same way that our own bodies are so microbial, these microbes so integral to our systems, so influential in our bodies. The medicinal qualities of plants, their antioxidant levels, aroma and flavour, and their adaptations are all affected by the type of fungus with which they cohabitate. Plants began as algae and evolved into what we call plants, and yet they are only plants by some visual cue that we seem to think is definingly independent, like our own bodies.
Lichen aren’t a thing, really, or a thing. Lichen are the symbiotic conjoining of fungi, algae, cyanobacteria. Less a conjoining than a world in process, an encounter, a long conversation in much the same way that during pregnancy there is no separation—mother is mother and baby. The baby is the mother’s blood circulating, the shared history of cells. Even later it becomes difficult to parse what of ourselves is unique from our families, to parse what of ourselves is separate from the microbes, the water, the collection of collaborations that we are.
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes that each lichen is birthed in relationship. The relationship between plants and fungus is so very close, that he argues in book Entangled Life, “What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.” Fungus is entwined with roots, too, and where plant and fungus connect, plant signals pass between them.
I am somehow the garden, and it me—neither fully functioning without the other, at least becoming our current expression through our relations. The garden is also a third entity between the “wild” and the human, between past and future. The garden is not a thing of itself, but rather all the relations between soil and seed, weather and microbes, insects and intentions. And I am my mother, too, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and my daughter is me.
All day Thursday she began breathing slowly but regularly again, seven or eight seconds apart. It was the twenty-seventh of March. They told me it could be weeks more. I didn’t know it was our last day. I lay beside her as I had been every day and every night, lifting the blankets when she sweated, recovering her when the skin was cold, her ability to regulate temperature diminishing. Alert to the most minute movement signalling pain, I whispered to her, stroked her arm, read passages aloud from La Gloire de mon père.
Plants are aware of one another and the insects and other critters that eat and otherwise interact with them. I cannot see this recognition between plants and their worlds, yet I was aware of my mother’s every minute movement and my mother was aware of me.
The birds notice me. The crows know when I am adding more food to the compost. At night I hear raccoons fiddling with the lid of the bin, which I’ve covered with a board and topped with a couple pieces of firewood to keep the dogs out. I sense the plants know me. I too have a scent that must give the plants and critters information about me. I move between the plants, rub against them all, I prune suckers, accidentally bend a stem too far, step on vines that cross the pash. Their chemicals do not work against the size of me. I’m not a small insect feeding on leaves, but a large predator. But the blistering that developed on my arms this summer from the parsnip has changed my behaviour with them. I do not have a way to measure how the leaves might taste differently day to day, week to week. I wonder if the plants look forward to my touch. My gentle touch. The way I tuck a leaf away from the electrified fence. Tuck compost around the base of the flowering squashes.
I called my brother. Told him she needed to hear his voice, for him to say he would be fine. We would all be fine and that she could go. I sent my daughter to the liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. We drank small sips from small glasses and each time a friend or beloved visited or called to say goodbye, I wiped a drop across her lips.
The scent of tomatoes is strong on my hands when I prune and gather. This scent must have a function. I sometimes wish I had followed my interest in plant biology, the only science class in high school that turned me on. I loved learning about the plants and creating plant identification drawings. I am not a scientist but I have my imagination. Science is fascinating and important—it proves what we guess at. It gives the rationale for love, for protection. It leads to understanding the functions, the mechanisms that can help us help the plants, to understanding their medicines and gifts. Long observation does this, too. The layperson’s long observation, the long observation of Indigenous tribes carried forward, reaches the same place as science, but often well before.
I was fine-tuned to the scent of her. I could smell the yeast, the drying breath, the dried sweat and warmth of her skin. I should have trusted my instinct and stayed awake with her, to witness her final breath the way her mother witnessed her first one, to hold her hand as I’d been doing all week.
Some flowers grow so quickly. You think you can sit and watch them grow. Suddenly the basil needs pinching back. The true leaves have formed above the cabbage’s cotyledon. Beans race toward the sky within days. Sprouts pop up from seeds, giant sunflowers tilt their faces toward the sun just like mine, Mom would say.
I rotated my sore hips on the extended La-Z-y Boy that I had drawn up close beside her bed and fell asleep again.
The garden is always scented, but it is absorbed differently into the open sky. In the greenhouse it is distilled. In the greenhouse it feels as though I inherit green. It’s always eight degrees warmer than the temperature outside. Scent is a relationship with water molecules; the gift that is the respiration of leaves. When plants began to breathe in carbon dioxide, humans began to breathe it out. We are connected directly by breath if nothing else. I’d like to say we are a gift to the plants but the exchange is reciprocity only up to the point when we make them work over hard by pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere. This closed greenhouse, the earth.

In the room where my mother was dying, we were in a world apart, a space between the world outside and the room we inhabited, between the world toward which she was moving and the one where I would live without her.
I’ve always heard that talking to our plants is good for them, and music, too. My mother always said so. Perhaps it’s an old wives tale, but the voice is vibration, an invisible language like the volatile chemicals of plants. Certain people can make my hands clammy, my underarms sweat. It is said we can smell another’s fear. I could sense my ex-husband’s mood at the turn of a hair. I had become finely tuned to the slightest shift in tone, to the scent of him. I wanted to hear my mother’s voice again, to feel her sound my name.
On Thursday only the left eye opened. She was finishing her days as I started mine. One eye closed. But she was sure of me. A slight squeeze of my finger, the moving eye. A small sound. She was perhaps less sure of where she was going than from where she had come.
And then it only fluttered. I watched carefully to see the eye under the lid, a fish swimming below the surface.
Around midnight I put a chant on repeat, reminded of the Ravi Shankar records she and Dad played when I was a child.
I slept. Perhaps I dreamed.
The roses on the window and the opening orchid absorbed her last breath and returned it to me.

sophie anne edwards

(she/her/settler) lives, writes, and gardens on Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island). A Mouth of Vowels, an experimental novel, is out now with 1366/Guernica Editions. Her debut collection of visual and text-based poetry, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024), was a CBC “must read.” She’s just started a new letterpress company called Field Folios, working with a 1954 Heidelberg “windmill” press.