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Where the Wild Roses Grow · Relatively Stable

0:06
SPEAKER_00: Where the wild roses grow.
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SPEAKER_00: In remembrance of a woman who mothered a whole generation of strays.
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Recently,
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I attended the funeral of my dear friend's mother,
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Brenda Boozer.
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SPEAKER_00: My friend Todd is more than a friend.
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SPEAKER_00: He's soul family, and Brenda was too.
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SPEAKER_00: Another member of my soul family,
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SPEAKER_00: Tamar Reno,
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SPEAKER_00: helps me search for better language for many things,
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SPEAKER_00: most recently the word tribe.
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Tamar is indigenous and often reminds me that language carries
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responsibility,
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SPEAKER_00: that we can name a feeling without borrowing what isn't ours.
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She helps me know that it's worth searching for words that
0:55
don't break into a house
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SPEAKER_00: just to steal a gift for another neighbor.
1:00
The word tribe denotes deep relation,
1:03
daily care,
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and generational reciprocity.
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But most of us caught in the modern pulse of individualism only
1:12
show up for each
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SPEAKER_00: other in times of crisis and loss.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm one of those people.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm often too busy to check in until the world stops.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: At Brenda's funeral,
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SPEAKER_00: I had just settled into the pew when her daughter in law,
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SPEAKER_00: Jean Marie,
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SPEAKER_00: asked if I'd be willing to deliver the eulogy.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: The person originally scheduled hadn't arrived yet.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Two things crossed my mind at once.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: What an incredible honor to be asked.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: And how could I possibly do Brenda's life justice in notes?
1:49
SPEAKER_00: I started furiously typing fragments into my phone.
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SPEAKER_00: Mentor,
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SPEAKER_00: second mom,
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SPEAKER_00: lost daughter in a car accident,
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SPEAKER_00: loved fiercely despite and because of her grief.
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But there wasn't enough time to condense my interactions with
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Brenda into a brief
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SPEAKER_00: semblance of meaning.
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SPEAKER_00: I needed some time to do her life justice.
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Luckily,
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the brilliant woman who'd been asked to speak found the church
2:15
just in time.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: The service began,
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SPEAKER_00: but my mind kept listing details,
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and the writing kept on in my head as the music and
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remembrances during the service
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SPEAKER_00: moved me.
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It's rare to attend a service in the American South that
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doesn't feel like a sales pitch.
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Brenda's was orchestrated with truth and kindness and a depth
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of feeling that left
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SPEAKER_00: me buzzing with the beauty of what life can be.
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SPEAKER_00: What it is, despite the pain.
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SPEAKER_00: So I decided to write that eulogy anyway and put it here instead.
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SPEAKER_00: Before I met Brenda,
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SPEAKER_00: I knew her by her car,
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SPEAKER_00: a sexy little RX-7 that her son,
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Leland Todd Boozer,
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drove the first night I ever snuck out of my father's house to
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go to a party.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: My date that night was Jennifer Walker,
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SPEAKER_00: my eternal Scorpio sister,
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SPEAKER_00: my best woman at my wedding,
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SPEAKER_00: and most recently,
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SPEAKER_00: the defiant figure standing her ground in an Atlanta Tesla protest.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: The night of the party was filled with firsts for me.
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SPEAKER_00: Vodka shots, freedom, drinking games, and more freedom.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Did I mention that part?
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere in the blur, Jennifer got sick.
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SPEAKER_00: I was 13,
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SPEAKER_00: just a few weeks into public high school,
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SPEAKER_00: after a childhood in fundamentalist Christian school.
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SPEAKER_00: Resourceful,
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SPEAKER_00: but very much in over my head,
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I didn't know how to get us both home without anyone finding
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out that we were
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SPEAKER_00: missing.
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SPEAKER_00: Todd came to my rescue in his mom's fancy car,
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SPEAKER_00: and by the time he dropped me off in my driveway,
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SPEAKER_00: we were forever friends.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Not long after,
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SPEAKER_00: I was arrested,
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SPEAKER_00: a situation that was less for what I'd done and more for who I was with.
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SPEAKER_00: No, it wasn't Todd.
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My father,
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devastated,
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picked me up from the police station with tears in his eyes.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: I was sentenced to solitary confinement in my own house.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: But once again, Todd came to the rescue, still in Brenda's car.
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SPEAKER_00: He was my lifeline, a safety net, my big brother.
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SPEAKER_00: Todd introduced me to music,
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SPEAKER_00: a giant world of music,
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SPEAKER_00: tones that form the soundtracks of my stories and dreams.
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SPEAKER_00: He gave me music to write by, like a gifted composer scoring the scenes.
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Todd made me believe that anything I dreamed could be created
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with music and with words.
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SPEAKER_00: And through him, I met Brenda.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: When I finally had my license and some freedom,
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I began stopping by the Boozer house between mornings at my
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high school and my
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SPEAKER_00: writing class at the Fine Arts Center.
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda wasn't always home,
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SPEAKER_00: but I came to know her through the space she created,
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SPEAKER_00: her carpet and framed photos and cats.
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SPEAKER_00: The house she and Don built smelled like home.
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SPEAKER_00: It was home, the kind of home you carry in your body forever.
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The tree-drenched road that led to art school passed through
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Brenda's world.
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SPEAKER_00: That road still feels like part of her.
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SPEAKER_00: I was always welcomed, never judged, never turned away.
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Those truths are all a human needs to feel like they're part of
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a community,
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SPEAKER_00: part of a soul family,
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SPEAKER_00: filled with people we've chosen and have chosen us back.
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It's those kinds of threads that make me feel like we've known
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each other before we
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SPEAKER_00: came down to this earth.
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SPEAKER_00: I went away to college, but not far.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: In the winter of my freshman year,
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SPEAKER_00: Tara Boozer,
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SPEAKER_00: Todd's sister and Brenda and Don's youngest daughter,
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was in a car accident driving home from a ceremony honoring her
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work as a visual
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SPEAKER_00: artist.
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Without social media or any organized network for distributing
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information,
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SPEAKER_00: word spread by phone call.
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SPEAKER_00: The hospital filled with family,
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SPEAKER_00: classmates,
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SPEAKER_00: neighbors,
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SPEAKER_00: and friends of friends who had been folded into Don and Brenda's world.
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SPEAKER_00: It became a vigil for Tara's life.
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SPEAKER_00: When we learned that Tara would not survive,
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SPEAKER_00: that vigil became something else,
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a vigil for her soul and a mission that Brenda would carry on
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for more than 30
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SPEAKER_00: years until she was reunited with her daughter on the other side.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: I still remember slipping into the hospital chapel after Tara's passing.
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SPEAKER_00: I had grown up in churches,
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but it was there in the rawness of communal grief that I first
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understood what
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SPEAKER_00: prayer was,
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SPEAKER_00: how it reaches beyond us,
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SPEAKER_00: how it holds us in place.
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SPEAKER_00: and how it does this despite my deeply fundamentalist upbringing,
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SPEAKER_00: not through performance or doctrine,
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SPEAKER_00: but by presence and love,
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SPEAKER_00: reaching out past the edge of what we can understand.
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SPEAKER_00: The prayer I uttered that day was the opposite of fire and brimstone.
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It was a prayer of love,
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and one that would see me through so much that followed.
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SPEAKER_00: As I was writing this, I asked Christopher how long that vigil lasted.
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SPEAKER_00: I couldn't remember.
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SPEAKER_00: In my mind, it was both a blink and an eternity.
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SPEAKER_00: He said, a week, maybe.
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SPEAKER_00: I just remember there was hope and then despair.
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But the thing that sticks with me is that so many people didn't
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lose their faith,
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he said.
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SPEAKER_00: If anything, it got stronger because we knew where she was headed.
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SPEAKER_00: And now she's there with her mom.
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SPEAKER_00: When Tara passed the phrase, it takes a village, stop being theoretical.
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda could have shut the doors.
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SPEAKER_00: She could have turned inward.
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SPEAKER_00: She could have disappeared, but she didn't.
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SPEAKER_00: She loved harder.
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SPEAKER_00: She took in all of us,
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SPEAKER_00: the ones who loved her son and daughter,
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SPEAKER_00: the misfits and the wanderers and the artists,
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SPEAKER_00: and she made room.
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SPEAKER_00: She and Don parented us through our heartbreaks.
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SPEAKER_00: They met us where we were.
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda didn't shy away from grief.
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SPEAKER_00: She wore it like armor and an invitation.
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She taught us how to live honestly with pain and how to mother
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beyond biology and
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SPEAKER_00: how to accept the whole person,
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SPEAKER_00: not just the parts that are easy to love.
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SPEAKER_00: Not too long after Tara's passing,
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I drove the road where her accident happened to attend a
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writer's conference at the
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SPEAKER_00: same university where Tara was honored for her art.
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The South has a thing for crossroads,
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the legends that form at the intersections of two paths.
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I wrote a piece for the cover of a local paper about roadside
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memorials and the
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traditions that push us to tend and mark the spots of
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world-changing tragedy.
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tara's landmark was a fork in the road which is as symbolic as
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crossroads her
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legacy is still tended in the lives of those who loved her like
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a gothic garden
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with its old scars and stories and beauty and vines the dark
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symbols that bring us
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SPEAKER_00: back to our shared humanity
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda was a wild rose in that garden.
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I stood at the place where Tara left this world and felt her
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move through the
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SPEAKER_00: grass,
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SPEAKER_00: the wisteria,
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SPEAKER_00: the kudzu,
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SPEAKER_00: and the trees.
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SPEAKER_00: The land remembers.
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SPEAKER_00: As Flannery O'Connor,
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SPEAKER_00: the Queen of the Gothic South wrote,
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SPEAKER_00: what people don't realize is how much religion costs.
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They think faith is a big electric blanket,
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when of course it is the cross.
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SPEAKER_00: It's much harder to believe than not to believe.
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SPEAKER_00: If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this.
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SPEAKER_00: Keep an open mind.
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SPEAKER_00: Keep it open towards faith.
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SPEAKER_00: Keep wanting it.
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SPEAKER_00: Keep asking for it.
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SPEAKER_00: And leave the rest to God.
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SPEAKER_00: In the way that most value isn't recognized in the moment,
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there is medicine in writing this remembrance days after
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Brenda's funeral.
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SPEAKER_00: I need to make amends.
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SPEAKER_00: During my senior year in college,
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SPEAKER_00: I started dating Brenda's son,
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SPEAKER_00: and soon after,
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SPEAKER_00: Todd and I became engaged.
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I wore Brenda's ring on my finger,
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and she and I spent hours and hours talking.
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SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize how much I needed a mother to speak to.
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SPEAKER_00: I only see that now.
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I lived like an open wound in my 20s and I blamed everyone for
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my dissatisfaction and pain.
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Brenda took that pain and saw her own and also witnessed the
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seed in me that was
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SPEAKER_00: becoming the person I could be.
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SPEAKER_00: She saw the person that I am now.
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SPEAKER_00: As I planned to travel to Russia soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda gloried in telling me the plot of Dr.
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SPEAKER_00: Zhivago.
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SPEAKER_00: She gave me a music box that played Laura's theme.
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SPEAKER_00: I still have that music box,
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SPEAKER_00: all inlaid wood and flowers,
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SPEAKER_00: blue and smooth like the sky and the water and our dreams.
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I found an old cross in it as I wrote this piece and I put it
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around my neck.
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I hadn't lived long enough at the time to understand the
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parallel themes of Dr.
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SPEAKER_00: Zhivago and Brenda's life,
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SPEAKER_00: how she endured her own internal revolutions,
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SPEAKER_00: grief and heartbreak,
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SPEAKER_00: and yet she chose to keep showing up to love more.
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SPEAKER_00: She didn't shut down, not in the ways that mattered.
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SPEAKER_00: She mothered beyond biology,
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and that love lives on in her wide extended family of people
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who she touched.
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SPEAKER_00: She was not an easy person, but neither am I. Neither are you.
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SPEAKER_00: Neither are any of us.
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Like Laura and Dr.
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Chivago,
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Brenda survived the unimaginable and kept going.
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SPEAKER_00: Like Yuri in the story, she found poetry in the rubble.
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When I listen to Laura's theme now,
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I see how important it is to believe in love and survival.
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SPEAKER_00: I see how memory can become a sanctuary.
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SPEAKER_00: Brenda loved cats.
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When I returned from Russia,
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I adopted a little Abyssinian kitten named Ivan.
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SPEAKER_00: Not long after,
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SPEAKER_00: Todd and I were off to Ireland for a month for me to study,
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and Brenda kept Ivan for us as a blizzard slammed into the
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eastern seaboard.
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Brenda walked Ivan through the snowdrifts on her shoulder so
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his little paws wouldn't get cold.
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SPEAKER_00: The boozer house was always filled with cats.
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SPEAKER_00: It still is.
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SPEAKER_00: I asked Don if he liked cats before Brenda, and he said, absolutely not.
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SPEAKER_00: But Brenda made it clear I could be with her and her cat or hit the road.
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SPEAKER_00: He met the cat and fell in love with both.
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Don told me the cats mourned when Brenda passed and how Tara's
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cat did the same when she died.
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SPEAKER_00: I have no doubt Tara and Brenda are together in heaven now,
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SPEAKER_00: Don said,
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SPEAKER_00: unless now that they're reunited,
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SPEAKER_00: God has kicked them out for all the trouble they're causing.
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as the long procession of cars made its way from the church to
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the graveside for
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brenda's funeral i thought about how i drove the same roads
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when tara passed all
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those years ago i realized how much time had passed and how
14:03
things had changed
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SPEAKER_00: But I saw how there was still a timelessness, a time out of time.
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SPEAKER_00: In this stillness,
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the old forest and fields and wildflowers of this land witness
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our comings and
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SPEAKER_00: goings,
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SPEAKER_00: our rejections and our becomeings.
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The spirit of this land holds us,
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like Brenda's beloved flowers and gardens.
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SPEAKER_00: When someone has a familiarity with the trees and the land,
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SPEAKER_00: they know how to connect on a heart level with other humans.
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SPEAKER_00: Not on the surface,
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SPEAKER_00: we can all do that meager work,
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SPEAKER_00: but how to seek out the depths and name them.
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I'm not proud of the way I abruptly walked away from the Boozer
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family when I left
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SPEAKER_00: their son and my promises a long time ago.
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SPEAKER_00: In my leaving, Brenda lost an idea of another daughter.
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SPEAKER_00: When in truth,
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SPEAKER_00: in time,
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SPEAKER_00: the only person who could have ever filled that role is the beautiful,
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SPEAKER_00: luminous Jean Marie.
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I can only imagine how proud Brenda was to be close to Jean
15:08
Marie in the time before she passed.
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I knew that my leaving was necessary and that I had a long,
15:14
hard road to travel alone.
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SPEAKER_00: I needed to gain some understanding of myself,
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SPEAKER_00: to quit running away when things got hard,
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to figure out the meaning of love instead of the illusion of it
15:25
that kept me
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SPEAKER_00: chasing new landscapes in hopes of finding a home.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: But as we all sit together because of Brenda's passing,
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SPEAKER_00: as we reconnect and hold each other gently because of her example,
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SPEAKER_00: I can finally put into words what home means to me.
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I have home with Christopher,
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who Dawn and Brenda loved as deeply as a son.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: I have home with Todd and Jean Marie, who love each other.
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I have a home in our shared histories and forgiveness,
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how we all never gave up on each other.
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SPEAKER_00: I have home with the plants and with the forests.
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And as Brenda and Tara are reunited in that place on the other
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side of our limited
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SPEAKER_00: understanding on this earth,
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SPEAKER_00: our true home,
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I know that love is the only power that walks us through the
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hills and the fields,
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SPEAKER_00: the sunrises and the sunsets,
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SPEAKER_00: the goings and the comings.
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SPEAKER_00: And in that love, we all find our homes.
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SPEAKER_00: Deepest peace to you, Brenda.
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SPEAKER_00: Your roots run deep and we are still blooming in your name.
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SPEAKER_00: Love, Kim