Not many of us get to die the way we wished. But my dad did. A man of the earth, he had a great passion for plants, a love for flowers and trees and all manner of flora. He saw the beauty in each of them, the unique promise every one held to make this world just a little brighter, a little more beautiful. He committed the best part of his life to gardening, and though he was gifted at design—at analyzing what a space was and imagining what it could be—he especially loved the work itself. “Dad, you’re 70,” we would tell him. “You’ve got to stop working so hard.” But work was what he knew and work was what he loved. He told us he would be content to die if only he could die with dirt on his hands.
In the hours after his death, my sister sent me a photo of his hands—his Working Man Hands. And, sure enough, they were stained with dark, Georgia mud. He had spent the better part of the day laying floors in the apartment he and my mother were about to move into—a bright little walk-out in the
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