Coffee And Clematis

(Two years ago this very day was the last one I'd spend with my dad.)

I am getting yet another cup of coffee this morning. Seems I am as addicted as my dad was. The thought of him and his coffee makes me smile.

In his last days with us, many times all he wanted was a cup of coffee. Once he’d been diagnosed as terminal and hospice was brought in, they brought a little hospital style bed and table, among other things to my parents’ house. 

The mornings I came to help out my mom, I’d always find his cup on the table, sometimes still half full and cold. “Just heat that up for me if you don’t mind”, he’d say. “No, I’ll brew you a fresh pot,” I’d reply. 

The man only had months to live. He at least deserved a fresh cup of coffee.  

He and I shared a love of the brew like few understand. See, I grew up in a time before the dangers of caffeine and children were known. My brothers and I kid about being weaned off the bottle and given a cup of coffee and, truthfully, we are not far off  the mark. 

Vividly I remember getting a last swig before running to catch the school bus.  That’s really the truth. There was always a pot brewing in the house and I keep that tradition alive.

Many of my visits to see him in his countless stays in the hospital, I found him longing for a cup.  Early on I learned that there’s always a pot in the nurses’ station, so I took to locating it myself and making sure he had a hot cup every time I’d go to see him.

When I went to help take care of him in his last days, I’d always cut him one of my Clematis blooms before I left home and sit it beside his cup on the little hospital table beside his coffee. 

He’d hunch over it and look (he had macular degeneration and was legally blind.  It’s kind of like looking at the world through swiss cheese, so he could make out parts of the flower). He loved the purple color of the blooms so much (my favorite color too).

All through April, May and part of June, I’d bring him a Clematis bloom and a cup of coffee, pretty much daily. In July the blooms started dying off as they always do. 

In September, he was gone.  The 21st of September 2009, torrential downpours flooded all of North Georgia. It was a horrible time of destruction, the damage still very visible in many parts of the area. 

I felt like the whole world was crying with me at the loss of my dad that morning.  The whole week was a long, bad dream.  We buried him that Wednesday, the 23rd. 

I came home, raw, hurting, shocked by his death and the floods that had wiped out whole neighborhoods. As I turned in the driveway, I saw it out of the corner of my eye a bright speck of purple. My dying Clematis vine was blooming again! 

Three gorgeous purple flowers were there with a little green growth on the brown crackly vines. In all the years we’d had the vine, never had it bloomed twice.

Throughout October and even into November, the vine bloomed. Even one morning when frost made the world sparkle, there were blooms. I took photos to document what I’d never seen before. 

I believe my dad sent me the flowers we both loved so much. I remember at the funeral, asking him to let me know he’d made it safely to the other side and was OK. I stood at the mailbox that day, looking at my flowers, knowing he had. And then I went inside and brewed a pot of coffee.