What I Grow In Her Absence

This Mother’s Day is different.

It’s the first one since my mother passed away last year. And it’s also the first one since my father passed. Losing both of them in the same year changed everything about how I see time, family, and even the ground I stand on.

There’s no soft way to say it: grief is heavy. It doesn’t arrive once and leave. It shows up in small moments you don’t expect—like seeing something they would have liked, bringing my mom flowers I had grown and watching her ooh-and-aaah while she placed them on her table or realizing I can’t call them anymore just to tell them about an ordinary day.

And yet, life keeps moving.

This year, I started something new from scratch—a flower farm.

Not because I had everything figured out. Not because I felt ready. But because I needed something real to hold onto. Something that grows even when I don’t feel strong enough to.

When I’m in the soil, planting, watering, or pulling weeds, it doesn’t erase the loss. But it gives the loss somewhere to sit beside me instead of inside me alone.

I think about my mother often when I’m working. I think about my father too. And I can’t help but believe they would be proud—not because everything is perfect, but because I kept going. Because I chose to build something with my hands in a season where it would have been easier to stop.

Starting a flower farm has been humbling. It’s slow. It’s messy. It doesn’t always go the way I want. But it allows me to build strength, how to endure and how to keep going when things don’t go as planned. And maybe that’s what makes it feel connected to them. They both understood hard work. They both understood rebuilding when life doesn’t go as planned.

Mother’s Day used to be about celebrating her.

Now it’s also about remembering her and keeping her stories alive while I’m still here living. Still growing. Still learning how to carry what she gave me forward in a different way.

I don’t think grief ever fully disappears. But I do think it can change shape. And sometimes, if you keep going, it turns into something that grows alongside you instead of breaking you down.

This flower farm is part of that for me.

Not a replacement for what I lost.

But a continuation of love in a different form.

And this Mother’s Day, that’s what I’m holding onto.

And when someone chooses my flowers—whether for a mother who is still here or for one who has passed—it means more than a sale. It means those flowers are part of a larger act of love. A table set. A memory shared. A gravesite tended. A name spoken out loud again.

That, to me, would be the greatest honor.

Not just to grow flowers.

But to have them be part of how people continue loving their mothers—wherever they are.

This Mother’s Day, I carry my parents with me into every stem I cut.

And I let the flowers speak for what I don’t always have words for.

-Deana