Spring came late that year.

At the end of March, a small green shoot pushed up from the ground by the back fence.

Sam knelt beside it and looked for a long time.

The rose bush he had torn out had sent its roots deep; the winter freeze hadn’t killed it, and a single

new branch had pushed up through the mud.

He reached out to pull it, but when his fingers touched the green shoot, he stopped./

He pulled his hand back, went to the garage for a bag of potting soil, and carefully spread it around

the base of the new growth.

On the balcony, the pot of white camellias was still alive.

Carla, the hospice aide, had called to tell him that I had left instructions when I was in the hospital.

“Water every three days, and don’t put it in direct sun.”

He followed the schedule. The camellias bloomed again, one white flower with petals so thin they let the light through. They trembled in the wind.

In April, Sam put in a transfer request, from surgery to palliative care.

The department head asked him why. He said, “I want to learn how to help people hurt less at the

end.”

He began working with patients at the end of their lives. Some cried. Some laughed. Some said

nothing at all.

He found that so many of them were like me. Their greatest fear wasn’t death. It was being a

burden.

They hid their pain behind smiles. They pushed their fear down under their pillows. They kept telling the people around them, “I’m fine,” until the very last moment.

In every one of them, Sam saw my shadow. And every one of them left him with nowhere to hide.

On May seventeenth, he went to the flower shop.

Betty, the owner, still remembered me. “The woman who bought the white camellias? Pretty lady, very polite. Is she doing all right?”

Sam bought a bunch of white camellias but didn’t answer the question.

He took them to the columbarium where my ashes were kept.

The niche was small. The photograph was the one Margaret had chosen, the same one from the service: Me in the cream-colored sweater.

He stood in front of the niche for an entire afternoon.

The building manager came by at closing time to shoo him out, but when he saw Sam still standing there, he didn’t say anything, he just turned off the other lights and left one burning for him.

That night, Sam went home, took out the letter from the drawer, and read it again.

On the fifty-seventh reading, he noticed something on the back of the second page.

In the bottom right corner, there was a line of very small text written in pencil, hidden under a fold, he had never seen it before.

He held the page close to the lamp and made out the words, one by one.

The handwriting was very light. You could tell the person who wrote it had hesitated, over and over, about whether to leave it there.

[Sam, next time I make beef stew, I’ll use less salt. You always said it was perfect. But I tasted it once. It was a little salty, wasn’t it?

But you never told me, so I never changed it. Ten years, and I never changed it. We were both so

dumb.]

The lamplight fell on the small, crooked letters.

Sam pressed the letter to his forehead and bent over, folding in on himself.

In the kitchen, the stove was clean.

The cast iron pot was washed and turned over on the drying rack. Next to it, the labels I had made.

Spices in order, salt on the left, a small circle drawn around it in marker.

By the back fence, the new rose shoot had grown two small leaves.

The wind moved through them, just a little, and they swayed.

On the windowsill, the white camellia bloomed quietly.

Its meaning was unrequited love.

It was still alive.