EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

It All Happened Before The Flowers Bloomed

July 24, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

Returning to Stamford, New York after so many years has been a strange exercise in delayed belonging. I expected to reintroduce myself, explain where I had been, and provide whatever evidence people required before permitting me back into the story. Instead, people remembered things about me that I had assumed disappeared when I left.

People remember us in fragments we never thought to preserve. A story, a gesture, a relative, a street—the person we were before we possessed the language to describe ourselves. I assumed I would return as a stranger carrying documentation of my former life, but memory had been working in my absence.

There is something unsettling about discovering that parts of you continued living in other people after you left. There is also something tender in realizing that departure did not erase you as completely as you once feared.

I said Mom’s name the other day while explaining why I had so many connections to the town. I can’t remember where I was. Somewhere in Stamford, perhaps. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

I keep a night-light on in my parents’ bedroom. When I go to bed, it feels as though they are still here, waiting up for me the way they did on Christmas Eve when I was small. Going up the stairs and into my room at night is comforting, though haunting, every time.

It all happened before the flowers bloomed. Mom made her final arrangements, refused the continuation of her life support, and passed away peacefully, on her own terms. The void she left created an enormous strain that ultimately ended my marriage.

Not everyone who wants to die wants life itself to end. Many simply cannot imagine continuing under the conditions in which they have been forced to live.

The dead leave emotions behind. Institutions send forms.

I have become increasingly fond of unfinished conversations. They imply an expectation that there will be another opportunity.

You do not defeat grief. Eventually, you recognize it as evidence that someone or something was worth loving.

I have been saved more than once by people who did not know they were saving me. A sentence offered casually, a door held open, a place at a table, a telephone answered late at night. Small acts become more visible when a life is close to collapse. Obituaries are poor containers for complicated people. They favor accomplishments, affiliations, and acceptable forms of love.

The world is held together by temporary solutions that outlived the people who promised to replace them. I no longer believe everything must be useful. Some things deserve to exist because they are beautiful, strange, amusing, well made, or capable of making an afternoon less ordinary.

We speak of losing time as though time were merely misplaced. Usually, it was taken—by fear, illness, obligation, poverty, bureaucracy, or another person’s refusal to behave responsibly.

The people who tell you not to live in the past are often hoping you will stop examining what they did there.

But returning is not the same as living in the past. Sometimes returning is how you discover that you never disappeared from it.