A WREATH OF HONESTY

The wreath of honesty, December 2024.

I’ve loved lunaria since I was a little girl, when a favourite teacher brought a sheaf of the silvery siliques into class and told us they were called “honesty” or “silver pennies”. And for years I’ve grown this lovely spring-flowering biennial in my English garden, cutting some of the fragrant purple flowers for the house, leaving enough on the plants to produce the pods that dry to papery translucence in the autumn, when I broadcast the seeds to continue the cycle.

So honesty is a symbol for me of the past, the present and the future.

Douglas loved our garden: before I came into his life he cared for its roses alone. And throughout all the years of our life together, it was a place of peace: golden afternoons, quiet evenings when his pipesmoke used to drift across the terrace as we watched the moon rise, nights listening to the owls, or staring up at the great mystery of the stars. He left this house for the last time on the night of January 23rd, 2017— and after that, there was no more light.

I walked in darkness, and sometimes I still do. I cannot watch a dawn or a sunset or look up into the night sky because too much beauty pierces my heart, and winter stars are the cruellest and most beautiful of all.

And I do not celebrate Christmas, because the last time I decorated a tree, in 2015, and asked him as usual to come and hang something glittery on a branch for luck, he was very frail, and had never completely recovered from the traumatic brain injury of the previous year. As we stood together in the glow of the lights he said gently, “Don’t be sad. It isn’t the last time, you know.”

It is, you know, I thought. And I was right. In December of 2016 he was dying, and there was no Christmas in my heart, and there never has been since.

So why this wreath? Why now?

Because it spoke to me. Although golden and elegant, it makes no gesture toward festivity. And it symbolizes my own honesty, the truths of who I am. I was loved and I loved, and I still love and will always love. I wear no masks: I play no games. I do not hide. I do not pretend. I am wounded: I am scarred. I have lost my man, and I will mourn him for the rest of my life.

And yet, with this wreath of honesty, in these longest nights at the end of another annus horribilis, I invoke the light. It is my supplication to the God or gods who watch over my life, and who will turn this earth once more toward the spring.

Look kindly upon Thy servant, Lord. And bring me safely again into Thy Light.