THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER by Patricia Hampl
A dutiful daughter—and superb memoirist—reflects upon the deaths of her parents.
Hampl
(English/Univ. of Minnesota; Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, 2006,
etc.) has crafted an honest and loving tribute to her parents, who raised
her in St. Paul, Minn., where she has remained virtually her entire life.
Her father (the eponymous florist) and mother (a librarian) had different
cultural histories. He was Czech; she, Irish. They worked hard, went to
church, believed in truth, justice and the American way, did nothing the
world would deem remarkable. And, Hampl says, “Nothing is harder to grasp
than a relentlessly modest life.” Her writings about that life highlight
difficult truths about both the author and her parents. (It was her mother,
she says, who made Hampl realize the coldness of her own heart.) Hampl
begins at the hospital bedside of her mother, who lay dying after a stroke.
She holds her hand and tries, simultaneously, to take notes. Several times
in the ensuing text she returns to this scene—the hand-holding, the
death-watch—until no life remains in the room but her own. The author moves
back in time, telling us about her father’s business (the employees, the
customers, the economics of flower growing and selling) and her mother’s
career (she loved biographies). She adds that both had mixed feelings about
her decision to become a poet. Her father, she says, thought “being a poet
was all right, though hopeless.” Her mother eventually created an archive of
Hampl’s work—every clipping, every note, every word she wrote. Hampl
mentions occasionally her more conservative brother, who became a dentist
and moved west, but his story is on the periphery. Death is the principal
character, and Hampl shows us powerfully that Death touches not only the
dying. A memoir for memoirists to admire—with language that pierces.