“Thriving on Neglect: Easy Houseplants for Beginning Gardeners” by Cecily Stone

The sun in Phoenix, Arizona has a voice, and on this day, it was laughing.

The dips and bumps of the flesh of the land soaked in its pure joy with greed.  It has an abrasive sense of humor, this Arizona sun, and only its true friends remained, steadfastly loyal.  The saguaro cactus remained eternally its bestie — arrogantly turgid, hoarding love for itself, remaining true for hundreds of years.

My friend Tony informed me that it was a federal crime to cut down one of these beautiful creatures.  We rolled along in his rental car, our luggage shoved in the back of the trunk.  His girlfriend Melissa was sunk into her seat, her feet resting on the edge, her eyes squinted and glazed over.  She snickered at the cacti.  My eyes, wide open, ventured the question.

“Hey guys,” I drew the words out and lifted them up into a question.

“Yes?” Tony replied, also squinting, straining forward in his seat.

“How high are you right now?”

Tony snickered.  Melissa started giggling.

“Um,” he said.  “A little. We had a brownie this morning.”

“And then the gummies,” Melissa giggled.  Her blonde hair shimmered in the Phoenix sun; her blue eyes sparkled.  She was a bright dandelion, wilted and sleepy, yet vibrant.

The white Malibu approached a hill in the road, slightly descended, and a particularly erect saguaro bombed our DMs.  It tilted slightly to the left and had two thick little arms towards the bottom.

It existed at us, suggestively, and we died of laughter.

Tony was almost crying, one hand on the wheel, one on his chest, moaning with laughter.  I was practically seizing and had to pump my tightening lungs with my inhaler.  Melissa cackled like a witch - her usual ladylike demeanor had fallen out the window.

Each one was more turgid than the last, and the parade of saguaro cocks sent us into fits of laughter.  Today, I couldn’t tell you for how long, how many cacti, or which one was the most realistic.

We barely worked that business trip.  It’s not that weren’t a hardworking team; sometimes we overworked ourselves, almost drowning in it deliciously, rarely coming up for air.  Tony was a brilliant software engineer, and he told me, one night in a condo up in the mountains in Keystone, Colorado, that what we were building would change the world.  His passion lit up the balcony as much as the full moon overhead, and my whirring mind, drunken and honest and trusting, believed every word.  It would.  We would make it change the world.

Together we crawled under the hood, dusted off the wires, rebuilt the system…sometimes in ways that ended poorly, and sometimes in ways that cut through garbage with Tony’s calculated brilliance.  It never mattered to him that I was a woman.  It never mattered that he was the CTO, and I had just base-level architect experience.  It was us, just two humans, with a whiteboard and a problem to solve.

I was drunk on his respect.  I flourished under it, sometimes stumbling, but sometimes ascending that mythical Ballmer peak of programming power. Other engineers use the tools that they are given, but not Tony.  He made the tools.  He was a framework designer, and while the rest of us weighed the pros and cons of the different packages we could use, Tony zeroed in on the requirements and, after a weekend of obsessive programming, came back to the table with just the right tool we needed.  Lightweight and brilliant.

He was a former military officer, and all that comes with it — the early rising, the fastidious workspaces.  On the Arizona trip, I walked by everyone’s messy bedrooms at the Airbnb, and briefly saw through the door that you could bounce a quarter off Tony’s bed.  He was a Jocko disciple and bought me his book about leadership.  I devoured it and we had deep discussions about team dynamics, leadership, and personal ownership.  Tony believed in leading, following, or getting out of the way.  Very often, he paid me the deep respect of opening the door for me and getting out of the way.  But when I needed him to be, he was every bit the leader.  It was a fluid and intuitive dance for us.

Then there was the other side.  Most military men I have met, when applying such a strict standard to themselves, have a deep need to unwind.  They will let loose.  They will drink you under the table and laugh at your unconscious form.  They will tell you jokes that get worse and worse as the night passes, trying to prove who is the most deplorable human. 

I remember Blake dancing on the table at our office in Denver.  It was past midnight, we were all wasted, and I was streaming “Candy Shop” by 50 Cent on my phone.  He had the demeanor of an old-fashioned crooner somehow, pointing at us, staring in our eyes, shaking his ass like Elvis.  Our DevOps engineer Joe followed suit, remarkably incapacitated, and shook his ass as well.  Joe, though, was more like a rabid raccoon.

In the team chat the following Monday, there was obviously an on-demand replay of this spectacle in flashing, animated gif form.  All you had to do was type “:party-joe:” as a macro. Joe was very sore about this.  I’m sure his butt was, too, when his conservative wife found out.  He pleaded to his best friend Jeff to help him remove it.  Jeff and I laughed at his desperation, and just started imitating him whenever he entered the room instead.

I remember camping in Pike National Forest.  I ran back to my tent to grab a sweater, and as I walked back, I noticed the sun was beginning to set.  When I arrived back at camp, it was deserted, because everyone was sitting on the ridge, watching the sky.  “Dude,” Tony yelled back at me, “you’re gonna miss it, get up here.”  I scrambled up the rocks and sat with my friends on the ledge, watching the sun set over the mountains.  Everyone was full, overcome, our collective breath swept away by beauty.

We were also full of the twenty pounds of bacon Blake had cooked over the fire over the course of the day.  There is nothing like smoky, campfire bacon cooked in the mountains, and we ate it like heathens, our fingers moistened by the fat.

I remember streaming Tony’s favorite song over the office speakers.  It was his favorite because the lyrics were about Silence of the Lambs and it was, just, incredibly fucked up. It puts the lotion on the skin, yes precious, yes it doesss.  He loved it for two reasons: the first, because it was a seriously chill indie rock jam on the surface.  The second, because if by some chance someone in the office hadn’t deciphered the lyrics yet, and managed stop, to look around, and say, “What the fuck is this song, guys?”

That moment was glorious to him.  Tony lived for that moment.  He would cackle, mock them, and be fulfilled.  He was a master troll and kept us laughing.  Kept us close.  Kept us true to ourselves and each other.  Kept us working…mostly.

I remember splitting an Uber back to the airport with Tony.  We headed to the shuttle, and after lifting my bag on the rack for me, I saw the unmistakable gleam in his eyes as he thought over something funny.

“What are you thinking about?”

“A study I read,” said Tony.

“About what?” I had no idea what to expect.

“About how everything in airports is covered with an unusual substance.  They did a sanitary survey of airports and found something truly unexpected that covers, like, everything here.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Dude you can’t drop something like that and not say what it is.”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“I do though.”

“Are you sure?  I can’t say it out loud.”

“Stop fucking around and tell me what apparently coats everything us around us Tony, you asshole.”

He leaned forward and whispered in my ear.  “Vaginal secretions.”

I immediately gagged, Tony cackled with pure joy, and everyone on the bus looked at us like we were insane.

But there was something wrong.

There had to be something wrong.  Because why else?

Why else would my phone ring

and I hear the words

that Tony shot himself?

I pulled my car to the side of the road.  I couldn’t drive.  I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t think.

I had just put my notice in, yes.  That couldn’t be it, could it?  There’s no way.  No fucking way.

He never said anything.  We hit a rough patch at work, sure.  Things were more tense than they’d ever been, sure.  That’s software.  Shipping is always hard, you just gotta roll through it. Tony knows this, right?

There’s no way it was work, right?  He knew that we would still be friends after I quit.

I tried to think of why…why the fuck…why, man.  Fucking why.

Why?

My mind rubbed over the sore, again and again, and whispered to me that it was all my fault.  Sometimes I found the strength to reject that, but still I asked myself, again and again.

Why?

But what did I know about his life?  What did anybody know?

For all the times Tony was a friend to me - listened to my troubles, encouraged me, and lifted me up, one day I had a realization. One that happened with a startle that cracked a chasm in my brain: I had never supported him through anything difficult.  And why hadn’t I?  I never heard trouble, sadness, or stress.  When we solved problems together, every suggestion I had was met with enthusiastic support and further exploration.  I was swept up in his positivity.  Every story was hilarious, completely disgusting, or insightful.

He had never once revealed that he was struggling, and so —

I never saw the darkness that rested just beyond it.

And as the weeks came and went, so did the whispers, as his family worked through the remnants of a life that Tony had left behind.

Melissa, who had become violent, and gaslighting, and ruinous.

Debts, unspoken mountains of debts.

Shell companies of our collaborators that turned out to be just Tony, working alone, struggling to summit his dark mountains.

I’m sure there was more.  But to the whispers - I turned the volume down, yet then my own increased in their gain and intensity.

In waves, I convinced myself I should have been a better friend to him. I should have forced my way in and found his demons.

In more waves, I realized this was impossible.

The noise in my head was too loud to go to the funeral, which I’m told was beautiful.  Tony received full military honors, and his coffin was draped in a flag before it disappeared under the earth.

They told me his son spoke at the funeral. He told his family, through his tears, that sometimes he didn’t think his dad had loved him.  This was a sharp departure from the Tony I knew - he was never hard on us, and it was shocking to me that he had that capacity.  But if his son is his legacy, and his sense of self, then I began to understand.  His son said there, at that horrible place surrounded by people in black, that he knows now that his father was just trying to make him into a good man.  He was forging his son, with pressure unforgiving. Like he must have done, regularly, to himself.

Several months later, I rested at the start line of a Spartan race, surrounded by new friends.  The venue was in Colorado Springs, and the trail was 5 kilometers, full of obstacles, most noticeably the cacti budding up from the earth on the trail we were supposed to run.  But we had our shoes tied tight.  The sun was eyeing us suspiciously, doing its best to make us sweat.  The announcer before the race began his usual, emotional, church-of-athletics sermon.

“SPARTANS,” he yelled.

We stomped and howled and screamed, as we always did, “AROOO.”

He swept his hand across the crowd.

“I want everyone to be on the lookout for Spartans draped in the American flag today,” his voice echoed across us, silent with reverence.  “Every sixty-five minutes, another member of the military commits suicide.”

My brain seized and turned white with pain.

“If you see one of these athletes,” he continued, “draped in an American flag, I want every one of you to slow or stop.  I want you to thank them for their service.  I want you to offer a hand, or a knee, and help these servicemen and women complete this race with us.  I don’t want us to stop pulling them up, and supporting them, until that number of military suicides reaches zero.”

And suddenly we were running, and I couldn’t move.  I ran but was sobbing.  I moved my legs and went nowhere.  But I was forward.  And back.  I was confused and stricken and felt like my brain had thrown a code exception, exiting the process, terminating, shutting down.

How the fuck would that ever help, you idiotic, brainless announcer asshole?

How can you help someone who never asks?

How can you treat a bullet wound that you can’t see until it’s too late?

Tony would be the first man to hold out a hand for one of these veterans.  He would pull them up a wall, even if they were in a wheelchair holding a sack of bricks, never even questioning them why the hell they had a sack of bricks in the first place.  It would be a coordinated work of support, and he would put his heart into it.  He would inspire everyone around him to help this veteran and be a leader.

He would never, ever, allow an American flag draped over his shoulders in weakness.  He would never ask for anyone’s help.

That’s why he’s gone.

Why would he believe anything else?  These stories that we tell.  You know them.

Women and children first.

It’s your ship. Your men.

The book he gave me to read - Extreme Ownership.

Because you are last.

That’s what makes a man, right?  Give yourself to us and take nothing back, and when we need you to - throw yourself in. Feet first.

It is a gift and a curse to know one of these selfless men, perfectly crafted by his own discipline, driven by honor, forged from pain.  We love the world they create for us….

We love them until they are gone, and we are left with just a chasm where a human we cherish used to stand.  We weep, us wailing women.  Behind our heaving sobs we are consumed with white-hot rage. We know this sacrifice is unholy.  We hate it, the pressure - the pressure that can make them disintegrate into ash.

His daughter, brilliant as he was, now hides her dad’s ashes in the closet, under the dog food, punishing him for the stupid choices that he made.  I’m told she tells her friends dead-dad jokes now because it eases the pain.

But does it ease the pain?  Or does she hide it, skillfully, just like her father did?

I couldn’t tell you her motives.  I left and have not looked back, hiding my own pain, because I don’t know what else to do.  I’m going to keep going on, day by day, and pretend nothing hurts.

I bought a cactus.  I named it Tony.  When I look at it and close my eyes, I am back in Phoenix with you, my friend, my belly in pain from laughter, the sun (or is it you?) filling everyone with a love of life.

It’s a considerate friend, this plant. I never have to water it.

About Cecily Stone
She/Her/Hers

Cecily Stone is a writer, programmer, wife and mother of three living in Morrison, CO.  A lifelong poet and essayist, she shares her stories of motherhood, rebirth, and sacrifice at open mics and on instagram: @cecilystonespeaks.  On the weekends, you can usually find her behind the mic, outdoors climbing rocks, or camping with her husband Michael and their large zoo of children and pets.