In the Language of Flowers

To protect the privacy of those involved, all names have been changed, though the emotions and truths behind each experience remain unchanged. This is my story, raw and honest, but with pseudonyms.

The flowers came up in waves. First the daffodils, their heads bowed, swollen with too much sun. Then the lupine, tall and stubborn, like they’d dared winter to break them and it couldn’t. The bachelor’s buttons followed next, scattered and indecisive. Then the lilacs. Bushes of cream and purple hues, smelling of sweet vanilla and honey, with a faint dusting of spice, like the air after a spring rain. Lilacs were always the last to arrive and the first to fade, like all the loves I’ve known. Afton Bitton’s garden never bloomed all at once, it revealed itself slowly, like it was trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t quite speak.

I started photographing them obsessively, as if I could document proof that beauty had once existed in my life before I had to leave it behind. Before I had to leave everything behind.

The poppies were last. They emerged suddenly, with fire in their petals, reckless and unapologetic, blooming red against the porch line like a warning. Like they knew something was ending.

I kept my camera close to those final days in Swan Valley. I shot everything: light on the floorboards, steam rising from the chipped mug in the morning, Afton’s garden as it changed hour by hour. I thought if I documented enough, I could stay. I thought if I paid attention closely enough, the land might ask me to. 

Swan Valley & Ms. Afton Bitton’s House Photographed on Polaroid

But the eviction was symbolic before it was logistical. Idaho had already decided I didn’t belong there. The way the co-working space, designed to empower and uplift women, I’d joined earlier dropped me the moment my diagnosis became real. I had been an ambassador, exchanging my time, working one day a week, opening up shop, greeting members, making coffee. The owner had asked me to put together a proposal for photography services and branded visuals for the space, which I did. But instead of telling me I was out of her budget, she hired someone else. That’s how I found out. I didn’t hear it from her directly. I didn’t find out via email, but through a new hire. The marketing director called me right before my therapy session to tell me they were making cuts. With a full-time staff, they didn’t need as many ambassadors on-site, and I was the only one cut. I cried the second I hung up. Then I wrote an email thanking the owner for opening her space to me and asked if she would share my donation site once it was live. More silence followed. She never replied. 

The writers’ group at the all female co-working space was a reflection of my overall experience there. It was a group that was meant to be about creation, connection, and growth; but in reality, it was stagnant. Each Tuesday, members sat together in silence, not discussing their writing or supporting one another, just occupying space, pretending to be a part of something bigger. It mirrored the disconnect I felt in the space itself. The co-working space was supposed to empower women, but instead, it became a place where the loudest voices were those of silence. They were all about appearances, about the idea of community and empowerment, but when it came down to it, there was no substance, no real engagement. Much like that group, I was quietly pushed to the margins. I had given my time, my energy, and my belief in their mission, but in return, I was met with silence, token gestures, and eventually, a cut. The very thing they preached about, “lifting women up,” wasn't true when it counted. It was all surface-level, a façade, just like their writers’ group that sat in silence week after week.

It felt like a slow unraveling. I told my therapist and case manager that I had to pivot. “Don’t waste time on fertility grants right now, I don’t even have a roof over my head.” They sent me housing applications. All of which had application fees. Which makes zero since when you are a woman facing cancer and homelessness. Or any person facing homelessness. But nothing government funded or ran made sense. 

The women’s shelters were my next call. The homeless shelters, the places that were supposed to take in the broken, the lost, the ones who couldn’t make it on their own anymore, would not take me. Despite having beds open. Not with my cancer. Too much risk. Too much liability.

It hit me then, harder than I expected, Idaho didn’t want me. 

I had family, but no family who offered to take me in. Family members that took my father’s money with a “thank you very much,” when he was alive, but who’d rather see him rolling over in his grave than to offer me a spare bedroom. So really, I had no family at all. No support system. Just a single woman with cancer, trying to find a place to breathe. And in that moment, it felt like my mother all over again. The way I had to drop her off at Turningpoint Women’s Shelter eight years earlier, knowing she was too far gone to save, too much of a risk to keep. It was that same feeling, that same coldness. Being abandoned. Left to unravel.

The women’s shelters of Idaho wouldn’t take me. And suddenly, I understood the bitterness in my mother’s eyes when I left her at that door. It was a bitterness I’d never seen until I found myself standing in her shoes. The fear of being alone, the hurt of not being wanted, the humiliation of asking for help only to be told no. I hadn’t realized it before, but in that moment, I was her. And it terrified me.

My case manager shifted gears from fertility grants to survival plans. She began scrambling for resources—anything that could help me scrape together enough for gas and an oil change to get out of Idaho. My therapist’s questions changed too. Where could I go? Who might take me in? How soon could I leave?

They got me in touch with a man from the LDS church in town, Bishop Glass. We’ll call him that. I drove to the Palisaides Ward off of Rainey Creek Road and parked my car in the back parking lot so the Hunter wouldn’t stumble on it on his way back from Jackson. I passed the painting Jesus and the Little Children and wondered how my life had cumulated to this moment. I found Bishop Glass and followed him to his office. Once there, I sat on a fold out chair in a room that somehow reminded me of my Ukrainian grandmother’s living room: stiff, uninviting, and not meant for comfort. The kind of furniture that doesn’t absorb you but instead expects you to sit up straight and repent. He handed me a box of tissues before I’d said a word, and it made me want to cry more, not less.

I told him everything. Or at least the version I could get out without choking. About the Hunter. About the cancer. About the promise, that if things didn’t work out in Idaho, the Hunter would help me leave. That he swore I wouldn’t end up worse off than when he found me. But things had unraveled fast. And I was very much worse off.

“I want to be clear,” I said, steadying my breath. “He has never laid a hand on me.”

Bishop Glass nodded like he’d heard that before. Maybe too many times. He folded his hands on the desk and looked at me in that Mormon way, kind, practiced, and a little too patient.

“Abuse doesn’t always leave bruises,” I added, quieter.

That’s when I told him how isolated I’d been. How I hadn’t started treatment because I couldn’t. No stable housing, no gas money to get to and from appointments, no support. Just a diagnosis sitting in my lap like a ticking bomb. And now I wanted out. Out of Swan Valley. Out of this failed experiment of love and homesteading. Out before the cancer did what it was trying so hard to do.

He didn’t rush me. Just nodded again and listened in full sentences of silence. Then he told me about fasting.

His congregation fasted once a month, he said. Some skipped a meal. Some a day. Some went longer. But the money they would’ve spent on food was given to the church, tithing with teeth. So that when someone like me showed up, crying in his office, bleeding from a place no one could see, they could help.

I laughed. Not out of joy. Just out of the absurd symmetry of it all.

“That’s funny,” I told him. “I did a forty-day water fast right before I got diagnosed with cancer. It’s actually how I found out I even had cancer.”

He didn’t say anything to that. Maybe because he didn’t know what to say. I didn’t tell him how I still wasn’t sure if the fast was some divine intervention or the final slap from a God who liked irony. That part I kept to myself.

But what I’ll never forget is how he said, without blinking, that the church would help me get out. Help me get where I needed to go. He didn’t promise salvation. He didn’t offer a miracle. Just an oil change. A two hundred dollar Shell gas card. A yes.

And in that moment, that was more than God had given me in a very long time.

I met the Bishop in the parking lot of Les Schwab to pay for the oil change the next afternoon. He gave me a gas card for Shell and a gift card for McDonalds. Said he would be praying for me. Asked what the blog he’d seen me writing would be called. 

“Cancer is a Gift.” I said, surveying his eyes. “It’s satirical." 

“It sounds like it’s going to touch a lot of people.” He replied. “Send it to me once it’s live.” 

The morning I left, I walked the garden one last time. Was there an angle I missed? Had I already photographed it to death, or was there still one last story the light hadn’t yet told? I circled the poppies like a mourner, half praying they’d speak. I crouched low. Tilted my lens toward the sun until my screen was nothing but white heat and silhouettes. The poppies didn’t care. They kept blooming anyway, disobedient and loud, throwing themselves open like they hadn’t just watched a woman unravel all spring. 

There’s an old belief that poppies grow where blood has been spilled. That they mark the in-between. Between waking and sleeping. Between memory and forgetting. Between one version of yourself and the one you’re about to become. I had bled in this garden. Not literally, but in the way someone bleeds from the inside out. From disappointment. From hoping too hard. From waiting for someone who never asked if I was okay. 

And so I took my final photos like a thief. Stealing light. Stealing closure. Stealing proof that I had been there. That I had loved something here. That the leaving wasn’t the whole story. 

And when I finally set my camera down, I finished packing the last of the boxes that remained into my CRV. I had already started dragging plastic totes packed with photo albums and childhood relics down the wooden path. I’d left a trail of crushed lilac blooms in my wake. The petals smeared against the walkway like bruises. I knew the moment the Hunter pulled into the drive and saw them, he’d know.

She’s gone.

He wasn’t attentive to my needs, but he could spot whether or not I’d moved my vehicle by the way my tires were pointed. 

But before I left, I wrote letters. Not just to the Hunter, but to the people who surrounded him, the ones who, despite the chaos, had become small fixtures in my day-to-day life.

To his parents, I wrote a thank you for their warmth and for the Christmas gifts they gave my dog. I thanked them for lending me the trailer that helped me move my life out to Idaho, and I apologized for any discomfort I may have caused during my time there. I told them I never intended to divide their family, only to join it.

To Homegrown, the youngest daughter, I wrote a soft letter. She was still so young, still forming her ideas about what love and strength and womanhood look like. I told her she had a light in her that would burn for years if she protected it. That the life her father lived didn’t have to be the one she inherited.

And to Precious Pixels, I left something tangible. My studio backdrops. My photography equipment. A bequeathment of sorts. A passing of the lens. Because even if her watermark was poorly chosen, her eye wasn’t. And maybe in some small way, she’d carry forward a piece of the life I once had, before the cancer. 

Then I wrote the letter that mattered most.

I left it for the Hunter on the table, folded beside my deepest fear. The same fear I had read aloud to him once, but that he hadn’t really heard. A fear I had whispered like a prayer and screamed like a curse: the fear of dying without ever hearing "I love you." Without ever being chosen. Without ever being seen.

Arley, beaming on the last day before I had to leave him behind in Idaho. He’s framed by the poppies Ms. Afton Bitton—Swan Valley’s own published author—planted before she died. Everything in this photo feels alive, which is what makes it so hard to look at now.

Here is that letter:

I’ve never been very good at goodbyes. I think you know that by now. There’s a whole part of me that wanted to do this face to face, to look you in the eye and say all the things that deserve to be said with a steady and calm voice. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. So instead of dragging this out with a long, awkward Minnesota goodbye, I went for the Irish one. Quick, quiet, and gone before the ache sets in.

It wasn’t because I didn’t want to say goodbye. It was because I thought it would break me. Maybe more than I already am.

Because I knew I had to leave while I was still beautiful. Like the poppies in the yard, vibrant and open one day, curled inward the next. I wanted you to remember me that way. Still in bloom.

I met with the local LDS Bishop.  He was kind. Their congregation paid to get my car serviced and helped with gas money. That support let me lift the burden off you, just a little. I’m sorry I ever became one. I never meant to be. I see now how much of myself I lost, how I let myself go. And didn’t live in alignment with the girl you met online. I slipped into old patterns. I numbed out. I disconnected, from you, from myself, from the life I wanted to build. I self-sabotaged. I dulled. I collapsed. I got lost in the waiting room of my own life. I acted like a child more often than I care to admit. I wasn’t the partner you deserved. I wasn’t even the person I used to be. I wasn’t my best self, and I know that. I’m sorry for every way that showed. Deeply. And I never wanted you to see me wilt.

I left before the last bloom faded. Before I became something I couldn’t come back from. 

You once said you feel like you’ve failed me. But you didn’t. I wasn’t something meant to be kept. Our love story was that of the poppies, briefly beautiful, never meant to be plucked. Poppies wilt almost immediately after being cut from their roots. We were only ever supposed to be witnessed in our natural habitats. 

If I had stayed, I would have dried out in your arms. And you would’ve mistaken the hollowing for love fading. I didn’t want to leave like that.

I didn’t know how to write this letter until now. I wrestled with what was truth and what was just pain talking. What was ownership and what was wound. What I would regret saying, and what I would regret leaving unsaid.

I still don’t know if I got it right. But I do know that somewhere in all this, in the garden, in the grief, in the small gestures, you loved me.

Maybe not in words. Maybe not in the way I thought I needed. But in the way you could.

Thank you, for everything you did for me. When I look back at this season of my life, this wild, unraveling, train-wrecked stretch of time, you were the only one who actually stopped. Who didn’t flinch at the wreckage. Who didn’t turn away. Everyone else did. They looked at me like grief and cancer was contagious.

And you? You put your hand on the twisted metal and asked how it got that way. You showed up for me when almost no one else did. I will never, ever forget that.

You offered me safety before I even knew I needed it. You gave me quiet when the noise in my head wouldn’t stop. And even though this isn’t ending the way I hoped, I will always be grateful for the way you tried to love me.

For the roof you provided over my head. For your patience. For the small, quiet ways you showed up like making sure my plants got watered. I’m sorry I left so much behind. And that I could not keep my promise to you that I would leave the farmhouse we called home better than when I got here. Please don’t let it be a weight. Sell it. Keep it. Give it away. I want you to have anything you can make from it as a repayment. I left the boots, the bibs, the blue orchids, every gift, because I didn’t feel right taking them with me. I didn’t feel worthy enough. And honestly, I won’t need them where I’m going.

But Arley, thank you for taking care of him. That means more to me than you know. If you ever feel like sending updates, I would appreciate that. 

I think I need a clean break, and I don’t know yet if I want to be in contact. I don’t know if I’ll respond. But if you’re ever curious, if you ever wonder where I ended up, you can always find pieces of me in the story I’m telling on my blog: www.cancerisagift.org (Launching at the end of this month.) 

Please thank your family for everything. I’m sorry I couldn’t give them a proper goodbye. I’ve removed them from social media, not out of anger or malice, but because I need distance. I need quiet. I need to let go without looking back. Like the mythology around the poppies that bloomed along the banks of the Lethe. But that doesn’t mean I won’t think about each one of them often. That I won’t be grateful. I will be.

Give your parents my love. Thank them for everything they did for me, allowing me to use my trailer to bring my belongings here to Idaho. Buying my dog Christmas presents. All of it. And please give them my apologies. I never meant to hurt their feelings or cause a divide among you. 

Give your brother’s dog Willow a goodbye hug from me. I will miss her fiercely. If you’re willing, maybe you could send an updated picture or two of her sometime. And tell your oldest twin I’m sorry for whatever I said that hurt him. I really am. I hope with time he can forgive me. I’m rooting for him from afar, whether he believes it or not.

Tell Homegrown I’m sorry we never made it to the potato museum together, but I did make a pit stop on my way out of town. It felt like a small promise I made to myself.

I wish you nothing but the best. I wanted this to work with my whole heart. I wanted a home. A family. A forever. I have no regrets… except maybe that I wish you’d invited me hunting, just once. So I could’ve better understood that part of your world—the one you loved so much, and wouldn’t shut up about, the one I never really got to step into. For better or for worse I will notice the elk and deer and wildlife as they dot the landscape from now on. 

Thank you for trying to step into my world. You tried. And when your heart heals, and I believe it will, you’re going to find love again. A good love. A steady love. And she’ll be lucky.

I’ll always love you. That doesn’t disappear just because I’m gone. It’s funny that I’m leaving just as the poppies are in full bloom. Because the seeds can lie dormant for years before blooming, sometimes only after a fire or disturbance do they sprout up and grow. I’ve been dormant since my mother died but cancer has finally caused me to bloom. In the language of flowers or floriography as it is called poppies represent death, rebirth, loss, yes, but also endurance—a kind of bloom that refuses to die even in grief’s wasteland. I believe they were a sign for both of us of who we both are. Resilient. 

And the one pink poppy that sprung up from Afton Bitton's garden, the color symbolizes compassion, and platonic love. They are said to represent a soft, tender kind of affection, the kind that holds your hand, not your waist. And isn’t that what you gave in your own way? Not eros. The last time we laid in bed together, and you just held my hand, it was the single pink poopy in the garden of my life. The most pink poppy moment of them all. Quiet. Deep. Almost missed. But everything.

Give yourself compassion, for how this ended, I know I will be giving myself compassion. 

I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye the right way. This was the only way I knew how. I had to go in color. I had to go still blooming.

—R

a.k.a Crazy Cora 

P.S. you asked me what my deepest fear was the other night. I didn’t reply because I’d told you my deepest fear before. Read it out loud to you. I left it like a place mat on the table Monday night but you weren’t paying attention. I’m sorry I couldn’t answer you on Tuesday but I’ve included it in my “Dear John” letter. 

If you want to know what I left on the table beside it—my deepest fear—you can read it here:

👉 The Fear of Dying Without Ever Hearing “I Love You”

To understand how I got here, you might want to start with Strawberry Moon and Cracks. They’re the preludes to this story—what came before the garden, before the leaving.

To Read what came after, read about my exodus from swan valley here.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer