Hope for the Flowers: Commemorating our Failures

My daughter kills succulents.

She is great with animals—she’s the person in the neighborhood who can get anyone’s loose dog to come to her, the sought-after pet sitter, the kid who got the coveted job tending horses at the barn, the girl even the feral cats like. That’s not surprising. After all, she’s the girl who, after watching one too many Disney movies, decided she needed some forest friends of her own.

And mostly, she’s good with plants. When we had a garden, the rest of us would sweat and scrabble and swear and end up with just a few sad ears of corn, or a handful of tomatoes that escaped predation by the birds. Ash would announce that she was going to grow carrots in our Alabama clay, and even though we advised her not to try root vegetables, she’d grow fat gorgeous orange ones somehow. We’d never grown melons, but she wanted cantaloupe, and she chose a seed variety out of the catalog and grew cantaloupes that tasted like Creamsicles.

So, really it’s just succulents.

She decided to try them in the first place because she’s a college student now. Plants really brighten up a dorm room, and freshen the air besides – but when you go home for long weekends, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, you’re not around to care for them, and neither is anyone else.

So, she thought she would give succulents a try.

The kinds of succulents you can keep as houseplants tend to be small; pocket houseplants. Tiny as they are, there is virtually no room for error in their care. You water them with an eyedropper, to avoid overwatering; you have to keep to a schedule, so that they don’t get too dry. But you can’t be too rigid about the schedule, or you risk over- or under-watering them just because of barometric changes.

I think we are up to six? Seven? Dead succulents at this point.

That sounds like a name for a garage band.

Each tiny succulent that withers up, or whose leaves fall off from overwatering, or that starts to look unhappy is a blow to her; she is sentimental and names them all. Like a child with a succession of ill-fated goldfish, she mourns them and retires their names in her heart. Perhaps eventually she will learn to care for succulents as effectively as she cares for cats, dogs, horses, and random wild creatures.

Or maybe, in the end, she will give up and form a band in their honor: The Dead Succulents.

We think of success as being the thing that’s good for our souls, but what about failure? What about the failures that leave us sad? We feel damaged, when we fail, but are we?

I don’t think we are. I think our honest failures can be as wholesome as our honest successes. They are, after all, humbling, and humility is the best of virtues. Only the most horrible people are good at everything and have everything always turn out their way.

So, while you’re commemorating your successes with medals and trophies and victory laps, remember that you can commemorate your failures, too.

Maybe they’d make a great name for your garage band.