I visited my dad today. As always, I talked to him.
I told him that his beloved New York Knicks had finally done the unthinkable and won the NBA championship — their first since 1973. He would have loved that.
When I was growing up, he used to tell my brother and me stories about his own father, an Italian immigrant who would save every extra dollar he could, so they could go to Madison Square Garden together and watch the Knicks play. He called them the Knickerbockers. Those memories meant everything to him, and somehow standing there today, I could almost hear him telling those stories again.
Then I told him about Joaquín. I told him his beloved grandson had won the Spanish Award at graduation and how incredibly proud he would have been. And that he received a standing ovation for being an Altar Boy.
I then told him I was scared about my upcoming gallbladder surgery and how they had found a mass inside of it. I told him I was trying to find my inner strength that he had taught me to rely on in situations that are out of my control. My father was the most tenacious person I have ever met.
And then I smiled through my tears and made one last request.
“Dad, if heaven gives you any pull at all, could you do me one favor? Since Italia is not playing in this World Cup anyway… could you help Argentina bring home a fourth star?” It made me laugh. And somehow, it made me feel closer to him.
His niche is surrounded by a beautiful and peaceful garden.
Hydrangeas bloom in all different kinds of shades. Sunlight filters through the trees. The breeze moves gently through the leaves. Benches invite people to sit for a while and simply be.
Standing there, I found myself staring at the flowers. They reminded me of something someone wrote to me recently that has stayed with me for days: “The storm did not come to prove the flower was weak. It came to reveal how deeply its roots had learned to trust the earth beneath it. And when the clouds finally parted, the bloom was not beautiful because it had escaped the rain—it was beautiful because it had survived it.”
I have not been able to stop thinking about those words. This year has brought more storms than I ever imagined.
I lost my dad. I spent years as his caregiver, putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own until my own health quietly slipped to the bottom of the list. Now I am grieving while preparing for more surgery, navigating severe anemia, perimenopause, and the uncertainty that comes with waiting for answers.
Some days I do not feel strong at all. But then I look at flowers.
No one questions how they bloom after violent winds or heavy rain. In fact, it is often because of those storms that they become what they were meant to be. And it makes me wonder if perhaps the same is true for us.
Maybe our hardest seasons are not meant to erase us? Maybe they deepen our roots? Maybe they teach us to lean into hope when everything around us feels uncertain?
As I stood in that peaceful garden, surrounded by blossoms that would not exist without rain, I thought about all the conversations my dad and I are still having.
He always called me his angel. And I could not help but imagine him looking at me now—with tears in my eyes, fear in my heart, and hope I am still learning to hold onto—and smiling that familiar smile. “There’s my angel.” Not because I have somehow escaped life’s storms. But because, despite them, I am still choosing to bloom. I hope he knows that he is MY angel now.
Because without storms…there would be no flowers. And maybe that is what my dad has been trying to teach me all along—that even after the fiercest storms, beauty still finds a way to bloom.
