Wilted Grace (2025)

“The Last Rose of Summer”
Diagnosis arrives like late heat: the body still blooms, unaware. Love clings to colour, believing warmth might last beyond the season’s warning.

“The Paper Rose”
Hope folds itself carefully—fragile, brave. Test results rustle softly, promises thin as paper, yet shaped with devotion and trembling faith.

"Echoes of Rain"
Unspoken conversations fall softly. Grief begins as rain—gentle, repetitive—echoing through rooms where courage pretends to be peace.

"Whisper of a Withered Bloom"
The body weakens. Life speaks now in whispers, petals curling inward, beauty not gone—only quieter, asking to be heard.

"The Faded Rose"
Color drains, but meaning deepens. What fades in flesh intensifies in memory, where love refuses to pale.

"The Surrender of Spring"
Acceptance replaces resistance. The rose stops fighting the frost, trusting the earth to remember its shape.

"A Rose In December"
Time feels wrong. A rose blooms where it shouldn’t, teaching that love does not obey seasons or survival.

"The Last Petal"
Breath thins. One petal remains, trembling with everything left unsaid, holding the weight of an entire life.

"The Search for Sunlight"
Even near the end, the soul leans toward warmth—seeking light not to live, but to be seen.

"A Rose in Repose"
Death is gentle here. The rose rests, intact, placed carefully into silence by hands shaped like prayer.

"Litany for a Soul in Bloom" ​
What died was never the rose. Love blooms endlessly, recited like a sacred name, petal by petal, forever.

"Are There Roses?"
A question lifted in grief becomes an answer in petals. Mary gathers our prayers and sends roses—proof that love, sincerity, and compassion have reached a mother now held in heaven.

Note: 

Written as a Mother’s Day hymn in 2012, this work honours my mother’s lifelong devotion to Mary. Through her faithful novenas for family and friends, she trusted Mary’s gentle intercession. Shaped by her cancer journey, these songs bloom from love and suffering. Are There Roses? is a final prayer—twelve roses sent to her, now at peace in Jesus’ arms.

Are There Roses:

Are there roses in Your garden on the shores of Jubilee?
Would You pick some for my mother and deliver them for me.
For she prayed to Your Mother, to bring hope to another;
Would You pick a dozen roses, and deliver them for me.

Are there roses in Your garden on the shores of Jubilee?
Would You pick some for my mother and deliver them for me.
Let Your roses be a sign Lord, that she hears this prayer of mine Lord;
Would You pick a dozen roses, and deliver them for me.