Original sin?

I wouldn’t have noticed the garland of pink roses beside the redwood coffin that held mother Anne’s corpse, had my Swedish sister-in-law not mentioned it as we were leaving the cemetery. She told me that her own mother had extended her condolences to "our family" by ordering a wreath with the epithet “Goodbye Anne, queen of the family” inscribed on its satin sash.
Later that same day, a couple of friends who had attended the funeral were leafing through the little album of photos that I had prepared for the gathering in my brother's home in San Francisco. The front cover of the album held a photo of mother Anne placing the first roses (which our father had once planted) of the year on his grave, which she knew would one day be her grave too. The back cover showed mother Anne, from a distance, crossing a stone bridge to a tiny islet in the Swedish archipelago. Most of the filler photos depicted mother Anne holding one of her grandchildren. In one photo she and two of her favorite grandsons are viewed from behind, sitting in the sand, gazing over a vast Pacific, into an expanse they all seem to realize is so much bigger than they. At the funeral gathering, my sister-in-law laid several boxes of photos of her own mother - vacationing on Eden Roc - alongside my little album. I looked at a couple of her photos and then politely put them to the side. Who and what had we gathered to remember? I was actually somehow relieved by the blatancy of my sister-in-law's revelation.
Last week, I met my sister-in-law’s mother in Stockholm, where we both live, for the first time in decades. When we spoke of mother Anne, she said “I’ll never forget the deeply haunting, penetrating look your mother gave me when I saw her the last time a month or so before her death. She seemed tired and didn’t want to talk to me.” Was it that four eyes had finally met in the abyss of female rivalry?
“…the women I interviewed spoke readily of competing with mothers, daughters, sisters, coworkers, and friends, many of them also seemed to buy into the myth of female solidarity, lamenting their own isolation from what they saw as a world of camaraderie and support,” writes Shapiro Barash, in her book Tripping the Prom Queen, adding “We can't understand female rivalry without understanding the pressure to conceal it.”

Back to work. Spent the weekend in my communal garden in Stockholm, laying a new stone path to the compost, preparing beds for the spring, cutting back roses, digging up weeds and ivy roots, and cutting grass. The sun was warm, the air balmy, and the sparkling waters of Lake Mälaren dazzling. Thanks M for all your good gardening tips, solid stance, and strong arms.