I met a woman once at a party. She was slathering cheese spread on Ritz crackers, her large body leaning into the kitchen counter of our mutual friends. Her lips glistened under the neon lights.

“I was driving back from a conference in Santa Fe,” she told between bites, “when I reached this intersection in the middle of nowhere. You know the kind. You’ve seen it in movies: two roads, no sign, no direction, nothing. Out of the blue, I turned right. To this day I couldn’t tell you why. I knew the way home was straight but I took a turn. I drove for three weeks taking whichever road I felt like taking. I ate and slept whenever I wanted to. The only call I made was to my daughter in college to tell her I was fine. She had her own life already. ‘Mama,” she said, ‘I just want you to be happy’. I don’t know that I was. I spent three days holed up in a motel room reading from a box of mystery novels I had bought at a garage sale a hundred miles back. I ate and drank from the vending machine and when I got done reading I went for a swim and a steak dinner. I saw the Grand Canyon. I think. Maybe it was some other canyon. Who knows really? I didn’t talk to anyone. Just did a lot of driving. When I finally came home, there was a letter from the school district telling me I had been fired for being a no-show. I had been a school counselor for twenty-two years. I could have gone back and begged for my job but I didn’t. I sold my house and everything I had. Kept a couch and a coffee table and moved to a garage apartment in San Antonio. I didn’t even keep a bed or a set of sheet. At first, I thought I’d do something: write the Great American Novel, go to school, start a hobby. But all I did was read and watch movies. It was like a switch had been turned off in me and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything worthwhile. Or maybe it was the opposite: a switch had been turned on and I was just living the way people are supposed to live. It was the first time in my life I didn’t have to hurry.”

She pointed at a flower dress with a sweeping gesture that left a dab of cheese spread on the tiled floor: “And now look at me. Here I am: looking for work and with seventeen thousand dollars in credit card debt.”

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets? I wished I had had enough money so I wouldn’t have to deal with the creditors right now. But that turn off the highway? I think that was a gift from God and I am glad I had the good sense to take it.”

A first, send me light airy bouquets of pseudo wildflowers with dots of baby-breath and wispy, tender greens that will arrest mid-afternoon bureaucratic meetings long enough for me to speed-dial you on for an impromptu afternoon picnic. Just think of it: the two of us eating vanilla ice cream on a quilt by the artificial blue pond at the center of the business park. We will blow a small snowstorm of private wishes from a dandelion. You will pick a blade of grass from my lips before kissing.

Later you can send me a happy batch of sunflowers but once love strikes, I tell you, only two dozens roses will do. They will have to be velvet-curtain red and elegantly arranged in one of those satisfying vases with the spiraling weeds and the tasteful silk ribbon. This will be no time to be cheap darling. You will want to be back and this modest initial investment will ensure that all your phone calls will get past my assistant and that my calendar will be cleared for seventy-five evenings in a row.

Whenever you pick me up for lunch, I will lock my arm under yours and smile all the way to the small bistro with the checkered tablecloths and the Gerber daisies sticking from the Italian wine bottles.

Be wary of birthdays and Valentines: I have the taste of an eighteenth-century noble woman who demands overflowing bouquets of peonies and orange-colored roses with a reddish fringe, lots of eucalyptus, some fern, a few orchids and purple lilies. I tolerate neither cheap carnations in bud vases nor stiff suburban arrangements of exotica. Obligations bore me stiff; I want passion in petals.

Should you show up on my doorstep the morning of May 1 holding a small pot of Lily of the Valley I swear I will call in sick and give you my entire day. I cannot resist Lilies of the Valley, they go so well with cold beer and Mexican food. Our day will be so memorable that you will show up the next year, and the one after that, pot in hand, until neither one of us remembers how we got started.

Give me flowers for no other reason that it will make us happy. Surprise me with a bouquet of irises on the dining room table, a single aster on the hood of my car, four bunches of gladiola in the bathroom, a handmade bracelet of black-eyed Susans, a jam-jar full of blue bonnets, wildly colored carnations from a curb-side flower stall, or a handful of wildflowers that will only last only as long as your embrace. I will kiss you every time, run my hand in the back of your neck where the hair is cut as short as the grass on a golf course.

When I grow old and can no longer see, choose for me the most fragrant plants, those that smell of lust, life, sun and wind. I will no longer care for subtlety. You will have to hunt for dianthus, gardenia and lilac and fly me to the Mediterranean for a nap in a lavender field.

Before each fight, hand me two thick purple thistles wrapped in newspaper, but once we reconcile I beg you to deliver whatever pours from your heart: tiny violets, renonculi tied with twine, a pansy dried between pages of my dictionary, a supermarket rose-bush, or some wild-ass tropical monster that will scare the wits out of me every time I step into the living-room. I promise to keep every flower in my heart until it withers away.

Should I die first, do as you see fit. I have seen coffins blanketed by rainbows of gladiola and others graced with a single white rose. Either is be fine by me, but please, nothing in lieu of flowers.

I am addicted to the simplicity of obituaries, to life distilled to its very core.

Open the paper and here it is: this man changed the world of cheese-making, this other revolutionized quantum physics. This woman loved powerful men but that one wrote books about the lives of worms, or danced her heart out, or was the best fly-fisher on this side of the Mississippi. In the local paper most everybody gets to fight a courageous battle with a dreadful illness or was the ever loving father, daughter, or nephew of someone else.

Most days I anesthetize existential angst in a daily hum-drum of paper-pushing routines and double lattes. But after reading the obituaries I pause to wonder what, in the end, will remain of my passage on Earth. Will it be the children I raised? The stories I wrote? The medical plan I administered so someone might win that courageous battle with the dreadful illness? Or will it be something more mundane, like the scarf I knitted absent-mindedly on the plane home from France but that might somehow be preserved for the next five hundred years and eventually displayed in a museum exhibit on “21^st century fiber arts”?

Or will the-thing-that-matters-most happen at the very end, like it did for Laurel Hester? The article does not say what she thought of her life. Had she been asked she might have talked about her love for her partner Stacie Andree, for whom she fought till the very end.  It's always about love.

Obituaries are condensed little romance novels offering us glimpses into someone else's love.  Delivered in neat paragraphs with a photograph of the main protagonist, they are meant to remind us that our combined hearts tick with the passion that makes the world go round.   They are tiny reminders of our intertwines lives and our struggles for meaning.  Let's read them, by all means.  Let's read.