Every Sunday, I brought seven crimson roses to my late wife Malini’s grave—wrapped in the same brown paper she once smoothed flat with her hand. But each week, they vanished. Not wilted—gone. I blamed caretakers, even animals, until I hid a trail camera behind her headstone. On the third day, I found my answer: a boy, maybe eleven, gently lifting the roses one by one and carrying them away as if afraid to wake them. The next day, he returned, cross-legged, reading softly from a notebook.
When I confronted him, he startled. His name was Reza. “She told me stuff,” he said, nodding toward the grave. “The lady in the red dress. She said this was a safe place.” My heart stopped—Malini’s favorite red dress, her bangles, her braid. He described her perfectly. He was the grandson of Malini’s old coworker, Mina. The roses, he said, were borrowed for his sick mother—“She said they were from someone who loved her very much.”
We began meeting each Sunday. I brought two bundles: one for Malini, one for Reza’s mom. We’d sit, talk, read. He once handed me a poem that ended:
“She told me love doesn’t end,
it just finds new places to land.”
Reza visits less now, but every year on Malini’s birthday, a single rose appears. I never ask how. Grief feels softer these days—less like falling, more like finding the tide again. Some love never leaves; it just learns where to land next.