Death and the Gardener

A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning. His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation. The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him. It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories. But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.