My grandmother had a plant on her kitchen windowsill for eleven years. A pothos, broad-leafed and green, the kind that doesn't ask for much. She watered it every Sunday after church, the same way she did most things: quietly, faithfully, without making a production of it.
Last spring my cousin Marcus, who was eight and therefore certain about everything, walked into the kitchen and announced that the plant was dead.
"Grammy, that thing is trash," he said. "Look at it."
He wasn't entirely wrong. The leaves had gone from green to yellow to a papery brown at the edges. Roots had pushed up through the soil and curled over the rim of the pot like the plant was trying to climb out. The pot itself had cracked down one side.
My grandmother set down her dish towel and looked at him.
"The plant isn't trash," she said. "The pot is."
She pulled an old newspaper from the stack by the back door, the kind she kept for exactly this purpose, and spread it on the table. She worked the root ball out, gently, and showed Marcus what was underneath. White roots, dense and alive, pressing in every direction. The plant had simply run out of room. It had grown past what the pot could hold.
She moved it to a larger pot that afternoon. By June it had thrown out four new leaves.
I thought about that plant this morning, standing at the edge of a crowd in dark clothes, listening to a pastor speak about my Uncle Al.
The Lord has given him a new pot to live in, he said.
Al was seventy-three. He had filled up every room he ever walked into: loud laugh, wide shoulders, opinions about football and the best way to season a cast iron skillet. He coached youth baseball for twenty years. He drove my mother to her chemotherapy appointments when I was too young and too far away to do it myself. He was the kind of person who ran out of room in whatever space you tried to put him in. He always had.
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
I keep thinking about that cracked pot on my grandmother's kitchen table. How Marcus saw trash, and she saw evidence of something outgrowing where it had been. How the roots had been the living thing all along.
The pot is what we bury. The plant is something else.