When Don presented our team with this year’s annual blog theme, Cultivate Your Garden, I immediately thought of the journey I shared with my father-in-law. Over the past two years, my husband, Chris, and I cared for him through the ups and downs of the end stages of his life, finding meaning and beauty in life’s smallest gestures, even as we faced difficult realities.
My father-in-law was a man of few words—stoic and dignified. As his health declined, Chris took on the role of caregiver with gentle attentiveness and humility, honoring his father through a rhythm of care that felt almost meditative. During that time, Chris also created a garden—a patch of vibrant dahlias that became a living testament to the love and patience that defined those days. 
Watching Chris care for his father with such tenderness and devotion brought a new depth to my love and respect for him. His incredible capacity for caregiving—his patience, resilience, and quiet strength—was truly humbling. In those moments, my admiration grew as I witnessed his ability to offer unwavering support and compassion in such an unassuming way. His love was expressed through small, thoughtful gestures, and his commitment only deepened as time went on.
Amid the routine of caregiving, we continued to share moments of joy and connection through our favorite game, cribbage. My father-in-law had a deep love for the game and a talent for crafting personalized cribbage boards. Each board he made became a small piece of him that he gifted to those he loved. Playing cribbage with him was one of the ways we connected, finding comfort in the familiarity of the game and the joy it fostered.
For Chris, planting and caring for the dahlias became a way of expressing his love—not only for his father but for the life we were building together. Those flowers symbolized the strength we found in our shared dedication to what we could control: moments of laughter, comforting words, and a mutual respect that gave even the smallest tasks a profound meaning. I often went out to cut the dahlias, bringing their vibrancy into our home and sharing them with those around us.
Caring for someone at the end of life has been both one of my greatest challenges and one of my deepest joys. This journey taught me that genuine presence and compassion are the most valuable gifts we can offer. True contentment comes from cherishing those closest to us and nurturing the world we share. In the simple act of creating something beautiful together, we found a sanctuary—a space where life’s hardships softened in the presence of kindness, resilience, and the quiet satisfaction of building something enduring.
The dahlias bloomed like our commitment to one another—steady, vibrant, and full of quiet strength. They reminded me that contentment lies in the gardens we tend, both literal and figurative, and in the love we share within them. Through this experience, I realized that the “best of all possible worlds” is not an idealized paradise, but the one we create with the people we love.
