by Amy Straub
Fourteen years ago, as my husband was completing his graduate studies, he was offered a teaching position at a college in Southern Africa. A few months later, he traveled there for a survey trip and came home brimming with excitement.
After weighing the risks and rewards of the opportunity before us, we said goodbye to my native state of Minnesota and relocated to Zambia with our two toddlers, both still in diapers. The change of climate alone was a shock to our systems, and many months passed before our bodies and souls began to adjust to our new surroundings.
Every year, Zambia endures a full six months without rain. This was one of the most disorienting changes we experienced in our transition to the Southern Hemisphere. We’ve been here over a decade now, but this prolonged season of drought still leaves me feeling as barren as the dusty roads and dead grass around me. By the time dry season reaches its scorching crescendo every October, I feel like a heap of bones, sun-bleached and brittle.
As a Midwestern transplant in Africa, it comes as a shock every year to witness the local flamboyant trees burst into bloom at the peak of the blistering drought, when my own soul is sapped to its core. Northern roots are known for their hardiness, but when they’re exposed to relentless heat and dehydration, they wither faster than a wildfire ravaging an open prairie. I’ve always wondered how these sub-tropical trees find the reserves to produce such vibrant petals when everything else is shrouded in dust.
Mercifully, Zambian culture is as warm as her climate. The love we found in our new friends was the life-giving stream that sustained us in those early years. We brought two more babies into our cross-cultural world, completing our family tree. As our branches leafed out, our roots deepened and acquired a toughness to match the difficult terrain.
Life in this country provides frequent reminders of human powerlessness. A normal day here may include (but is not limited to) up to twenty hours without electricity, an unreliable and contaminated water supply, police and government workers that expect bribes, and debilitating illnesses delivered by tiny mosquitoes and microscopic parasites. Together, they scream: “You have no control here.” We can’t so much as switch on a light or use running water without permission from unseen others. Chaos reigns, and we do our best to pick up the pieces and stay alive in the process.
But paradox is alive and well here, just as it is everywhere else on earth. Along with the frustrations we face in Zambia, there is a haven of reliable beauty unique to this place, and I’ve turned to it again and again to keep me grounded. This refuge is my garden: a leafy, tropical blanket that enfolds our home more beautifully each year, my care emboldening its encroachment onto the lawn that my husband prefers to keep clear.
In Zambia, gardening isn’t limited to a brief seasonal window like it was in my native country, with only houseplants surviving the long winters. In this world, the alchemy of leaves, sun, soil, and water is a sustainable source of wonder. Plants that were confined to decorative pots in my childhood home now spread freely as ground cover around the edges of the lawn.
There’s a running joke among local plant lovers that you can put a stick in the Zambian soil and it will sprout leaves. When the rains return, gardening is more an effort to control growth than to encourage it.
We’ve enjoyed mangoes, avocados, bananas, sugar cane, guava, and passion fruit from our own yard, and our flowering trees and bushes are home to an incredible variety of songbirds and pollinators. I’ve learned to compost and amend impoverished soil. I have planted palm seedlings that now tower over me, propagated trees from seed pods collected by my children, mounted orchids and epiphytic ferns to tree branches, turned neglected trash heaps into shaded walkways with vined trellises, and I’ve learned so much in the process. Cultivating this piece of earth has filled me with more satisfaction than the literal blood, sweat, and tears it has drained from me.
Zambia’s unique climate has given me the opportunity to notice the habits and growth patterns of fascinating plants and trees that I had only ever seen in the glossy pages of National Geographic magazines. Acacia trees, with their distinct umbrella-like shape, line the highways. Fever trees with thorns as long as your fingers pose a threat to barefoot children who venture too close to their fallen branches. Massive, prehistoric-looking agaves line the properties of our neighborhood, their tough, jagged leaves providing security from intruders as well as stunning symmetrical beauty.
I’ve admired these drought-tolerant plants for over a decade, but I recently came to love and identify with the agave on a deeper level. Its life cycle demonstrates a survival rooted in surrender, and this wisdom has become a personal anchor in a season that has hit our family like a whirlwind.
I say this because our life in Zambia is coming to an end. We’ve been planning on a study leave in 2026 for my husband’s PhD in intercultural education — his next step towards deeper cross-cultural engagement in this place he has grown to love so much. But we have been fighting for our health for so long that we’ve been forced to recognize that the battle is no longer sustainable, and we’ve raised the white flag earlier than expected. Our love for Zambia and the work here remains unchanged, but resistant tropical diseases and worsening environmental conditions have taken their toll on our ability to function.
We’re facing one of the biggest transitions of our life so far, not only because we will be uprooting our family again, but because we have experienced significant relational breakdown over the past several years that has left us even more adrift than when we first arrived, young and earnest, on African soil.
When we moved to Zambia, we had a clear purpose, and communities on both sides of the globe surrounded us in support and encouragement. Now we’re standing in the dark, mid-step, unable to see where to safely plant our feet next. The once solid ground beneath us is crumbling, but as I write this, we don’t have a new purpose or place yet. We have lost our sense of home on both sides of the world, and all we can do is wait.
I understand now that waiting feels a lot like dying. It is a slow starvation of hope. In this season of loss and grief, the agave’s singular approach to death has broken over me like an invitation into a new and significant purpose, a way to make meaning even out of the emptiness of forced dormancy.
The agave genus includes hundreds of species; most of which are monocarpic, meaning that each plant blooms only once in its lifetime. Before it dies, the agave uses all its remaining energy to produce a huge flower spike that towers nearly thirty feet in the air. One day, I rounded a corner in our neighborhood and was shocked to see a small tree that had not been there before. That “tree” was an agave death bloom.
The death bloom is the last act of an agave plant’s life, and it produces thousands of seeds and small new plants that ensure the continuation of its species. As it dies, the agave explodes with new life.
Our own human life cycle has some significant parallels to this pattern. I suppose it isn’t surprising, as we also belong to the natural world.
In my childbearing years, I was encouraged by an experienced midwife that when a laboring woman reaches the point of exhaustion and she believes she can’t go on, it almost always signals that she has entered the phase of labor called transition: her baby is about to be born. As she reaches deep for her final drop of energy, her former life ends and both mother and child are born into a new life together, their cries of agony and victory blending into one.
Ariel Lawhon writes that “A woman is never more vulnerable than while in labor. Nor is she ever stronger.” Humanity has endured for millennia because mothers willingly and powerfully break open again and again in life-relinquishing surrender.
And like a sunset mirrors the dawn, the end of life echoes its beginning. Similar to the transition a mother endures in childbirth, the passage into old age is a renewed opportunity to progressively pour ourselves out for others as we make the journey from this life into the next.
Our days on earth are considered meaningful to the extent that we leave behind an accumulated inheritance of love. One of my favorite lines in the musical Hamilton asks, “What is a legacy?” The answer paints an eloquent picture: “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” To pour out our love is to scatter seeds that will sprout and bloom long after we are gone.
As I studied the agave’s practice of self-propagation in death, a new awareness dawned on me. I realized that the trees here don’t flower despite the drought; they bloom because of it. When death approaches, the greatest act of defiance in the face of annihilation is to produce more life.
As my family faces the closing of this chapter in our story, we are exhausted and feel like we can’t go on. We are in transition, and it’s as grueling as labor and as mysterious as death. The weight of uncertainty feels impossible to carry any longer. My eight-year-old daughter says it feels like being inside a dark tunnel. We can’t see where we’re going, but we have to keep walking to find the light again.
When I learned about the agave’s striking death bloom, I realized that even in this death of ours, as excruciating as it is, we have the power to choose how we navigate the transition.
One possibility is to close ourselves off from a world that can be so cruel, develop a hard shell, and shrink inward in numb self-protection. I know this choice well, because I have wrapped it around myself like a dark cocoon for months. Why open myself to the incessant drumbeat of misunderstanding and criticism? Endings are painful enough without having to defend your decisions or explain the circumstances again for the thousandth time, all while being sick.
We are reeling from the prolonged loss of health we’ve experienced this past year, as well as the loss of relationships, loss of home, loss of trust, and loss of a sense of identity that follows the disintegration of hopes and dreams. It feels nearly impossible just to drag myself out of bed some mornings. Self-protection feels like the most sensible choice when everything around you is imploding, when relationships that once felt secure have turned into land mines.
But another choice remains. Like the dying agave, we can expand outward in vulnerable surrender and self-sacrifice, scattering the seeds of our love wherever they find soft ground. We can connect with friends. We can reach out, even in our limited capacity, in support of others who are struggling with their own version of pain. We can laugh. We can make music, art, and memories. We can leave little pieces of ourselves in the hearts that remain open to us. We can hold on to each other more tightly, in the deep understanding that grows in the soil of shared heartbreak.
If you have suffered, you understand how much courage this second option requires. But self-propagation over self-protection is worth the emotional and physical labor, even if we don’t get to see the flowers with our own eyes. Knowing they will one day bloom and continue the life-giving cycle is enough.
For months, I’ve been unsure how to respond when someone politely asks how I’m doing. It seems crazy to say I’m fine, but it would be equally absurd to attempt an honest answer. Very few people who greet you are prepared for a genuine response.
Those who want the unfiltered story are such a gift. A close Zambian friend and I have shared our actual realities with each other over the years, growing in our transparency and trust as time has passed. Our struggles couldn’t be more different, but how they feel is the same. Impossible. Insurmountable. Devastating. Now we jokingly ask, “How are you?” and respond “Fine!” and we laugh and laugh. And then we hold each other and cry.
As I spend my last days in this city that we have called home for so long, the city where I raised my children and have grown up myself, I notice death blooms everywhere. I marvel at the colorful petals boldly defying the dust. They are beautiful reminders that death can be navigated with intention. Life and its passing seasons can be relinquished gracefully and with loving purpose. Instead of raging or collapsing, I can become comfortable with discomfort and stay present in my pain. I can soften, open, and love, even as I leave.
I think have an answer now, at least in my own heart, when someone asks me how I’m doing these days.
The truth is, I am dying.
So I will surrender to the breaking open and undoing.
I — and my family — will bloom. And we will live on.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Amy grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a homebody with no desire to leave her native state. That all changed when she married Ben, a Canadian TCK with a travel bucket list as large as the globe. Together they moved to Kitwe, Zambia, where they have served for the past thirteen years at Central Africa Baptist University and in their local Zambian church. They have four kids who have enjoyed their many adventures around the world. Amy enjoys reading, writing, gardening, deep conversations and shared meals with friends, and exploring new countries with her family.
