Red and white roses turning pink

The image of red and white roses becoming pink gives Rachel and Ben Givens a way to imagine their shared future beyond death, but not to guarantee it. Recalled on a train journey through Italy, the childhood tale becomes a personal promise: their ashes will lie side by side, while what grows from them is left to fate.

The Recalled Tale

On the train to Bressanone, Rachel thinks of a story about two lovers whose ashes lie together: his beneath a red rose, hers beneath a white one, until the blooms merge into a soft pink. She remembers encountering the tale in an illustrated book from a library when she was about ten, but cannot recall the lovers’ names. The story’s details have faded; its image of passion continuing after death has stayed with her.

A Shared Future, Not a Certainty

Rachel offers the roses as a proposal for their own ashes. Ben responds teasingly, wondering whether the roses would mingle into one pink bush or whether red and white blooms would remain tangled together. His questions keep the image from resolving into a simple promise of perfect union: even in their imagined afterlife together, the result is unknown. They agree that there is no guarantee the roses will turn pink.

Leaving the Outcome to Fate

The conversation takes place after their marriage and as they travel north from Florence, carrying their new life together into the mountains. Rachel and Ben decide that their ashes should be interred side by side and leave the rest to fate. The pink rose is therefore not an assured ending but a possibility held within a concrete vow of closeness. Its uncertainty lets the image join love to mortality without pretending that either can be controlled.