Daffodils

This story recalls the events of the passing of my close friend Joyce Biernat in 2005.

Daffodils
By DJ Winters
April 27th, 2006
Edited November 2007
Edited November 2025

Death rarely announces itself. It doesn’t knock politely or whisper a warning. Bang! That’s it—you’re dead. As humans, we never know when we will be forced to confront death. For some, it marks the beginning of a journey; for others, it is simply the end. Many people never think about it until after the fact—that is, if they can.
Death is not limited by time or space. It moves freely, anywhere and at any moment, and knowing this, we should all be ready. We may experience it, witness it as it takes another, or feel its brush as it tries to take us—sometimes leaving us imprisoned in bodies that no longer feel alive.
Nothing about that March day felt ominous. In fact, it began with promise—bright, hopeful, almost ordinary.
I was twenty-seven, trying to build a life out of ambition, faith, and barely enough money to cover books and gas. I had recently transferred to the Community College of Denver to pursue an Associate of Applied Science in Architectural Drafting. Architecture had become a kind of obsession—nighttime sketches, daydreams about buildings I might one day design, the fantasy of shaping structures that would outlive me. For the first time in a long while, I felt direction.
Spiritually, things were shifting too. I had been baptized at Littleton United Methodist Church a few months earlier, and the congregation had taken me in the way real families do—without hesitation or conditions. I cooked Wednesday-night dinners, serving while church ladies asked about my classes and older men teased me gently about life. It was one of the first communities where I felt fully seen.
And woven through my life was Joyce.
We met more than a decade earlier, when she and her mother, Bea, moved into the townhouse next door in Aurora. Joyce was vibrant even then—curly reddish hair, bracelets that clinked when she laughed, and a mischievous warmth that made even ordinary stories sound magical. Over the years, she and Bea shared family tales with me: Minnesota winters, dance-studio memories, travel mishaps, and the tight closeness between a mother and daughter who had weathered storms together.
When Bea became ill and eventually passed, Joyce and I bonded even more. I was young, navigating a fractured family life, trying to survive more than thrive. Joyce stepped into that gap without ever naming it. She brought me leftovers, asked about my day, and told me she was proud of me even when I didn’t feel deserving. In return, I helped with Christmas lights, small repairs—tasks a son might do. Over the years, we fell naturally into those roles: she became a mother figure, and I became the son she didn’t get to keep.
She carried her own burdens. Her son had died of AIDS in his twenties—a grief she seldom spoke of directly but wore like a second pulse. She worked two jobs: organizing senior outings and helping elderly job seekers find work. Her health was fragile. A heart attack years earlier had led to a defibrillator implant. She brushed all of this aside with stubborn humor, insisting she was “fine” even when she wasn’t.
Still, she carved joy from the life she had. She adored her grandchildren—bright, spirited kids she bragged about with glowing pride. Her daughter Terry lived nearby, and their bond held strong.
My days wove themselves around school, church, and Joyce’s small house in Littleton. Some weekends I helped her with the garden; other times, we simply enjoyed the quiet of each other’s company. The previous fall we had planted daffodil bulbs, joking about how she’d forget them until spring surprised her.
Those daffodils were just beginning to bloom the morning she died.
March 25, 2005—Good Friday—began like many holidays we shared. We planned to attend a church service, but Joyce felt tired, listless, slightly feverish. Bronchitis, the doctor said. Nothing alarming. We returned to her house. Evening settled gently. We watched television. She went to bed early while I settled into the guest room, grateful for sleep after a long week.
The house was quiet—the kind of quiet you don’t question.
At 3:26 a.m., that silence shattered.
First came the scream.
It wasn’t a cry for help or anything recognizable as human. It was sharp, primal—the kind of sound that forces your body upright before your mind understands. I scrambled out of bed, heart pounding. For a moment, nothing made sense. Then came the crash—wood on wood, body on floor, life colliding with something irreversible.
I ran to her bedroom door. It wouldn’t open. Panic clawed at my throat. I sprinted through the bathroom instead, flipping on lights with shaking hands.
She was on the floor—slumped sideways, limbs slack, head hanging.
“Joyce!” I dropped to my knees beside her.
She was breathing, shallow and rattling, unconscious. The air felt thin, as if the room itself were shrinking. I dialed 911, barely recognizing my own voice as I answered the operator’s questions. Muscle memory took over. I unlocked doors, turned on lights, cleared space.
When I returned to her side, the operator asked, “Is she still breathing?”
I looked down.
Her chest was still.
“No,” I whispered.
“Do you know CPR?”
“I… I think I’m going to have to.”
I lifted her gently, positioning her body in the hallway where there was more room. My hands shook, but every bit of focus I had narrowed into one mission: keep her alive. I began compressions. I gave breaths. Between each attempt, I talked to her—pleading, coaxing, bargaining with a God I hoped was listening.
“Come on, Joyce… stay with me… I’m right here…”
Her face looked unfamiliar, drained of the light that had always defined her. I don’t know how long I worked on her—seconds and centuries all at once.
Then the front door burst open. Paramedics flooded the room.
“In here!” I shouted, still doing compressions.
They took over instantly. Machines beeped. Instructions flew. Someone guided me backward as they worked. I watched but couldn’t comprehend. My mind kept repeating: This isn’t happening.
One medic asked about medications. Another about symptoms. I called Terry but couldn’t tell her the truth—not yet. I couldn’t form the words. Six and a half minutes after the 911 call began, they loaded Joyce into the ambulance.
At the hospital, I spotted Terry sitting beside her mother, both motionless and quiet. A nurse said gently, “She suffered a massive heart attack. Her heart seized. There was nothing anyone could have done.”
Nothing.  Two syllables that rearrange a person.
I stepped into the small room, standing before someone who had been alive minutes earlier and now lay utterly still. She looked like Joyce, but she wasn’t Joyce anymore. My hand trembled as I touched her arm. Her skin was cool.
Some part of me whispered that Christ had taken her gently—perhaps even before I reached her—but the thought brought no comfort. Grief rearranges time. It breaks order and logic.  Tears didn’t come. Shock filled the spaces where sorrow should have been. Outside, the world was still dark.
I returned to Joyce’s house, not wanting to intrude on the family’s sudden grief. The living room still bore traces of the medical crew. Her bedroom was quiet, the bed unmade. I cleaned what I could, gathered my things, and left the space as gently as possible.
Outside, the daffodils stood open and bright in the early light. I barely noticed them then. Only later would I understand how deeply they’d root themselves into this memory.
At the first stoplight, the dashboard clock read 6:20 a.m. Three hours had passed—three hours that divided my life into before and after.
The weeks that followed blurred: the funeral, family gatherings, condolences. I hand-crafted her urn, pouring every ounce of grief and love into the wood. People said it was beautiful. I barely remembered making it.
I stayed in classes that summer, burying myself in schoolwork as if it could hold the grief at bay. But trauma does not care about distractions. By August, preparing for fall semester, I began to break under the weight of unresolved shock. One afternoon, overwhelmed, I picked up my phone and dialed Joyce’s number before realizing what I was doing.  It felt like tearing open a healing wound.
Depression settled in. Nightmares blurred with waking hours. Suicidal thoughts came quietly, disguised as exhaustion. I told no one. I believed grief had an expiration date. I believed my spiritual foundation should have made me stronger.  Instead, I felt hollow.
Eventually, desperation drove me to therapy. My therapist named what I could not: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. EMDR sessions helped pull the memory out of the dark corners where it hid like a monster waiting to pounce. My church supported me; some friends did too. Others drifted away or told me to “move on.” Grief reveals people in ways joy never does.
Slowly, I began to heal.  Healing did not mean forgetting. It meant learning to live with what remained.
I wrote my will—not out of morbidity but clarity. Death had shown me its unpredictability. I stopped using words like someday and wish I had. I thanked strangers more. I paid attention to small moments that once slipped by unnoticed. I tried to love people more openly, in ways I once hesitated to. Grief softened parts of me ambition had hardened. Faith rooted itself more deeply—not as an escape from pain but as a companion through it.
Most of all, I began asking myself every day:  If I go right now—this minute—am I ready?
The answer changed, but the question shaped me.
I think often of those six and a half minutes on the phone with 911—the longest and shortest moments of my life. I think of the hallway where I did CPR, my hands pressing into the chest of a woman I loved like family. I think of the daffodils blooming outside her window as death slipped into her room.
I remember standing in that garden that morning, watching the petals tremble in the breeze, impossibly yellow against the soil. They bloomed without permission or apology. They bloomed because life, even in grief, insists on returning.  Joyce is gone from this world, but her memory persists in small, bright ways—stories, lessons, laughter, the warmth she left in the spaces she once filled. And every spring, when the daffodils return, I am reminded of that Good Friday morning: brutal, holy, transformative.
Death visited my life that day and took someone precious from me. But it also left behind something unexpected: a deeper understanding of how fleeting and sacred life is.

The daffodils still bloom. and I am still learning to live—fully, gratefully, as if each day were both a beginning and a gift—because of her.