The last few weeks have been intense and hard. My father passed away on August 19, the day after my birthday, and his services were held on my partner Alabaster’s birthday September 1. But my dad came into this world crashing a funeral–his father’s–and so the whole cycle of life seems contained in my dad’s own. Enter the corpse flower, and its day of bloom at the Denver Botanic Gardens on August 31, the morning of the day we were …