Flowers

Flowers, they smell to me like love and like death. My first experience with them was when I was young. I didn't like the smell of flowers, especially roses.  I seem to remember the strong smell of flowers and an old person in a casket with the overwhelming floral and rose smell. 

It felt a little crypt like to me and was my first association with the smell I didn’t like. I associated that smell it did not like anyway with old people from then on.  So flowers first got me to think of old people. I didn't yet appreciate the smell of a flower for the beauty that it is.  

When I became a young woman and began to attract the attention of men, I got flowers. Flowers of my own to enjoy.  That was the first time I smelled a rose and smiled as I thought of the young man who gave it to me.  Flowers began to smell like love to me and the smell transformed. 

It turned into something I liked better, then loved and even began to desire to have.  Then there was my husband’s funeral-it was also full of flowers.  That smell of funeral flowers this time was pungent with love, life, memories, and now death.  It felt like my own death too.  Not the death of my body, but my own death of my life.  

It wasn’t an old person or what I remembered that death was supposed to be, what I had been conditioned to expect.  It was a young person, the one I was supposed to grow old with.  The person I loved who was not old nor should be dead yet.  It was a new combination of meaning for this smell that has already gone through so many iterations in me.  

Just before Grant died, I had cleaned out what used to be his old office, to be a playroom.  I did a video chat with him to show him how clean it was. Nothing was in the room.  The photo here was just before I cleaned it out.  If only I could have known… it’s all ready for all the flowers we’ll get at your funeral.  

It’s a good thing I cleaned it out or I’d have no place to put them all!  I cleared it of everything, and left the house for what I thought would be the last time. We had moved to a new house and I planned to start our new life there and never come back.  

I would never have guessed that I’d be back in just a few short weeks; that I’d be living there again and that that room I cleaned out would become the place to put all the flowers from my husband's funeral. I brought all the flowers from the funeral home. 

They filled my house with their smell.  My house became what felt like a funeral parlor.  I love flowers, and I loved these flowers, but they filled me with sadness every time I walked into this empty room, filled only with flowers.  

I’d walk in, smell each arrangement and stand there and look at them, or sit and just stare past them out the window. I'd contemplate how this all surrounded me.  It's the place where I would sit and smell the strongest scent of flowers I had ever smelled in my life with more meaning than a flower had ever had. 

I kept the flowers there and watched them die.  I didn’t throw them away until every flower was dead and dried.  They were so beautiful when they were first all in there, and I knew it would be a morbid process to keep them in my home.  

For the first week they were bright and vibrant and beautiful.  After that, each day they would wilt, dry and smell a little different, until they were brittle and their smell of rot was more pungent than the smell of the fresh flowers.  I basked in the sadness of it.  

The reflection of what was once bright, beautiful and longingly fragrant to that which was just the opposite of what it once was.  I watched it happen in my empty room.  I was watching it in my own life too.  That’s why I kept them.  That’s why I wanted to keep them.  That’s also the only way I could throw them away.  

Now, when I get flowers, I smell them and am filled with so many emotions.  I don’t think of death when I smell them.  I think of life and how much of life is filled in the scent of a flower. I think of how in that fleeting moment of the beauty of a rose, I can truly appreciate what it has to offer me.

I know that it’s time is short. I know its purpose is to bring beauty for this moment, not forever. I know that this life is meant to be lived in this moment, not in a forever that doesn’t yet exist.  So being in the moment and enjoying the beauty and smell of a flower is what I choose to experience now when I smell a rose. 

Smelling a rose or any other flower still comes with the memories of life, love, death and so many more layers of smell and experience now to me; yet in that moment when I have and smell of the fragrant beauty of a rose given  it brings a smile. Now I just smile.