Flower shop

Flower shop.

Yesterday I went to a flower shop. My friend’s sister had given birth to a baby girl and I was on my way to the hospital to see them. The flower shop was packed, florists moving up and down, flower stalks being picked up from different vases and buckets and put together for different customers. It was like a bee hive!  Then I realised most flowers being prepared were wreaths.

This week there’s been so much sad news everywhere. Note, that I say sad not necessarily bad. I’ve learnt that not all sad things are bad. Sometimes they are unexplainable courses of nature. Or so I believe.

Anyhow, there I was amidst such colorful, beautiful flowers of all types, put together to celebrate the dead. There were daisies and roses and lots of flowers whose names I didn’t know. But they were beautiful, at least that I know.  A number of wreaths were on the floor while others were still being prepared on a huge table. The florists attended to them with such care you would think they would last forever. Cut off the extra stem, pluck off the withering petals and leaves, and align a certain color of a certain flower next to one of its kind or in juxtaposition with a different one. Such careful design work. Our own human attempt to understand and give respect to the dead.

This week I’ve heard lots of news about people who passed on and in some cases I have even wondered what to say. Let me say at this point that for some I have actually said nothing.  Friends, colleagues, people I know have lost somebody. But the truth is this is always happening.  I have watched death happen to people I know countless times. I have seen my best friends lose people that are very close to them. I have been there while they grieved in their own ways and time has passed. I have seen my parents lose their parents and break in ways I didn’t know they would. I have lost people close to me. In so many ways, I thought I would get used to it. But the truth is I never do. You would think when an older person dies there is less sadness because we all know they were bound to die but the pain always seems the same to the people closest to that person no matter how old they are. And it’s not about how deep the pain is in the end; sometimes it’s a test of whether we know where they are going and if we’re ever going to meet them again like our faith assures us. Sometimes, it’s not even about all this. It’s just death, plain old death taking away from us.

However, this is not about death. This is about many things BUT death. In fact I have seen tragedies that are much worse than death. Perhaps I sound ridiculous but believe me I have seen sad news. Yet as I sat at that flower shop amidst wreaths and messages of passing, I felt such peace. Peace I hadn’t felt for a long, long time. I was there to pick flowers for a baby girl who had been born three weeks before her due date, who had caused such complications in her birth and had her mother undergo a C-section. Who had caused such worry you would give up if you saw how tiny and pink and harmless she looked. But the fact that she was a baby bringing forth life from her mother’s womb meant everything. It meant that it didn’t matter how many other things went wrong because she survived and she was going to live, only to die, who knows how many years later but that at that moment she had lived. And sometimes that’s all we have. To live, even if it’s for a few days, but to know that we once were and when we go, who knows if we’re going to be seen again but we made a mark. We’re like scars. We don’t just be. We happen. We grow each day. We aren’t the beginning or an end, we are a process. We prove a point. We live and slowly or sometimes suddenly fade out but we are never forgotten. And sometimes some of us live longer in the minds of others than we do our own lives but in the end none of that matters.

Life in many ways is a perception. Soon as I realised there was, after all, good news in all the chaos, I noticed one bouquet that wasn’t a wreath. It was a basket of flowers with a bottle of wine at its centre. Perhaps it was for a couple getting married, or for a family reunion or for somebody that just got a promotion, who knows how many stories lay beyond, where the basket was going? Two people came in and one picked up a wreath, the other that basket. And in that moment I understood that the hymnist was right, it is indeed well. Life goes on and if I wanted I could willow and wallow in all the sadness or I could just pick up those flowers and go celebrate a new life.

I recently read a book about writing comedy centered screenplays and Andrew Horton believed there is no such thing as ‘objectively’ tragic or comic news. It depends on how you look at it. It’s all perception. Although I had trouble believing it, I think now I get it. If you look closely, there is always something to cry about. I mean hello, this is earth, and there is sad news everywhere. But if you look even closer, there is always something to laugh, maybe be not laugh but smile, yeah, there is always something to smile about. Try visiting a flower shop next time you doubt.