Forget- Me-Not Blue
May 7, 2008
I’ll not forget, back in my flower shop days making a posy of forget-me-not’s and lily of the valley, for a child’s funeral, it was delicate, pretty, ephemeral.
I’ve written before how flowers can send you back in time, date stamp a time and place, be it happy or sad, Dame Honoria Glossop writes about a similar experience, as does Bo; today’s flower thought was a little melancholy, but I have a lighter one to write about as well, I’ll be back soon.
There is a fellow name of Thomas Lynch who is a poet, a teacher of writing, and a second-generation funeral director in Michigan. He wrote one of the most powerful essays I’ve ever read, The Golfatorium. It is a complex piece, partly ironic (“Must be a golf course,” is what I said to myself . . . Or a cemetery. Hell! This is California! It could be both!”) - and partly about the meaning of the work of reconstructing the face of a child who had been brutally murdered. About the gift that reconstruction was to the child’s mother, who stood by the casket “for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force . . .” About how the child’s body now belonged “not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given them the body back.”
Changed my mind a good deal that day. It is important work, giving a parent something delicate, pretty, ephemeral for a child’s funeral.