Love and flowers

What Patricia Hampl's memoir taught me about grief and beauty

The first year I sent my mom flowers for her birthday it was April of 2012. I selected a beautiful bouquet of tulips I knew she would love. At the time, I had never sent her flowers before, and I probably would have counted that gift a waste of hard-earned money had I not fallen in love with flowers the year before. I used to wonder why people gave them as gifts since they usually didn’t last longer than a week. I especially didn’t understand why people would give flowers to someone who had lost someone. Wouldn’t they just remind the person of death? I didn’t have that emotional maturity or understanding of the often necessity for the gift flowers.

Now, I fall in love with a bouquet in the store and take them home to be reminded of the beauty, fragility and brevity of life. This evolution or preoccupation with flowers or their symbolism didn’t happen naturally. It started after I read The Florist Daughter, by Patricia Hampl. In her memoir Hampl writes,"Love and flowers, death and flowers. But flowers, flowers, always flowers, the insignia of death, the hope of resurrection.”

Original image of my worn copy of Patricia Hampl’s memoir

Hampl showed me something I’d missed: the work of a florist is underrated, possibly misunderstood. It’s both balancing texture, color, size and translating emotion into bloom and color. The flowers you select can carry their own language—red roses for romantic love, yellow for care and friendship, white for grief and remembrance. What looks like a lively and bright bouquet can also express meaning. Flowers help us say what we can’t always put into words: I love you. I’m sorry. I remember. You matter. The arrangement itself is an act of care, a way of tending to someone even when we can’t be there ourselves. After reading Hampl’s book, I began buying flowers more often.

I placed my flowers on a coffee table where there were framed pictures of relatives who had “gone on to glory.” I did this in remembrance of them. In the center of the table, I placed the clear vase with the prettiest flowers I could find that week in the grocery store.

Original Photo of one of my past bouquets of white gladiolus

When there were just pictures without flowers of my ancestors, I would walk by that table every day without a glance at the frames that needed dusting. I didn’t pause to look at how strong my great grandmother looked or how handsome my grandfather was even as an older man. If I took the time, I could remember what he used to sound like, but I was always buzzing by that table to get to the next task.

The fresh flowers reminded me to take pause. I knew their life was short. I had to enjoy them before they wilted and died.

Now I not only buy flowers for remembrance but to also spark joy. I not only buy them for others, but also for myself.

This year I will send my mother flowers again for her birthday and she will most likely place them on the kitchen table or on the center of the coffee table where she can look at them daily, point at them to share what I sent. She will smile at them and remember their beauty even when they’re gone. And, I will stop to smile at the beauty around me while I am still here. I will smell my flowers on my shine and remember to notice the beauty in the moment as well as in the faces closed in their frames, frozen in their time, and far from their hour of bloom.

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This is what I write about in my Food, Memory, Love, Loss series—the ways we tend to each other and to memory. Flowers on a coffee table. Recipes donated with prayers. Care made visible through what we create and share.

Every 1st and 3rd Sunday, I tell another story from The Divine Cookbook . If you’re just finding this series or missed the origin story of how the cookbook came to be, you can start here.

Thank you for reading.

I hope you find Between Grief and Joy a space where you find mirrors for your experience, windows to understand others and confirmation that your emotions are valid, your healing is supported and you are never alone.

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With gratitude,

-Yolande