The language of flowers

Downer Warning: Today’s entry is not uplifting!

This is an observation about the flower industry that I feel compelled to share.  When I first started helping D at her shop, I was put into a small space with spectacular roses, lilies, glads and daisies.  How can you not be awed by the beauty of flowers, uplifted and put in touch with gratitude on a daily basis when working in such a fragrant and beautiful environment?

I love just hanging out up at the shop, even when I’m not doing anything but sniffing roses. I love doing the deliveries that light up peoples faces, it changes their day and brightens their eyes by ten years when you show up at a door with a vase full of something special, just for them.

Then there are the downers.  Excluding the usual customer riffraff of cranky individuals that’s inevitable in a service industry – there are the downers.  Funerals, accidents, diseases and sympathy.

This is the first vocation I’ve ever been a part of where I am most important as a witness of the triumphs and tragedies of other peoples lives.  By the very nature of the way we use flowers: to speak, mourn, fall in love, say thank you, etc.- the people who make the arrangements, and do the deliveries are just as much a part of the drama as those who chose to send the flowers. Whether we want to be or not – we are witnesses.  We see people at their best and worst – EVERY DAY!

Weddings full of sobbing-happy mothers, bridezilla’s and irritated father in laws.  Flower girls in their cute little gowns and the maid of honor giving meaningful glances at the best man.  We see kids picking up corsages for dances, their faces still in the outbreak of puberty- their eyes full of the wonder of first time love.  We see people come in, hair askew and faces haggard after sleeping at the hospital all night after their loved one has had a heart attack, or children lost to tragic and unforeseeable circumstances.  But most of all – we see men come in for a bundle of roses to say sorry for one stupid thing or another. We call them “the dog house customers”.  They only spend money on flowers when they’re in the dog house and are tired of sleeping on the couch. Then there are the birthdays, full of giggles and or snarky comments about age and being over-the-hill.

There are centerpieces for dinner events like Thanksgiving or Christmas and each time we send one out I wonder what their family says as they sit around a table together – what memories they share or avoid.  We deliver flowers to new mothers or baskets to congratulate a new birth.

Sometimes we get customers who still regularly put funeral sprays on gravesites.  Same day, ever year for the last decade.  When they come in they seem to need to talk aloud, to remember someone by speaking.  D let’s them tell stories and she nods with understanding or sympathy.  She tells me later it’s their way of coping – it’s their way of honoring someone’s memory by making sure their story stays alive.

When I first started making deliveries to the funeral homes, I couldn’t recall ever having seen a corpse before.  The first time I set up the arrangements around an open casket, I tried desperately not to look at the old man lying inside the blue silk box.  But ultimately, I did look.  I set the last vase of calla lilies nearby and stood before him and thought. 

“Here is someone’s father, grandfather, lover, teacher.  He’s old, and has deep creases around his mouth and eyes.  I bet he laughed a lot.  I bet he had a life he thought was full.”

And strangely, after that, I didn’t feel sad.  I didn’t worry about making deliveries at the funeral homes any more.  It’s just life.  Death.

Then today we set up a viewing for a 27 week old infant who died due to complications in pregnancy.  He was to be the first boy in a family of six girls.  The girls were all fitted with blue and yellow corsages as they were prepped to be the pallbearers.  All six of them in the shop, crying.

It’s days like this that make me angry.  Angry that these kids will learn about this part of life when they can barely write their names.  Angry that when we go home from the shop for the day – liquor sounds like such a good idea because how else do you process being around such intense emotions regularly?

I’m a storyteller, that’s what I do.  I don’t know how to be anything else – even when I’m earning my way by acting as something different.  This glimpse into the lives of people, the grief, and the joy and the blundering has helped me understand the complexity of human emotion – the well of feeling that we are capable of is profound and beautiful even at its most painful.  It makes me powerfully grateful to be human.  To feel, to gain and lose and endure and discover – and to feel every bit of it.

It’s also worth mentioning that during the four months that I’ve been here – I can think of perhaps two orders that were labeled “just because”.  It seems that in the way we as a culture think of flowers – they are only purchased for occasions, or emotions and that we rarely think of the “just because”.

I have anger for this also.  Anger that men will buy flowers for their wives when they’re in trouble or want to get laid, but not to say “I was thinking of you.” Anger that wives don’t come in and get something for their husbands to say “I appreciate you”.  I felt bad for a woman who came in one day and ordered a centerpiece then changed her mind saying, “It’s just me anyway.  I don’t need to waste flowers on myself.”

GOD! I wanted to slap her. I understand.  It’s money. Flowers can be expensive so we say what we want to say with flowers – when we have the extra cash or what we have to express is important.  But to say – even to yourself, that you’re not worth a five dollar vase of roses – seems to me that you need an ass kicking and a serious re-evaluation of worth.

So here’s my two cents: If there’s someone you like, appreciate or adore – don’t wait until you’re in the dog house to say so.  Even if you don’t say it with flower – JUST SAY IT! Don’t wait to thank your mother by buying an enormous funeral spray when she can’t see it – Flower her now, and donate money in her name to a charity she loved when she’s gone.  If you’re a woman – remember that men appreciate flowers too.  You can be a chick and get an Amaryllis or an orchid for a man that he’ll like and probably be very flattered by.  You don’t need an occasion, because when you’re dead all that you wanted to express, won’t matter anymore.

Life is short – so stop and smell the goddamn flowers!