a broken lily

a peace lily cutting | May 2013

When mum died 4½ years ago my brother and I organised the flowers for a pedestal in the church for her funeral service. The florist had premises just around the corner from the town centre church where the service took place. She told us that they had done a few floral arrangements for weddings and funerals at the particular church and were accustomed to walking finished blossoming artworks just around the corner.

We didn't get a close look at the flower display until we got back to the church after the committal at the crematorium. There were a good number of people to talk to, since mum was only just into her seventies, had lived in the same house and attended the same church for over forty years and she pre-deceased most of her contemporaries.

In the conversations we were aware of some whispers “did you see the broken lily?” Not necessarily direct, but still passing around amongst the general chatter, something for people to talk about in those circumstances when people don’t really know what to say to the bereaved family beyond a sorry for your loss and a few uneasy platitudes.

It’s not as though mum’s death was unexpected. She had been ill for several years and the cancer advanced rapidly during the last months, rampaging its effects swiftly in any area of her body where fragments of health still remained. The distressing impact of end-stage cancer meant more earnest prayers of ‘Lord take her quickly and relieve her suffering.’ He did answer those prayers.

Even in the midst of relief that suffering is ended, there is the numb, disbelief for those left behind. In limbo and in the uneasy company of a multitude of feelings that death and its sudden severance brings. 

And around the flower arrangement we the family found ourselves gathered, with the other close family members. The broken tribe, heavy with sorrow, including too in our conversations the missing brother who was absent with easily uttered excuses, but for reasons known only to himself. 

There but not there. 

Kin who had travelled the miles, sensing a new corporate incompleteness and saying our goodbyes to each other. And our final parting with Audrey, wife, mother, sister, grandmother, auntie whose blood lives on in most of us. 

One of the peace lilies in the flower arrangement had a broken stalk which was first noticed after the florists had vacated the building. And those women who gather on these days of sad, salty tears and farewells could not decide between them. Whether the brokenness was a careless mistake by the florist and that the stem had been accidentally damaged by the human hands that walked the flowers into the building or whether it was a deliberate broken stalk leaving the flower hanging down perhaps to convey sadness. One or two ladies when they passed the flower stand had tried to inconspicuously resurrect the bloom, but the flower obstinately drooped anyway.

I like to think that the peace lily was weighed down by all sorts of things on that day, mostly sadness.

But often I have looked back and most clearly seen in that broken bloom, the sheer beauty of all the imperfections. 

the dress (crimplene conundrum in Coventry)

In 1967 we had moved as a family from my parents centuries-long Hertfordshire roots to Warwickshire.  In the early days here we sometimes went shopping to the big shiny spangly city which was Coventry.  It had a Green Shield shop, where you handed over your pages of accrued green gummy squared stamps for things like lawn mowers and paddling pools, depending on who got lucky.

Coventry boasts one of the most beautiful Cathedrals in England.  In the 1960's in shameful contrast at about the furthest reach of the city centre was a shopping area dominated by ugly concrete blocks, called Lower Precinct. Within one of these cubes was housed the cavernous temple called C&A, pioneering fast-fashion bazaar.

It's strange what gets saved on the permanent hard drive of your memory. How travelling back and forth in time modifies the specifics. 

With hindsight I now know that the earliest deposits of the language of music and attending sensory experiences were accumulating within my brain in the late 1960's, even though piano lessons hadn't commenced.  When at university, I was in a class where we were played excerpts from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and asked to say instantly what came into our heads.  Most people talked vaguely about rolling fields and peaceful feelings.  I was rapidly transported back to 1969, sitting cross-legged on the school hall floor in assembly with a couple of hundred other small people in d.i.y. blue knitwear, with tendrils of disinfectant odour wafting into our tiny nostrils.  And the fear, the gut grasping fear of that formidable headmistress.

If you were around in 1969 you were supposed to know exactly where you were or what you were doing at the time of that earth shattering moment when man landed on the moon (I have no idea). 

Perhaps I never saw the momentous event on TV.

Maybe my books seemed more interesting and important at the time.

Memory, the old curiosity.

Back in C&A, as a five year old, I was in one moment being led by the arm in the midst of endless rails of clothes. Then suddenly standing alone, feeling trapped in a maze with no escape, a scary labyrinth with giant sides of garish garments being swished to and fro, which you might just fall into and never be able to escape...

But, the dress,  

we had come to get the dress for the photo

so everything was OK.

Mum chose the style she wanted me to have in the bargain, wrinkle free wonder fabric of the era, crimplene. (You couldn’t turn over in bed in those days between polyester sheets and nightclothes without seeing tiny shards of static flash before your eyes). I was given a choice between two colours, the pink flower print or the yellow sunshine motif dress.  I plumped for pink florals, but it was the yellow with the symmetrical suns that was taken to the till. I know there were some tears but otherwise what happened between the changing room and the checkout is a mystery. Still the event and its periphery have sat there in the long, twisting corridors of my mind ever since.

A conundrum that you cannot choose what lodges in your mind.


Given the vagaries of consciousness, sometimes what do you believe?

(Linking with Tanya Amber and friends for #concretewords – communicating the abstract through solid things.)