I am a fan of flowers. Everyone is different but, personally, I can’t imagine anything more appropriate, healing, or uplifting after a death than bouquets or arrangements of fresh flowers. In my book, they are pure joy, and when I have received them after a loss they gave me so much more value than whatever the person paid for them.

If you’ve experienced the death of someone close to you, whether a family member or a friend, then you may know how desolate it’s possible to feel.If the loss was sudden or violent or tragic, then you may know how unfair or mean or truly scary the world can seem. If you didn’t get to say good-bye to someone or if their dying involved a lot of suffering, then you may know how it feels to carry grief that feels like physical pain, that feels sharp, that needs a salve of some kind.



Enter flowers. I am not saying that they will magically take all the pain away. But I am saying that they are medicine. They are medicine for the mind and heart. They are medicine for our weary souls and grief stricken spirits. Beauty is medicine, my friends. Innocence and joy are medicine. Where only sorrow can be found, they offer themselves as antidote. They offer their color, their shapes, their light, their energy as evidence that the world is still a beautiful place and as evidence that life continues and will go on.

I know many people feel that flowers are a “waste.” “They’re just going to die,” you may have heard folks say. And while each grieving person may not need fifty flower arrangements at their house or at a service, I would never say that flowers are a “waste.” Rather, I would say that they are essential - essential components for beginning to restore hope where hope may be lost; essential ingredients for uplifting hearts where they are downcast; and essential elements because they are of the earth, and we are of the earth, and they offer themselves to us as salve for our grief.