The last time I smelled lilies was when a large bouquet of them took pride of place on my mother’s dining room table when my Dad died in the summer of 2023. Knowing how powerfully a scent could conjure a memory, I’ve semi-subconsciously avoided them in any bouquets for that reason. The other day, however, I happened upon some lovely lilies in the market. Emi had just been telling me that lilies were her favorite flower, and I was looking for a bouquet for Andy as he has been so supportive over the last few stressful weeks. With a soft pink shading, the lilies matched the roses in the bouquet I was assembling, and I took a chance with whatever memory might be brought back to life.
It took them a day to open up, and then they filled the room with their heavenly perfume. It brought me back to that sorrowful summer, to all those sad days, but it wasn’t sadness I felt, it was comfort. It reminded me that as upsetting as it was, there was also something very beautiful about my Dad’s graceful exit from this world, and in the way we said goodbye to him. There was peace in those days – sadness, yes, but peace too – and there was beauty in those weeks. Beauty in the flowers that appeared from friends, in the flowers that were tumbling out of the gardens in that gorgeous summer, beauty in the white circle of flowers that surrounded his urn in the church, in that moment when the family I had known all my life would be in the same place for the last time. Or so I thought.
It would turn out that we would be together again – in every family dinner where Dad came up in conversation, in every moment I struggled and turned to the idea of him for protection, and in the scent of these lilies that brought it all back.
