Handfuls of Petals

Last month I took a drive next door to Kansas to “walk home” a beloved departed church elder by officiating a small graveside service with her family. During the service, family members shared memories, as they often do. And on this day each one added a sunflower to the gravesite from a big bucket, because, Kansas.

Sue’s two year old great-granddaughter was there, and she exclaimed when she saw the flowers. When the remembrances began, this little one began too…

Sue’s eldest son was first to speak. He shared lovely memories, and when he had finished speaking and laid a sunflower by the urn, my small, self-appointed co-officiant saw her chance. She crept up to the flower, grabbed it, and took off through the gathered family.

She went first to her grandparents. With the concentrated carelessness of a toddler, she tore the petals off the sunflower in chubby handfuls and presented them to grandma and grandpa.

I think we were all unsure whether to be horrified or charmed, but when a toddler gives you something you take it. So there they sat, Sue’s second son and his wife, clutching handfuls of sunflower petals. The service went on.

The toddler went on too. Every time someone would speak and leave a flower, she would fetch the fresh flower like it was her one job and leave the torn one behind. She traveled through the entire small crowd, distributing sunflower petals into helpless open hands.

By the end of the service, if you were looking at the urn, you would see a very sad pile of petal-less sunflower heads stacked upon one another, empty and bare.

This is one way to think about death and loss.

But if you turned in the other direction, you would see a crowd of faces, bemused and sad and joyful and shining with memory. And you would see them all holding open palms full of sunflower petals.

This is another way.

As with all things, of course, both are true. When we lose someone, we weep at the lack, and we experience all that is missing as we go about our days. So much can feel dulled and empty and bare. The loss is real and deep.

And. In the realities of loss, we may also be startled to find ourselves sitting with handfuls of sunflower petals, to learn that there is abundance as well, that we carry bright memory into our daily lives, love filling up our hands and spilling over the edge.

Love that is now ours to hold. And share from open, helpless hands.