Daisies & Dirt
My sister’s favorite flower was a daisy. I’ve always found that fitting. Daisies are unpretentious. They’re welcoming. The kind of flower that blooms beautifully for anyone and everyone. Daisies are far from the fanciest flower out there, but that makes them approachable.
So we bought daisies for the funeral. For the graveside part of the service. Planning a funeral felt so wrong, like it wasn’t real. But it was. And no other flower would have felt right.
At the end of the memorial service, we welcomed anyone who wanted to be there to join us for the burial. We also had the luncheon next door to the funeral home beginning right away, for anyone who didn’t. We told people what they would see at the cemetery would be hard to watch. That if they came, we would give them a chance to leave before the bulldozer drove in.
The cemetery had warned us that a burial was hard to witness. They told us the way most people choose to watch. How most people leave the gravesite after the coffin has been lowered. They shower the coffin in flowers and the ceremonial shovelfuls of dirt, but then they don’t stay for the rest. We smiled politely and firmly said that we’d be staying with her until the end. That we would not let Nicole be buried alone.
When a lot of people come to a funeral, the line of people saying goodbye is a long one. Nicole drew a standing room only sized crowd. The first people through the line were her teammates at City Year. They were all wearing their khakis and red jackets when they said goodbye and filed out of the funeral home.
Over an hour later, maybe two, my parents and I were the last three in the room filled with too many flowers and the echos of ten thousand tears. And then, it was just me. My parents let me be the last one to see Nicole’s face and say goodbye. Then I joined them in the hall and the three of us stepped outside, heading to the cemetery.
For three days now, I’d been staring out the big windows of the funeral home, staring straight across to my sister’s gravesite. I’d watched the maroon tent arrive and the yellow bulldozer, and the men digging her grave. So as we walked out of the funeral home, I looked to the spot I’d grown used to staring at.
My breath caught in my chest. People in red jackets and khakis stood in two perfect rows, in the freezing cold. Waiting to escort Nicole, and all of us, to her graveside.
A few hundred people came to the cemetery. We offered them all daisies as they arrived, most people walking up the red jacket and khaki path. At one point, I realized that we weren’t going to have enough daisies for everyone. And that Nicole’s team from City Year wasn’t going to get a single daisy for sending her off to the next world. That wasn’t okay with me.
So, I walked up to the bucket of daisies and a grabbed a handful of stems. We had gotten the kind with multiple daisies on one stem. I knew I couldn’t give everyone in khakis and a red jacket a full daisy stem, but I could give them each enough. Without saying a word, because I could no longer speak, I walked up to every person in a City Year jacket.
One by one, I stood face to face with every single one of my sister’s teammates. With each person, we’d make eye contact and I’d give them a small, sad smile of thanks. Then I’d break off a piece of the daisy stems in my hands and hold it out for them. Tears welled in my eyes and barely fell, but tears streamed down their cheeks as they accepted their daisies. It took me a long time, years, to realize that not all those tears were for my sister. Some fell for me.
When I finished my task, I turned towards the rest of the gathering crowd and walked back to my parents. Every pair of eyes were filled with tears, and every pair of hands was holding a daisy. While I was sharing daisies with the people in red jackets, everyone else shared daisies with each other. We turned not enough daisies into enough for everyone, and all I could think was that would’ve made Nicole proud.
The cemetery people were right. Even the ceremonial part of a burial is hard to watch. The slightly jerky motion of the casket being lowered into the grave is unsettling. I’ll never forget the sickening thud sound of the first shovelful of dirt that buried my sister. It was the sounds that made me surprised how many people stayed with us for when the bulldozer drove in.
The sounds of her funeral have always stayed with me, but so have the daisies. The daisies that silently spoke words when I couldn’t. The daisies that didn’t make a sound as everyone dropped theirs into the earth with my sister. A simple flower built perfectly for sharing, that grew into enough that day.
