The Victorian Language of Flowers was used for decades to relay feelings that people had a hard time expressing or were too embarrassed to share. Each flower has its own meaning and each color further explains the emotions they imitate. The flower we will be looking at today is the Star Lily. With six delicate white petals, the flower mimics the appearance of a star. The flower is wild and occurs naturally in prairies, grasslands, and mountain meadows. When bees try to pollinate this flower, they have been observed to fly rather erratically afterwards. In the Victorian Language of Flowers, the Common Star Lily symbolizes death and poison.
My roommate, Lauren, loves stargazer lilies. They are one of her favorite flowers, and upon searching for their meaning, I realized that they don’t date back far enough to have been used in the Victorian Language of Flowers. Turns out they are a hybrid created by cross-pollination in the late ‘70s. So, while they have a modern-day meaning, the closest I found from flowers of the Victorian era in books and online was the Star Lily.
It’s crazy to think that such a small, unsuspecting flower from the mountains could symbolize something as heavy as death, yet its poisonous nature deems it so. No one person deals with death the same way. It’s a hard concept to grasp, as despite religion and beliefs, we have no concrete answer to what comes after our lives in this world. Some believe in heaven, some in reincarnation, some believe your energy is expelled into the universe, while others just think of it as an infinite nothing. This uncertainty and the absence of a loved one frequently leave people in a lost state, as if to ask, “What now?”
Recently, my cousin’s grandfather passed away. While he wasn’t my grandpa, I still saw him at most family gatherings and spent time with him as a child. As a little girl who was raised Catholic, being invited to their family’s Passover was a completely new experience for me. With patience, Grandpa Ben explained the traditions to me and the core beliefs of Judaism. Little me never truly thought about what comes after death — I just thought of heaven and hell as I’d been taught in CCD. But now I reflect on those times with Grandpa Ben, and I hope that the afterlife is exactly what he dreamed, regardless of what it’s truly like.
When I first found out about his passing, I messaged my cousins to check in on them, and one wrote that he felt like it hadn’t yet hit him. He lives far away from where he grew up, where he most frequently saw his grandfather, and after talking to him, I feel that grief is strongly associated with memory. The news of someone passing never comes happily, but the realization of the meaning of death is a completely separate experience. Once you’re back in the environment you so frequently saw your loved one, you suddenly realize this gap. Something that’s not quite right — that’s missing. Almost as if you were to wake up one morning and the songbirds weren’t singing. Almost as if your morning coffee lost its scent. Almost as if your bag feels lighter than normal. There is this sense of unease as we feel something isn’t quite right, and then it hits you, they’re really gone. The weight of the realization hits and depresses you far more than any trivial thing. Suddenly, you feel the weight of the loss.
I think that the custom of hosting funerals is interesting. It’s supposed to be healing and almost a resolute moment for mourners, but in my experience, the mourning doesn’t truly occur until I’m reminded of the person. It’s when I see a flower my nanny would’ve loved and realize I can’t call her to show her that I feel the absence. It’s not until I get a wonderful item on a great sale that I think of my Grandmother’s pride and effort to save every penny while helping the most people.
To those who’ve recently lost someone: Loss hurts. It feels strange, and you might not understand why or what’s going on, but the reasoning won’t change the emotion. Maybe understanding the reasoning will give you clarity; maybe it will deepen the severity of your emotions. But at the end of the day, it’s most important that when something feels not quite right, and you feel weary, you give yourself the grace you deserve. Everyone mourns in their own time.
