Not Victorian, but flower symbolism just the same
We had to fight to get them in there, but when we finally said good-bye to my sister, there were four yellow roses there. A bit of silliness, perhaps, when all is over and done with, but yellow roses have sort of been a tradition. My grandfather asked for them, before he died. As he had never said a word about his own death, his wishes or anything else when he suddenly told my mother that "yellow roses would be nice" two days before he passed away in the nursing home, my mother thought it important to tell us. And we all agreed, yellow roses it would be. I think that's when the idea started to take root.
About 15 years after that, the first of my mother's elder sisters passed away. My mother was the youngest of five daughters born to her parents. The eldest of those girls died as a young child, before my mother ever knew of her or knew to make a memory of her. So for the great majority of her life she was one of four sisters, part of a set of seven. But her relationship with her sisters was a strong and dominant force throughout her adult life. She an her remaining sisters went to my cousins and my uncle and asked that four yellow roses be included in my Aunt's funeral wreath as a token of those four sisters. It was never said, but I and my sisters had assumed the idea for the four yellow roses came from our mother. She was like that; she paid attention to those kinds of symbols.
When our momma passed away just four short years after her second eldest sister, I told my sisters we needed four yellow roses somewhere, so her sisters would know what they meant to her. So we could make a statement about being one of four sisters.
I have a small enamelled box on my writing table where the dried petals from those four yellow roses live. She's been gone for 14 years, but I'm a sentimental fool, and thus do these symbols have meaning for me. My younger sisters tease me about this, my son rolls his eyes but says nothing. My therapist once told me I imbue my objects with heavy doses of meaning. My roommate notes the endless clutter.
Every so often I open the box and look at the petals.
When my nephew phoned me to tell me that my own, younger, sister had died, I knew that arrangements and services and symbols would not be mine, or my siblings to share. The distance between the life my sister had led once she left our childhood home and the children we had once been together was very, very great. We, her siblings, were invited to pay our respects, but the family that was grieving no longer included us, at least from the point of view of my sister's in-laws, who were in charge of all of the arrangements. I suppose this is how it should be, on some level, after all my nephews and their children had lost their mother and grandmother, my brother-in-law had lost his spouse. Ugly family history and some active agitation had separated my sister from her sisters a long time ago. The opportunity to ask for a birth family tradition to be honored never really presented itself during the very emotionally tense time that we attended her funeral.
But her sons had arranged for a celebration of her life to take place at sunrise the following day. A gathering on the side of a mountain to watch the sun come up and to talk about our memories. For this event my remaining sisters and I brought with us four yellow roses, for the four sisters we had been. I wanted to leave them there on the mountain. My sister wanted to give them to my nephews. My baby sister, the deceased's twin, said no. She claimed to right of the common birth and took the roses with her back home.
On the way to the airport, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel and bought an ugly, painted box so her petals would have a place to live, too. Because, four yellow roses will always need a home.