My Beautiful Sunflower

My Beautiful Sunflower

It was early April and one of the last very rare Indian Summer Days where the light and warmth dressed the city in a final promise of summer. Lisen was looking through the florist window on Jetty Road, trying to decide what flowers to buy for her friend Carina’s funeral. She felt sad and strangely weak inside and somehow the flowers did not bring that sense of comfort and strength she had hoped for.

She looked at the roses; red, pink, yellow and white and thought of Carina walking through her rose garden with the secateurs in her hand. It was only a couple of months ago on that hot summer day when they sat on the porch sipping cold cider, watching the steam rise from the ground. They had brought fresh water to the chickens and hosed down the porch to bring some coolness to the air. Carina looked out over her roses and decided to cut away the spent flowers while Lisen watched without moving. She knew there was something wrong, Carina never did any gardening in the middle of the day, especially not when it was so hot.

She came back with the dead flower heads in the basket and almost symbolically placed it on the table in front of them.

“There, that’s it, the last of this summer’s bloom.”

She picked up the red, pink, and yellow heads in her hand and crushed them one by one as if they symbolized a life that was no longer and she looked at Lisen with a long solemn look before she spoke. Carina had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and there was no treatment for her illness. Lisen was shocked and something took a hold of her entire body making her feel weak and nauseated inside. They sat together on Carina’s grandmother’s old sofa on the porch and watched as the day dissolved into another hot night. They cried and they hugged each other as they talked not so much about the future as about the past they had shared together.

No, she would not buy roses for Carina. They did not seem real, arranged so perfectly there behind that shop window, only a prop sprayed with tap water to look fresh and desirable. But they were only shop roses and not those wild and beautiful flowers that grew in Carina’s garden.

The weeks that followed after that day on the porch would become one of the most difficult times in Lisen’s life. She had known Carina ever since the first day of school and she was one of her very best friends. They shared a lifetime of memories, innocent childhood games, teenage fun and the coming of age. Happy times when Carina’s and Jamie’s daughter Carol was born, sad times when Lisen’s mother passed away and the time when Lisen was forced to have a hysterectomy and Carina and Jamie was there by her bedside at the hospital. Carina was the sister Lisen never had.

She watched the gerberas, a colorful pageant of happiness and celebration which only seemed to mar the situation even more. Carina was a free spirit, always happy, down to earth and behind those clear blue eyes there was wisdom. She was not a cut flower in a vase.

Lisen felt the tears welling up in her eyes. The leafy green plants forced into pots of dirt; confined, trained, and stunted into a confined life. The cut flowers in the vases had nowhere to go and for a short time they would stay there, fight for a life that was doomed to end without any hope of new growth. It was not Carina.

The blue irises reminded her of the van Gogh exhibition they had visited last year but this was not van Gogh’s irises and it was not the irises that flowered so beautifully in Carina’s garden. They looked like they belonged in a funeral display, and the freesias reminded her of weddings long gone. The white carnations spoke of peace while the red ones talked about love. The shop assistant knocked on the window and waved at her to come inside and she realized she had been standing there far too long mesmerized and lost in memories.

She walked further up Jetty Road where the familiar shops seemed unfamiliar and the traffic so loud and insensitive. Something had changed and she understood that nothing would ever be the same again, she felt detached and transformed into a mortal sadness that she could not escape, no matter what she did.

Monday evenings at Carina and Jamie’s place. Lisen and her husband Alex named them the “Seinfeld Nights.” Carina cooked a nice vegetarian meal; she had learned how to cook Polenta to perfection and served it with plenty of butter and fresh cut parsley from the garden. Roasted vegetables with sea salt and rosemary and for dessert the beautiful Krishna apple crumble with a drizzle of honey and yogurt. They would bundle up together in the sofa with hot popcorn covered in melted butter and salt and they laughed as “George” once again put his foot right smack bang into it again. They drank Caro with milk from hand made mugs from their potter friend and later in the evening Jamie put on a movie. Something classic, black and white noir. Perfect evenings in the small stone cottage that belonged to another time.

Under the marquee at the end of the road she stopped, her heart skipping a beat when she noticed the big bucket of sunflowers on the ground.

Lisen could still hear Carina’s voice in the care center.

“A sunflower!”

She stood in the door looking at the bed by the window where the soft evening light was coming through the curtain, touching the blanket covering the tiny body in the bed. Jamie and Carol sat on the chairs by the wall. She moved towards the bed with the sunflower in her hand and as she bent down to kiss Carina’s cheek Carina smiled and kissed the sunflower. They laughed as she was picking out the seeds making eyes, a nose, and a big smiley mouth. Jamie put it in a vase and stood it on the window seal just beside the bed where Carina could watch it.

“I love sunflowers, and this is a happy flower!”

“I will call it “Happy Face.”

A fly buzzed around the window and Carina asked for somebody to please let it out.

“Lucky fly” she said, “if only he knew.”

That was the last time Lisen saw Carina. She passed on early in the morning hours a couple of days later and the rest was just a blur now. Jamie and Carol took the sunflower home where it was still standing smiling even though the petals had since dried and fallen off.

On the day of the funeral Lisen picked out the seeds from the two sunflowers she had bought. One for herself and one for Carina. She made eyes, a nose, and a smiling mouth and put the seeds on a piece of paper in the window to dry. When the spring arrived, she would plant them. She put her sunflower in a vase on the table and placed the other on the urn as it was lowered into the ground.

“Yes”, she thought, “a life well lived.”

“Goodbye my beautiful sunflower, I’ll miss you.”