Gerber Daisies
By Roger Lovette
[Roger Lovette is Pastor of the Baptist Church of the Covenant, an inner-city congregation in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of numerous good books among which are For the Dispossessed, A Faith of Our Own, and Journey Towards Joy.]
Funny how some of the most important moments in our lives cluster around the simple things. Often these are occasions which seem inconsequential at the time. The gospel says that abundant living usually flows out of simple things like mangers and loaves and fishes and bread and wine and chance encounters at a watering place. Biblical faith often clusters around events so ordinary that we miss their meaning because we expect the spectacular.
Unloading my suitcases after being gone for two weeks, my wife and I began to catch up on the news. She had traveled South to see her mother as I traveled North to study. Coming back home from Florida she detoured by my hometown in Georgia to see my mother. In her eighties, my mother was rushed to the hospital while my wife was there. My mother`s hospital trips had been coming closer together. Slowly her heart was wearing out although we did not recognize it at the time.
"Oh, by the way," my wife said, "your mother sent you some flowers. Gerber daisies. Just before she got sick she went out to a nursery, found these two plants at a good price. She told me about three time to go by her house and pick up the plants and bring them to you. She gave me strict instructions to tell you not to plant them here. (I was living in Clemson, South Carolina at the time.) She said, and these were her words, `That old red mud won`t grow nothin`.` She said, `Keep them out of the full sun. Give them plenty of water, but not too much–take them with you to Memphis when you move and put them out.` They are on the deck if you want to see them," my wife concluded.
I wandered outside to see the daisies. Both pots of flowers still had beautiful red blooms on them. I noticed that there were other blossoms still coming on. I felt the dirt to see if the flowers needed water. Then I placed them under a picnic table where they could get some sun without being parched. Every day I would check on the daisies.
I called my mother who was still in the hospital. She said she was feeling fine. As usual she wanted to know all the news. What we were doing, when we were flying back to Memphis to talk to another church about moving. She asked, of course, about the daisies. I told her they were faring well. She repeated her instructions a second time: "Don`t plant them now. That old red mud in South Carolina is not good for flowers. Take them with you when you move and put them out and I expect they will do fine. Give them plenty of water, not too much sun."
This was the last conversation I had with my mother. Little did I know that within a week`s time our family would be huddled together around her grave at the Park Hill Cemetery.
The morning the call came that she was dead I did not know what to do. What I did do, before we left for my hometown, was to ask my neighbor to look out after the flowers until we returned. Then we drove to my hometown for that long hard trip of saying goodbye. The next few days were a blur. Planning a funeral, surrounded by family and friends through the years, visitation at the mortuary, the funeral itself on a hot July afternoon under a blue, blue Georgia sky. We returned weeks later and cleaned out her house, lovingly divided the belongings of eighty years, and sold the house where I was born.
We moved in late August. All our belongings were packed away into a moving van for that long trip from South Carolina to Tennessee. One of the last things I did was to walk across my back yard to our neighbor`s house to pick up the daisies. They had been well tended and they were flourishing.
I did not trust the movers with those plants, so I placed them in the car for the long drive. A week later, on a hot, August Sunday morning I planted those two plants in the side yard in my new home in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a painful time, planting those last flowers my mother had given me. When I finished I remember whispering a prayer: "Dear God, let them live. Let them live." That was in late August.
On a Saturday morning, October 15, 1 went out the door to get the morning paper. It was my birthday. I noticed a strange sight. One of the Gerber daisies had a red bloom on it. Looking closer, I noticed that another bloom was forming. I`m not much of a gardener, but I do know that daisies do not usually bloom in October. My mother`s final gift, like so many others she had given through the years, reached out and touched my life. Even after her death, her gift came alive on my birthday.
Frost came early that year in Memphis. The perennials wilted and hibernated under the cold hard soil. But after the winter the grass slowly turned green and the birds sang their hearts out. I kept watching for signs of the daisies. Earlier in the fall I had covered them to protect them from the cold but I did not dig them up. Everything else I planted came up, but not the daisies. I kept going back and looking for signs of life. The Gerber daisies were dead.
At first I could not believe the plants had died. I had prayed and worked and hoped they would make it through the winter into the spring–but they did not. But the flowers did what they were intended to do. They bloomed on my birthday and in the weeks that followed. The Gerber daisies came into my life at a hard time and the flowers fulfilled their purpose.
I have made peace with the daisies that did not come back. They were part of the multilayered fabric of my grief. They were a symbol of my mother`s life–rich, alive, and special. Her flowers were there when I needed them, working their healing power. Perhaps grace and renewal always come to us in tiny things as unlikely as blood-red Gerber daisies.
I still have dreams about my mother. Sometimes I wake up with a start and think: "My mother is dead." Grief has not yet done its final work even after all these years. Sometimes, even now, a sadness steals over me. But I go on. And from time to time I remember a cluster of daisies with their untimely, serendipitous, October blooms, a birthday present that came from my mother months after her death. Her gift taught me that the Psalmist was right: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30.5).
