The Magic of Peonies

These beautiful peonies caught my eye in Pikes Place Market, Seattle.

The magical thing about peonies is that their beauty is so short lived, available for such a short amount of time. A poignant symbol from a flower I love.

It is three weeks today since we had a service to say goodbye to Ottilie. It was a funeral but somehow neither of us can quite bring ourselves to call it that. Before her coffin was lowered I placed a bunch of delicate peonies in the ground. I just couldn’t bare the thought of her touching the cold earth.

Making decisions about that day was hard, all of them are decisions that you don’t want to make. We had many offers of help, every one of which we are truly grateful for but this was something we had to do ourselves. It was the only thing we would ever be able to organise for our baby girl.

There was some time between her still birth and the service, some dictated by practicalities and some by emotions. Our vision of the day changed in that time. In the first few days the shock and desperate sadness made us feel like we couldn’t cope with grief other than our own. We could see the pain in the eyes of those we love most and the thought of extending the pain of a funeral to them too didn’t feel right. That quickly changed as we realised they needed a chance to say goodbye too. As the weeks went on we had such support that we knew we wanted to share the day with the many people that would have been a part of Ottilie’s life, as long as they knew it was an opportunity not an expectation for anyone to attend.

Making choices about burial or cremation, music, readings, flowers, all the things that are associated with the ceremony of death are always hard but when you have no lifetime to represent or reflect on they felt harder still. We don’t know her favourite colour, song or have countless tells to tell in reminiscence. Gradually with the help of people we came into contact with through the process we realised we knew more than we thought. Of course we knew our baby, she was a perfect combination of us. I especially knew her better than anyone, inside me was the only life she had known.

There are many things I will write about that day another time but for now, I know that we created the best goodbye we could. We were surrounded by the people we love and who love her. The darkest depths of my imagination were worse than the reality of my darkest day. We had no choice but to say goodbye but we made it work for us and for Ottilie.