Loss | Day 9 of my 2023 Journal

I have the habit of taking pictures of flowers.

It seems banal, but it is not. Not in my personal life.

I have the habit of taking pictures of flowers and sending them to my oldest daughter. This is beautiful in and of itself, a way of connecting and sharing without words. But there is more to it.

I lost my mother three years ago and my grandmother six years ago.

Both women were very important to me, and I feel lost without them. The line of women was always important to me. I felt held by the power of the females, connecting back in time.

My great-grandmother used to travel and take photos of flowers, so when I started traveling, I did the same, and I would always send these photos to my grandmother and my mother.

Today, when I take pictures of flowers, there is this stinging from the loss, the loneliness of being the oldest woman in the family.

I feel the love for my mother and my grandmother when looking at the flowers, and I feel gratefulness for my daughters, and I breathe. Then I feel the love for my other grandmother (father's side) and others I have lost.

I have to mention one of my fathers (I have two) and my niece, but I can not mention all. I feel the darkness of the curtain of death, of loss, and I breathe again. Feel the gratefulness of being on this side of the curtain and the longing for those who are no longer with us.

Flowers are beautiful and fragile, and they remind me of love and loss.

Many of my loved and lost ones have a particular flower attached; my mother is the poppy flower - as I sat for hours in a poppy field just after the message of her death, and my grandmother is in all of the lavender I see, as there were a lot of them in her garden, and she is buried in a bed of lavender.

The beauty of the flowers carries my loss. I can handle it with the flowers, I can work with it with the flowers, and I never forget because of flowers.

Love and light

Cecilie Conrad

#9 of my 365 writing challenge - Read them all here