My dad thought lilies were my mother’s favorite flower, because she chose them for their wedding. She revealed to me that she actually preferred morning glories, but my grandmother said those weren’t “classy enough” for a wedding. When I told my dad about it, he said, “I know that, I get her lilies because they remind her of the day she smiled so hard, her face hurt for a week.”
I remember blinking, a little surprised.
“So you knew the whole time?”
“Of course,” he chuckled. “She loves morning glories, but lilies are the story.”
It didn’t make much sense to me back then. I was sixteen, head full of teenage stuff, and didn’t pay much attention to the language of flowers.
But now, years later, I keep coming back to that line: Lilies are the story. My mother passed away last spring. Quick and cruel.
Ovarian cancer that snuck in, wrapped its hands around her, and didn’t let go. We didn’t see it coming. She was always moving, always doing.
She had this quiet energy that made a house feel warm even when she wasn’t saying much. The kind of woman who made soup from scratch and somehow remembered your best friend’s birthday, even if she’d only met them once. After the funeral, people kept bringing flowers.
Lilies, mostly. The scent of them hung in the house like an invisible veil—strong, heavy, almost too much. Dad didn’t say much those first few days.
He sat on the back porch, where they used to drink tea in the mornings. Just sat there, holding the mug, long after the tea had gone cold. I didn’t know what to do.
So I cleaned. I organized. I tossed out expired spices and folded laundry.
And one morning, as I was putting away the sympathy cards into a shoebox, I found a note in her handwriting tucked between the pages of an old book. It read:
“Morning glories bloom fast. Maybe that’s why I love them.
Life doesn’t wait. It blooms. And it ends.”
I didn’t cry.
Not right then. I just stared at it and whispered, “I’ll plant you some.”
Two weeks later, I was in the backyard digging holes. I had no clue what I was doing, just that I wanted to do it.
Morning glories. Blue ones, purple ones, even those soft white ones that look like summer fog. Dad walked out, hands in his pockets, watching me.
“She’d like that,” he said quietly. “Yeah.”
“You know she planted those once? When you were little.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
