Flowers

Flowers

August 2023

St Cecilia’s Church, Cambridge

O LIVER STANDS BESIDE

the grave and thinks of his mother.

His father, who really ought to be the concern of the day, is there in a peripheral way. But it’s his mother, whose smile, whose easy kindness towards him all his life, whose voice on the other end of the phone was a constant, is all he can think of.

Was he a good enough son to her? Did he notice her yearning for someone who was out of reach? Why did he never call his father out on the easy cruelty, on the indifference, he showed her?

Oliver winces at the thought of his teenage years, when he tried out his father’s indifference towards his mother to see if it fitted. To see if that was what he was supposed to do as a man. But all it did was hurt. Nobody’s mother was like Oliver’s. Nobody’s mother was as warm, as cuddly, as soft at the edges. Other mothers competed against one another, to show they were the best wife, to prove their child was better than all the other children in the class. Bridie seemed

indifferent to all that. She seemed to exist in her own orbit. But in the evenings, when he would trudge down the stairs on his way out to an empty park to go drinking in with his friends, he would spot her in the living room, alone except for the cat and the cast of Coronation Street

, and he would notice that she was so still. That she was so lost. But he didn’t know how to fix it and his friends were waiting, but now he wishes that he had. Or that he at least tried. Why do we spend so much money on flowers for the dead but barely ever buy them for the living?

He wishes he had bought her more flowers when he was growing up as the vicar concludes the funeral.

‘We turn him over to Jesus’s hands,’ the vicar says as Oliver wraps his arm around Bridie and looks down at his father’s open grave.