My friend Imrana called from Delhi to say how sorry she was about Mom. During the conversation, she asked me to put a flower on her grave from her. I told her we weren’t doing flowers. That we had asked people to send contributions to Karuna Vihar instead. “Oh, Jo,” she said. “We always need flowers.”

I thought about that when I walked in to the funeral home where Mom was laid out. I saw all the beautiful bouquets that so many people had sent in spite of our request for contributions and I realized that Imrana was right: flowers have their own special healing powers. They are so beautiful and so fragile. We love them partly because they do not last. They ask us to stop and love them now; not tomorrow, not when we have time, now.

There were so many we could not take them all home: some we put on Mom’s grave, some we sent to an old age home, some we gave to friends, others to neighbors. The rest we kept. They filled the whole house with a fragrance and a feeling of peace. And when they started to fade, we took them outside and found there were some blossoms among them that still lived. So we made smaller bouquets and filled the house with those. I threw the last one out only yesterday, and I did it with real gratitude for the wisdom Imrana knew so well: we always need flowers.