FLOWERS AS ANESTHETICS

GLOBAL VOICES

Flowers as Anesthetics

Sergey Sologub

Flowers have a purpose that I didn’t realize before: sometimes they are used as anesthetics. Perhaps this can explain the bright sunflowers that one artist painted on car—over the bullet holes on their hulls.

I remember that I thought about the anesthetic effect of flowers for the first time when I was at the cemetery. Being a clergyman, I have to visit cemeteries several times a year. It is always tragic, and every single time it is deeply depressing. Life is a festivity that a person starts celebrating from the first days after their birth. Our Creator made us eternal, so death is the most disgraceful thing we experience. We hate death.

That day, watching the burial, I noticed that two things dominated the cemetery’s scenery: crosses and flowers. A lot of flowers and a variety of bright grave wreaths. If it wasn’t for the crosses all around, the cemetery would have passed for a flower show. “Why are there so many flowers here?” I asked myself since obviously nobody was celebrating anything. Birthdays, days of the proposal, weddings, various holidays—these are the days decorated with flowers. The usual purpose of flowers is to please the eye in happy moments of life. So it seemed strange.

Perhaps, people bring flowers to the cemetery in order to show their disapproval of the fact of death. The unbearable pain of loss needs to be concealed with something, it must be anesthetized. The wreath covers the unsightly ugliness of death. It distracts from it, shifting our attention to colors, bright colors...

I suppose that flowers in the cemetery are our protest before the eyes of death. We face it with a declaration, “We deny you!” To resign ourselves to death, for us humans is to die alive. We can’t live like that. We cling to life, we strive for hope, and thus, we cover death with flowers. It brings some tranquility to our souls. The anesthetic does help, even if only partly. Flowers are the human response to death, but there are also crosses in the cemetery. The cross is God’s answer to death. It’s interesting that in his speeches Jesus Christ did not disguise death. He spoke straightforwardly about it. Later, he stepped into the very darkness of death and defeated it. He rose again. But we can’t do that! It still frightens us. Perhaps, that is why we hide behind flowers.

May the sunflowers painted on bullet-perforated cars remind us of the eternal desire to get rid of death. To forget it. To cast it away to the very hell. One day it will be just so. Jesus assured us of it and did so himself. The victory will come.