No flowers, by request

A friend of mine who died about twelve and a half years ago is bur­ied in Bris­tol. It’s a city that used to be my second home, but times move on, people change, and it’s not some­where that I get to visit so much these days. On the infre­quent occa­sions that I’m there, how­ever, I always make a point of vis­it­ing his grave to have a quiet talk with him — he was, after all, a very close friend. And on each and every occa­sion I go to the cemetery, I stick to tra­di­tion and take a bunch of flowers with me.

I don’t know why I do it, though, because after talk­ing to him for a little while I real­ise that he didn’t really like flowers. He simply wasn’t the flowery type. But he did like plants, and he would often wander round his flat attend­ing to them with a fine water spray. Des­pite those clear memor­ies, leav­ing a small orna­mental cac­tus on his grave would just seem so wrong.

There’s an emo­tional level to this as well. After shar­ing some of my thoughts with him in the way we used to, plonk­ing a bunch of flowers on top of him also seems wrong: “Well, I’ve poured out my heart to you, but now I’ve got to be going. Here, have these — I bought from the flower stall round the corner”. I wouldn’t have done that if he was alive, so why do it now?

On the last two or three occa­sions that I have vis­ited his grave, I’ve ended up walk­ing out of the cemetery still car­ry­ing my sup­posed mark of respect. Mak­ing my way to the cemetery gates, I’ve looked around the nearby head­stones for a name that appealed to me, and then quietly placed the flowers on their plot. It felt like the right thing to do at the time.

For days after­wards, how­ever, I can hear my friend’s dis­tinct­ive voice in my head, mock­ing me in that teas­ing way he had: “You still haven’t left any flowers for me, you heart­less bastard!”