I have a predilection for flowers blooming from the trees that line the streets outside my house, and in the gardens of my neighbors, but I have a slightly different appreciation for the flowers I see in vases. Those flowers possess a finite beauty. They will they be wilted and gone in a matter of days and in that time only a few people will ever have the opportunity to know their singular beauty. It is honoring to be coupled with that few.

It’s such a shame because beauty should be known and I feel the same as I do in other, likewise morbid places. Children-sized coffins, corpses, the sick, old and infirm…

Mankind is too beautiful, each person there own unique and inherent wonder. We live our lives longing to be known, understood, loved and appreciated but when I see these lives, cut short or well lived, I want them to be known and appreciated one last time.

I imagine who they are, what they might have been, what they could have been. I appreciate them. I feel better about the world knowing they were considered and appreciated by someone they never knew. Perhaps from the other side of the world, perhaps a decade after they passed, but remembered none-the-less, for this one last time.

I cannot put to words how humbled I am to be one of those few.

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