The Cemetery Flowers

Last week, while visiting my mother in Ohoopee, we found ourselves wander ing down the silk flower aisle at Hobby Lobby in Statesboro. “While I’m down here, I’d like to put a nice floral arrangement on Daddy’s grave at Cedar Creek,” I mentioned to Mom. Without hesitation, we began a familiar ritual of selecting the perfect silk blooms.

I selected bundles showcasing cream camellia blossoms, peachypink lilies, and apricot-colored chrysanthemums — a springtime palette that felt right for my father, Herman Lanier, who passed away in summer 1992 after a very brief illness. We’ve been taking turns adorning his grave since then, a quiet commitment spanning over three decades.

“What about Johnny?” Mom asked, referring to my stepfather, Johnny Collins. When I asked about Johnny’s favorite color, she replied simply, “Blue.” This led us to beautiful silk hydrangea bouquets, which we complemented with small cream magnolia blossoms and stalks with dangling indigo berries. We recycle the weighted pots and floral styrofoam blocks, needing only new flowers to refresh our tributes.

The next day, we delivered our creations — Daddy’s springtime arrangement to Cedar Creek Primitive Baptist Church cemetery, and Johnny’s blue hydrangeas to Collins Chapel Primitive Baptist Church cemetery outside Lyons. We even prepared an arrangement for my Aunt Gloria at Cedar Creek, after checking with my cousin Caroline. At each site, we tidied around the monuments, silently communicating with our loved ones in our thoughts and hearts.

This practice of grave decoration stretches back through centuries, across cultures and continents. The ancient Romans placed flowers and mementos on burial sites during their festival of Parentalia. In Mexico, the vibrant marigolds of Día de los Muertos create pathways to guide ancestors back to their loved ones for annual visits. Here in the American South, “Decoration Day” has been a longstanding tradition, with entire families gathering to clean cemetery grounds and adorn graves with fresh flowers.

These rituals serve multiple purposes. For the living, they provide tangible ways to express continued love and remembrance. They give us a specific place to visit, to feel connected with those we’ve lost. The act of tending a grave — removing faded arrangements, cleaning monuments, placing fresh flowers — becomes a form of care we can still provide.

During the holidays, we had small Christmas tree arrangements on Daddy and Johnny’s graves, created by my cousin Angela Gregory. We retrieved these in January, mindful of my grandmother Ona Jarriel’s observation about how she hated seeing Christmas decorations on graves in February. “It’s like the people have been forgotten,” she said one time as she looked out over the cemetery plots. And so we try to rush out there and tend to the graves each year at the conclusion of the holidays.

I often wonder about the future of this tradition. Modern life moves quickly, with families scattered across vast distances now, sometimes far from homelands and family cemeteries. Cremation rates are rising while cemetery visits are declining. Yet even as these practices and traditions evolve, our human need to remember our loved ones remains constant. While we acknowledge that our loved ones’ souls may be elsewhere, we still honor their earthly remains as sacred ground.

Perhaps the tradition continues not just for those beneath the granite and marble slabs, but for us who stand before them. In the quiet moments of arranging silk flowers or clearing away fallen leaves, we reconnect with memories and emotions that might otherwise remain dormant in our busy lives. The cemetery becomes a place where time slows, continued from page

where stories and legacies can be contemplated.

As we drove away from the cemeteries last week, I felt that peculiar mix of melancholy and peace that comes from these visits. The flowers will eventually fade and need replacing again, but our acts of remembrance, like love itself, endure across time.