The Eternity of Daffodils
This week, my five-year-old daughter overheard that two of my in-laws’ puppies died during birth.
My daughter is a sensitive soul, and this news greatly disturbed her. But not for the reason you might expect. She wondered if they were going to the doctor.
My husband said, “They don’t need a doctor. They’re buried now.”
She smiled uncertainly. “You’re just being funny.”
I glanced across the table at my husband, perplexed as to how to explain such a hard topic to a child, and then I noticed the spray of potted daffodils wilting on the table.
I explained that, just like flowers are beautiful when we first pick them, but then they eventually die and need to be placed back into the earth, the puppies also died and needed to be placed back into the earth.
My daughter seemed to grasp this concept. She went back to eating her chicken and rice. But I continued staring at those daffodils, considering the bulbs hidden beneath the soil, and how—though the plant appeared like it was dying—the blooms would come back to life the next spring if I planted the bulbs.
This was such a clear picture of eternity, and it filled my spirit with hope.
A few nights ago, before this conversation, I talked to my husband about his June scans. Every year, we are reminded of his cataclysmic brain surgery, which took place at the end of 2014. Every year, my husband puts on a gown, receives dye in his veins, and is placed inside a tube for forty-five minutes. He said that if he opens his eyes, he could get claustrophobic.
But he doesn’t open his eyes. Instead, he just lies there and reflects on the past year, on our family, on the direction of his spiritual and physical life, and where he wants to see it go in the next year. Once, he even fell asleep.
He is grateful for that time; truly he is. Without that yearly reminder, I’m not sure he would remain as grateful for life, or we would remain as grateful for each other.
Still, it would be dishonest to say that I don’t experience a little anxiety as June gets closer. I know it is the same for him.
Lord willing, this June, we will have a newborn—a third baby girl—when my husband receives his scans. He will have them done at our local hospital, and then the scans will be sent off to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota: a beautiful city founded on healing.
When my husband and I had that brain scan conversation, I was sitting on one of the two tiny Time Out chairs that we keep in the living room. I said that I was concerned about bringing a third baby into the world. Which is kind of ridiculous when you’re mere weeks from giving birth.
My words stemmed from fear. From the fear that something will show up in those scans that will, once again, redirect our world. And then God spoke to me through a wilted daffodil and the bulb hidden beneath. For not only is my third daughter an eternal being, with a calling and a destiny for her life, but my husband has a calling and a destiny for his life as well. As do I.
We are each eternal beings, and there is such hope in the fact that our journeys do not end when the blooms of our lives fade. Instead, our souls will be awakened anew when our temporal bodies are placed into the earth.
Do you look at creation through the lens of eternity? If so, what do you see?