Look how the wild
flowers grow: they don't work or make clothes for themselves. But I tell you
that not even King Solomon with all his wealth had clothes as beautiful as one
of these flowers. (Luke 12:27, Good News Translation)
On
Monday, August 25, we met at the funeral home to make arrangements. We all
agreed we wanted to keep things simple, short, and quick. But fitting. I don’t
know. People said we did a beautiful job presenting a fitting tribute to Val.
But, again, I don’t know. It was Val’s life, not any of ours.
But sitting in the funeral home
office, we had to decide what to put in the little card they have available for
people to take. Jim has to bring one of those home from every visitation or
funeral we go to, and it sits on the kitchen counter, bugging me for weeks
before I finally throw it away.
Karri, the woman at the funeral home,
offered suggestions from the standard funeral card book. Not one was even close
to Val.
Her boyfriend suggested we use the
words from the Tom Petty song on the tattoo on her back. We knew it was
something about wildflowers and could all picture it, but none of us could pull
the words out of our brains.
We finished our business, and I told
Karri we’d figure out the lyrics and get back to her.
That night, when I couldn’t sleep (as
if I thought I would ever sleep normally again), I went on my laptop and
started looking up the lyrics for all of the Tom Petty songs.
Duh! The song is literally named
“Wildflowers.”
That week, I worked on cleaning up my
computer by deleting some of the thousands of pictures I’ve stored from all my
travels. In 2017, Val and I were on one of our many trips to Kenya when she got
sunburned while wearing a shirt with straps in a pattern across her back. And
there were those words, with flower petals, blowing along her back. Did she
ever think those words would become a tribute to her life?
Life doesn’t always make sense. We’ll
never understand it. I’ll certainly never understand what happened to Val that
Friday night in August, 2025. All I can do is keep muddling along and turning
my worries over to God. He understands everything that we do not.
You
belong somewhere close to me
Far
away from your trouble and worries
You
belong somewhere you feel free
(from
“Wildflowers” by Tom Petty, 1994)
This picture is from her trip to Kenya in 2019 with her brother and her husband.
 |
| This one is at Diani Beach in 2022. I challenge everyone to find a picture of my back! |
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