@soul .... I hope it is okay to share this with you .....
In our faith, when someone passes, their spirit remains with us for 40 days afterwards, to comfort us, to view life a little from their new perspective before leaving this realm .....
I didn't know this at the time of my mother's passing, but within the span of 49 days, I kept coming across sunflowers in unexpect places .... and they weren't in fashion as a decorator's item or anything, to be able to say that it was common to come across them .... in fact, there was a solitary sunflower growing quite randomly next to the footpath across the road from the funeral home .... that was the first encounter.
Sunflowers had only become a recent connection for us. The week ebefore she died we were sitting out in the garden of the hospital grounds, mum on a day-bed, because it was a lovely day and she had spent a couple of months inside hospital wards.
There was a vacant block of land behind the hospital, and it was full of wild sunflowers. Mum asked my kids to go and pick some. They brought armsful back and lay them on the bed next to her. I showed the kids how to make a giant daisy chain out of them .... the way my mum had shown me how to make daisy chains from daisies when I was a girl. We put some into a vase in her room.
To find them unexpectedly sprinkled across mylife in the weeks afterwards was hauntingly comforting, and it was only in marvelling about it that someone explained that that is part of our faith, little love-touches from the one who has left us ....
According to what we believe, that was a love-touch from your mum ......
