What it is (left)
THE COFFIN: Something has ended. No one decides the depth of that loss for you but you. Grief and sadness are valid emotions. Honor them as you see fit for as long as you need.
The platitude “don’t be sad that it’s over, be glad that it happened” rings as profoundly toxic and wrong-headed here.
No one gets to tell your emotions but you. They are yours to be named, faced, and released in your own good time.
It isn’t a matter of healing. This assumes with great hubris that the processes of grief and loss are unhealthy. The feelings aren’t unhealthy. Processing them, sitting with them, feeling them IS the healthy thing. Suppressing them, bottling them, ignoring them, smothering emotions in toxic positivism….THAT is the thing that needs healed.
It’s hard to trust in the face of profound losses. Fault or blame is of no value. Even if you can’t trust others enough to share your emotions with them, trust yourself enough to feel them, face them – and survive the experience of it.
What to do (right)
THE LILIES: I don’t know how it is in other cultures, but in the Appalachian evangelical culture where I was born, lilies are a common flower for funerals. It has an almost exclusively religious meaning in that context. It was always connected to Christian symbolism like redemption, resurrection, a return of the soul to heaven – a litany of things that hold no truth or significance for me individually.
If those things are meaningful for you here, please, by all means embrace them in any way that they help you.
I think there is another message here, drawn from the general symbolism of giving flowers, any flowers, as a gesture of good wishes. We give flowers as a message of sympathy, condolences, love and support for those who grieve at a funeral, but we also give flowers in celebration of holidays, birthdays. They are a part of weddings for good reasons. This is the energy I see around the lilies card.
It is a reminder of the whole spectrum of human emotions. Flowers are a reminder of all we feel and all that is possible. Loss of any kind is never easy. Grief exists within its own timeline and it exists side by side with all the other emotions in life.
It takes particular strength to choose the flowers of love and compassion from the bouquet of everything that life hands us. Choosing kindness toward your own emotions and that of others is a beautiful flower within our humanity. Choosing compassion in the face of loss is perhaps the hardest thing to do, the hardest flower to grow.
Wisdom is always hard-won.
Deck: Healing Light Lenormand by Christopher Butler copyright 2021 all rights reserved, used with permissions listed on llwellynpublishing.com
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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