In the Springs of years past, my mother would stash nail scissors in her pocket so that on our long walks together, she could sneak a snipping off of other people’s Lilac bushes. I always laughed and told her we would get caught one day. Her excuse was always the same: “Our Lilac bush never blooms. I’m just taking what Mother Nature owes me!” Our stolen blooms were proudly displayed on the kitchen table in a kitschy ceramic vase, and she inhaled deeply whenever she walked past them, sighing with pure contentment.
As she lay in her coma, I would get Lilacs from the park outside the hospital, and place them on her pillow. Although she was in a place where I could no longer reach her, her head always seemed to turn towards the Lilac bloom on her pillow, so that she could smell them. In those moments of unconscious movement, it was like she was just innocently shifting in her sleep, dreaming of something she loved.
After her funeral, I stood by the dining room window overlooking our sporadically blooming lilac bush. The Rabbi came over and stood with me, and I asked him if he believed in signs. Of course he did. I told him that the lilac bush we were looking at hadn’t bloomed in years. And then I showed him what I was really looking at: In the absolute center of the naked shrub, were three huge lilac blooms. There was no rhyme or reason to them, and yet there they were. He stood there, as surprised as I was, and then said: “Those are for you.”
For a long time after my mother died, I was awoken in the middle of the night by the smell of strong perfume. Sweet, cloying, but familiar. I would wake up thinking I had left a candle burning, and would get up and search my surroundings to make sure I wasn’t losing it. It was only after 3 years of these perfumed awakenings that I realized what I was smelling: Lilacs.
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