Deedee.
Deedee loved flowers. They consumed her with their sweet scent, stained her golden, sunshine skin with their pollen and her eyes poured nectar, like honey flowing from a hive. Flowers consumed her. So much so that she became a wild flower herself, blooming and growing, exuding a sense of absurdly beautiful chaos. A wild flower nestled amongst thistle and weeds. Deedee loved flowers and she loved her family more.
Eventually, it was mother that taught Deedee what her name meant. That was the funny thing about mother, names meant something in our family, there was no way around it. She said that we should find our true meaning as we went through life, growing and learning, suffering and bleeding; the purest thing on earth was your namesake, it defines your nature and paints your essence. If we hadn’t learned who we were for ourselves by our sixteenth birthday then mother would take us into the summer house and at the first sign of sunrise, teach us what we meant. And we all meant something. Every one of her children. Her babies. Her flowers. We all meant something and by god we would know it.
There were five of us, all girls and all glowing like sunrise, at least that’s what mother used to say, ‘her sunshine children’, that’s what she would tell us. And we believed her, for some time. But sunrises will set, and the evening will creep into your bones, into your mind and right into your soul. The sun set too fast on Deedee, the rest of us just shut our eyes tight and waited for the sun to rise again, but wild flowers like Deedee didn’t do so well in the dark. At night flowers slept, at night flowers closed their bodies and became cold; at night we cried because we knew that in the morning, Deedee would find it harder each time to bloom again.
It was when Deedee turned seven that the doctors told mother there was something ‘not quite right’, something not quite right about the way Deedee was always so tired and how she got out of breath walking up the flight of stairs in our house. When things are not quite right there should be a way to fix it. That sounds fair doesn’t it? That life should at least give us a chance to fix the not quite right thing. But Deedee couldn’t be fixed. There was something very not right with our little sister, but she was determined to bloom as brightly as possible.
I don’t think Deedee quite understood the severity of her illness. That was the best thing about her though of course, the childlike naivety shone through her like a beacon for the rest of us, we should have been strong for her, but somehow it was the other way around. She didn’t act like she was sick, on sunny days we would all go out, Mother, Lacie, Penny, Winnie, Deedee and I all together, mother would bring a picnic and we would play hide and seek in amongst the tall flowers. On rainy days we sat in the study with father, little Deedee sat on his knee whilst the others and I did sums and spelling. Our childhood was blissful, except on the days where Deedee had to stay in bed and on the days where she would come home with mother and father slightly paler than when she left. Most days she asked Winnie to read her a story, something pretty to help her mind escape. But there were times she screamed in pain and there was no doubting the agony. So Winnie would call Dr. Bell and the morphine would be increased, sliding Dede into a long dream, her body so still that everyone wondered if she had passed on.
It was on a Monday evening when I came up to Deedee’s room, it was my turn to read her a bedtime story and I was excited because it was about flowers and I knew she would love it. I wanted her to love it because I wanted her to be undeniably happy. With a glass of water in my hand and the story book tucked underneath my arm I climbed the stairs eagerly up to my sisters’ room, humming a careless tune as I concentrated on trying not to spill the water onto to mothers’ new rose carpet. Deedee had the attic room, a princess in her tower, away from harm is what my father thought, but even a tower can’t save a princess from her own body. I knocked on the door and a small giggle approved my entrance.
The water dropped onto the floor, water pooling over my bare feet and over the carpet and I screamed for mother because I was confused and scared and I didn’t know what was going on, I cried and cried, and I remember closing my eyes, tight shut for a long time. When I opened them, I couldn’t look away from my sister in her bed. Deedee, my little sister, her golden, honey dipped hair was gone. It didn’t look like her, her head looked too…misshapen and she was but a shadow of the blooming girl I once knew. For the first time in a while Deedee looked sick. Yet the little girl in the large bed held out her thin hand to me and I took it, numbly. I sat on the chair next to her bed with her hand clasped in mine, it was like holding a dolly, only slightly more fragile. When I had stopped sniffling she carefully put her hand on my cheek,
“Don’t worry Bee, mother said it won’t always be like this, and besides, I don’t have to brush it anymore which I always hated! AND I can put pretty head bands on instead! I’ll be like a warrior princess Bee, we can play make believe.” She dragged out the ‘a’ when she said the word hated. I almost smiled.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what too say. I just simply smiled and opened the book, I read well but if you listened closely, you could hear the inescapable shake that plagued my voice. ‘We can play make believe’ that’s what she had said, always staying so positive. But I guess at a time like this, all you can do is play make believe, make believe about a world where little girls didn’t get sick and the people you love didn’t die.
It was on a Monday evening that I stopped believing in God, I didn’t tell mother or father, but if he truly did exist then why did he create a world in which my little sister had to die?
When Deedee first got sick we started to put more flowers in the house. Sickness had a certain smell. Sterile and unfamiliar. The flowers helped with that, they added what was absent from Deedee being in bed almost every day: familiarity and reassurance. Sweet fragrance drifted around the large, open spaced house, they created a vibrancy that was the anthem to our family’s hope. I remember one morning I woke up to Deedee’s loud screaming, my heart racing I started to run up to her room. Father stopped me at the bottom of the stairs, he told me that little ‘Petal’ was fine but the doctor had just informed her that she wasn’t allowed flowers in her room anymore because they ‘didn’t help her current state’. Oh how little Deedee cried. For hours she protested and wept until my sisters and I couldn’t take it anymore. We went out with father’s camera and mother’s paints, we photographed and painted and painted and photographed until there was no flower Deedee would not see. After the photos developed and the paintings dried we marched determinedly up to Deedee’s room; the room became a blur of colour as we stuck the whole of Deedee’s world up on her walls, whilst she watched in awe from her bed. When we were done it was better than we had hoped, the once white walls were a mixture of every colour you could have possibly imagined, from vivid oranges to pale, dusty lavenders; each colour was a breath of life into DeeDee’s body. A Deedee without flowers was like the moon without stars: impossible.
A few months went by and Deedee had a neat little pixie cut which she gleefully styled with colourful ribbons and mother even pinned a small white rose behind her ear. She was also able to sit in the garden again. Whenever it was warm enough father would wheel her out onto the veranda and the rest of us would sit around her with paint and puzzles; on this day we sat, laughing at Penny’s attempts to imitate the ballet dancers we saw with Grandma in the months before Deedee fell ill. Then mother bought out the fresh strawberries that Lacie and I picked with heaps of cream. Deedee didn’t have any though. She wasn’t hungry. She never really was anymore. Once the only trace of strawberries was upon our tongues and finger tips, Lacie enthusiastically suggested to play a game of charades. We each took turns making fools of ourselves and the laughter flowed like a river out our sweet tasting mouths. The sun was setting and it was Deedee’s turn to act out a thing for us to guess. Her arms waved about madly and she would accidentally shout out clues which sent us in to fits of giggles, the evening air was alive with a feel of electricity, the warm air seeping its way into our bodies. I watched as Deedee fell silent, her eyes transfixed on the sinking sun, face aglow with the last orange rays before twilight beckons the stars. Her lips bore the semblance of a smile, just enough to show that she was enjoying her thoughts, whatever they might have been.
“I want to say that I love you. I love all of you more than I love flowers, and more than Winnie loves books.” She coughed a little and shivered in the warm breeze. Her smile was serene and her eyes…knew something that we didn’t. I should have realized what that something was then, but I didn’t and we kissed her goodnight.
The next morning we awoke to mothers sobs and even the flowers drooped slightly.
When the cancer took Deedee she was skin and bones, pale as a ghost, face masking the ordeal inside. She passed at 6am this morning, both mother and father were with her; so she wasn’t alone. Although Deedee was only seven years old, mother, whilst tracing the lines on her little girl’s hand, told her what her name meant that night.
We planted a garden around her grave. A garden of every single flower that still rested upon her tower wall, her very own piece of bliss, she lay there, hiding in amongst her flowers, just like we did every day as children. She was born again every single time that garden bloomed, becoming more beautiful and more expansive over the years. The little, beautiful girl rested below the meaning her mother gave to her:
“Deedee - Sorrowful and Devine, forever blooming, our little girl.”
- M.F
