FUNERAL FLOWERS: A PERSONAL FAMILY GHOST STORY

Relating my own personal unexplainable experience with what some might call the supernatural is very difficult for me. I am a student of science. I have a Bachelor of Science degree. I am trained to be both skeptical and observant. For the most part my family was agnostics and atheists. I am not someone who has been raised in any religious or supernatural belief system. To understand a situation I need to observe, classify and quantify information and then postulate a theory based upon whatever proof that I see to affirm said theory. In summation, I am not one to believe in the supernatural existence of ghosts.

One day when I was about 8 years old, long before I formed all my ideas about reality and religion, I happened to have an overwhelming smell of flowers that made me sick because they were so strong. Within a few moments I overheard my mom talking on the phone to a relative. My mom had just been told that her aunt had just died after a long battle with cancer. By that time the flower smell had become a tremendous stink and I could not get it out of my head. I was inside the house and there absolutely no plants around. At 8 years old I did not put together the overwhelming smell of flowers with my great aunt dying. I just remember after all these years that the two occurrences happened at the same time.

Many years went by and then when I was 15 years old my father while working in the yard fell dead beside of me. He had suffered a major heart attack and he could not be revived. Almost at the very second of his death I was overcome with the smell of flowers. I did not understand what type of flowers these were until I went to the funeral home to view my father’s lifeless body. All around it were dozens of flower arrangements and most of them had lots of flowers. It was at that time that I realized what I was smelled there and what I had smelled when my grant aunt died and father had died were funeral flowers. Even with that realization I never said a thing to anyone about it. It seem preposterous that I could smell death and that it had the same smell as the flowers at a funeral home near the body that was laid out for viewing.

The shock of my father’s sudden death overwhelmed my consideration of the funeral flowers. I smelled these awful smells many weeks after my father was laid to rest. Many years past and in my studies of the sciences I had forgotten about the flower smell. Then one day my mom and two sisters were sitting and talking about some of our favorite relatives that had died and my mom said that before she received the phone call that informed her that my great aunt (her aunt) had died, my mother was overwhelmed with the smell of funeral flowers. My sisters then each said that they had had the same experience that day. I just had to acknowledge that I had had the same experience as my mother and my sisters.

Since that time I have noticed overwhelming smell of funeral flowers whenever I am around someone who is about to die. I try to ignore it but there is no whisky, wine or, beer that can ever drown out that smell. As a garden center manager I learned that the smell was mostly the smell of carnations with the hint or roses. However, the smell is far more intense than any carnation or rose. I do not share my knowledge of someone’s impending doom with anyone. I just keep it to myself and I tell myself that I believe in science and not the supernatural.