Day Lilies: While I Wait

Every July, the day lilies come into their glory.

For most of the year they are almost invisible. Winter leaves no trace of them, and even in spring they ask very little of your attention, sending up graceful fans of green leaves that seem content simply to fill the spaces between more flamboyant plants. If you did not know they were there, you could easily walk past them without a second glance.

Then, almost overnight, everything changes.

Strong stems rise above the foliage, each carrying a tightly furled bud that seems to pause before revealing what it has been quietly preparing all these months. One flower opens, then another, and another after that, until the borders are filled with great trumpets of burnt orange and deep chocolate brown, each one catching the light differently as the sun moves across the garden.

I have several clumps now. Two are a rich burnt orange that glows in the evening sunshine, while another, my favourite perhaps, is a velvety brown given to me years ago by a friend because it simply didn’t fit the colour scheme of her own garden. I have always smiled at that story. What didn’t belong in one garden found exactly where it belonged in another.

Every year I wait for them, and every year they exceed my expectations. They return larger than I remember, carrying more buds than I remember, and I find myself wondering what has been happening beneath the soil while I wasn’t looking. They may have disappeared from sight, but they have never stopped growing.

Then, as so often happens with flowers, I found myself wondering about their story.

Day lilies are not true lilies at all. Their botanical name, Hemerocallis, comes from the Greek words hemera, meaning day, and kallos, meaning beauty.

Beautiful for a day.

Each flower opens with the morning sun and, almost before you have fully appreciated it, begins its slow journey towards fading. By the following morning another bloom has taken its place, just as radiant, just as generous, while yesterday’s flower quietly disappears. The plant itself flowers for weeks, but no individual blossom is ever given more than a single day.

For years I thought that was the lesson they carried: that beauty is fleeting, that nothing lasts forever, and that perhaps this was why each flower seemed so precious.

This summer, though, I found myself hearing something else.

Four weeks ago I found three small lumps in my neck. Oddly, I wasn’t frightened. Disappointed, yes, but not frightened. I had been here before. This was a story I thought I knew.

Seven years ago I was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, an indolent, or lazy, form of blood cancer. It cannot be cured, but for many people it can be lived with for years, quietly watched until it decides it needs attention. One consultant described it as something you are more likely to die with than of and, although it was never the future I would have chosen, it gradually became one I could understand.

I had chemotherapy, recovered, and slowly slipped back into the ordinary business of living. Hospital appointments became less frightening, scans became routine and, little by little, cancer stopped being the first thing I thought about every morning.

There was a plan.

Not a promise, because medicine cannot offer those, but a plan. Regular monitoring. Watchful waiting. Treatment if, one day, it became necessary. There was uncertainty, of course, but it was a familiar uncertainty, one that had settled quietly into the background of my life like the changing seasons in the garden.

Then the biopsy came back.

Instead of confirming what everyone expected, it asked an entirely different question.

Hidden amongst the familiar cells was another possibility altogether: Hodgkin lymphoma, a disease that behaves differently, grows differently and may require a completely different treatment. My doctors were as surprised as I was. The biopsy has now been sent away to other specialists, who will examine it before anyone can say with confidence exactly what they are seeing.

So now I wait.

For the next two weeks there are no answers to find, no decisions to make and no way of knowing whether I am still walking the path I thought I was on or standing at the beginning of an entirely different one.

My mind craves certainty. It wants to make plans, solve problems and look beyond today, as though safety might somehow be found just over the horizon.

Yet the longer I have waited, the more I have realised that nothing has really changed about the future.

It has always been uncertain.

Only my awareness of it has changed.

The day lilies have been teaching me that every summer without my ever really hearing them. Not one flower knows whether tomorrow will belong to another bloom. Not one waits until the weather is kinder or life feels more certain.

Each simply unfolds into the day it has been given, offering itself completely to the light, to the bees and to the passing hours, asking nothing more than the chance to bloom.

Standing amongst them this week, I wondered how much of my own life had been spent leaning towards tomorrow instead of standing fully in today. There was always something to wait for: the next appointment, the next holiday, the next deadline, the next season when life would surely become calmer, safer or easier.

As though life were something that happened once uncertainty had passed.

But uncertainty is not an interruption to life. It is the place where life has always been happening.

This morning the blackbird still sang from the apple tree. The bees still disappeared into the orange flowers before emerging dusted with pollen, and the brown lilies my friend once thought were the wrong colour still opened exactly as they have every July since she divided them and carried them across to my garden.

None of those things answered the questions I am carrying. None of them told me what the next set of results will bring. But they reminded me that life has not paused simply because I am waiting.

So I stayed in the garden a little longer than I usually would. I watched a bud that had been tightly closed the evening before gradually unfold in the warmth of the morning sun, until another perfect flower stood where yesterdays had quietly faded away.

Tomorrow it will be gone. Yet today it gave itself completely to the only day it would ever know. For the first time, I didn’t find that sad.

I found it enough.