DETROIT — Flowers for the children.
They had to be perfect.
The navy blue roses in Tate Myre’s casket cover and the soft pastels for Hana St. Juliana’s funeral.
“Tate’s was more sporty,” Marlene Morgan says. “Hana is more of a pastel girl.”
Morgan wanted everything to be perfect for the victims of the Oxford High School shooting.
For the parents burying their children.
So she tried to bring together the perfect collection of roses and carnations, hydrangeas and Fuji mums, snap dragons and delphiniums, hoping it would bring some comfort.
For this entire community.
Because those flowers represent everything that is right, everything that is good, the love and hope and humanity and compassion and warmth in the midst of unspeakable horror.
“It’s been the hardest thing of my career,” Morgan says. “These families are being held together by prayer.”
Minutes after the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School, Morgan stood behind the counter at Jacobsen's Flowers in Lake Orion and looked out the store window, watching several police cars race down Lapeer Road toward Oxford, lights flashing, sirens blaring.
“There was a lady that came in the door and she wanted to order flowers,” Morgan said. “She goes, 'I don't know what's happening. But I've seen five or six cars cop cars go by and some of them were undercover.'”
Jacobsen’s is about 5 miles from the high school.
“I immediately started praying because it was just something that you don't see every day here,” Morgan said.
A 15-year-old has been charged with shooting 11 people at the school, killing four students, a tragedy that has rocked this community, not to mention the entire state.
The aftershocks have touched people in profound ways.
People you wouldn’t suspect.
Like a clerk in a flower store.
Morgan has worked at Jacobsen’s for 24 1/2 years, taking orders and setting up flowers for countless funerals and weddings, Mother’s Days and homecoming dances.
But nothing prepared her for this, ordering flowers for all four funerals, meeting with the parents of two of the victims as they designed flowers for their children’s caskets and dealing with people going through unimaginable grief.
“I remember a man calling and this was tear-jerking,” Morgan said. “He was sending flowers to a young lady who helped his daughter after she was hit by a bullet. The young lady had pressed on the wound of their daughter, and he was sending her flowers. I said, ‘What do you want the card message to read?’”
He stammered and paused. Wasn’t sure.
How do you say thank you from the deepest part of your heart? How do you acknowledge the best in humanity? For showing love and compassion and fearless courage in the midst of chaos and fear?
Is it even possible?
“It was just really, really touching,” Morgan said. “Everybody was trying to send a lot of things to comfort everyone.”
Those flower arrangements represent sympathy and hope. They represent a community, an entire state, trying to cope with this tragedy.
“I had a customer call here from the Monroe area,” Morgan said. “And she said, ‘I want to send flowers to all four of the funerals.' ”
The card was signed: a Michigan resident.
'This is my sister'
Hundreds attended Hana's funeral on Wednesday at LakePoint Community Church in Oxford.
Morgan ordered the flowers for Hana's casket after meeting with her mother and sister.
“They didn't want a casket spray,” she said. “They wanted hydrangeas, more of the soft pastels — pale pinks, pale lavenders because it was more of a feeling of subtleness and softness.”
Hana was just 14 years old.
The meeting was more than a transaction at a flower shop.
It became an emotional connection.
“I took her sister away from the table,” Morgan said. “I go, ‘come on over here. Let's talk about what's going on.’ And she just burst out, ‘this is my sister.’
“And she started crying and I started crying.”
Jacobsen’s delivered between 30 and 40 arrangements to Hana’s funeral. One came from the girls basketball team.
“Hana’s first game was supposed to have been last Friday,” Morgan said. “One of her teammates, one of the parents, came in and wanted a particular arrangement. So we duplicated it and it was orange flowers, formed like a basketball, and we put black piping on it to make it look like a basketball. It was really pretty and unique.”
Because it meant so much.
Amazing Petals, a smaller mom-and-pop flower shop in Lake Orion, is owned by Beth Hency. She has also delivered flowers to the funerals, as well as to the homes of the grieving; she has felt just as connected, just as saddened.
“It's overwhelmingly tragic and sad,” Hency said. “Taking flowers to Hana's funeral, seeing the hearse come in with the police escort, it would make anyone cry. You just want to make everything beautiful for them to take away any of the pain.
“When you see all these young kids coming to the funeral homes or the church, they're so young to experience grief like this. They are the kids who come in for prom, or the kids that come in for homecoming, or Mother's Day.”
And now, they were burying their friends.
A personal touch
Tate’s parents wanted their son’s casket flowers to represent the school colors.
Tate was a star football player and wrestler. He loved Oxford. Loved his team, loved wearing those school colors. Oxford tough.
“When I wrote up the order from his mom and dad, they wanted navy blue,” Morgan said. “I always thought Oxford’s color was royal blue.”
Perfect. It had to be perfect.
So workers at Jacobsen’s painted the flowers the right color at a central hub in Waterford, where all of the arrangements were made.
That means even more people were touched by this tragedy.
Wanting to make everything perfect.
“The entire company put its heart and soul into all that work,” said Harold Jacobsen, whose family owns florist shops in Waterford, Bloomfield and Lake Orion and has been in business for 101 years. “My grandparents lived in Oxford. My father was born in Oxford. His brother was born in Oxford. So we have really deep, deep roots to the Oxford area.”
That made this extra emotional for everybody at Jacobsen’s.
“To send your child to school and not have them come home, it's gut wrenching,” Jacobsen said. “It's really, really tough. They were senselessly gunned down. There are a lot of tears shed in our company.”
'I don't know if I can do this'
Morgan was praying for the families to help them get through it.
At the same time, people were praying for her.
“People prayed for me because I knew that it wasn't going to be easy,’ she said. “And I said, ‘God, you need to give me strength because I don't know if I can do this.’
“It made me realize why I'm in this business. I'm here to help people. This is different than working at a grocery store. I mean, this is something that people do for personal reasons. It's a very touching.”
When you focus solely on the violence that happened in that high school — or the horrendous copycat threats that have frightened children across the state — the world becomes a cold, dark, frightening place.
But when you remember there are people like Morgan, or the Kensington Church volunteers at Tate’s funeral, or the families that scattered around Oxford tying ribbons to trees as a tribute, or the West Bloomfield football captains that went to Tate’s funeral to show their respect, or the artist who drew a Lake Orion Dragon cradling an Oxford Wildcat, or the Michigan Wolverines that honored the victims at the Big Ten championship game, or Lions coach Dan Campbell lifting up a game ball for Oxford, you can find hope and warmth and compassion.
Some inspiring humanity.
They have become the lights in this tragedy.
Approaching this moment with an open but heavy heart.
Offering comfort and compassion.
Trying to help in any way they can, whether it's giving a scuffed football or an arrangement of soft, delicate flowers.
