Grief is a strange and unpredictable experience. In the days and weeks after losing someone we love, we can find ourselves consciously or unconsciously seeking them, usually in photographs or memories, but also in the world around us. And sometimes, quite unexpectedly, the natural world seems to respond. As a funeral celebrant who works closely with families in the wake of loss, I am privileged to hear many of these stories. They are often told quietly, tentatively, and they are remarkably common. I find them fascinating, as I love to weave botanical symbolism into the ceremonies I create.
A friend whose father had died fairly suddenly, told me about the hare. In the weeks that followed, she kept seeing hares, having barely registered them before. Then, out of nowhere, a friend who knew nothing of this sent her a poem, which really chimed with the experience of losing her Dad, but was also used the hare as its central symbol. Whether we call it coincidence or something more, the effect was real: she felt a sense of comfort in these connected themes.
I have my own version of this story. When my mother died and I was putting her funeral service together having just started out as a funeral celebrant myself, I was searching for a botanical symbol that felt true to her. I settled on the ginkgo tree. It’s one of the oldest tree species on earth, and its resilience is almost mythological: six ginkgo trees survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and within months, while everything around them had died, they began to bud again. For a woman of my mother’s quiet, enduring strength, it felt right.
Not long after I had arrived at this, I went to a meeting at the Royal College of Music in South Kensington. As I walked, I looked down and found the pavement scattered with ginkgo leaves, their distinctive fan shapes unmistakable. A single one was on the steps as I entered the building. I had walked around this area for years and never once noticed them, but there they were.
I thought of this again recently when I met a family who had just lost their mother. She had always loved robins; their bright persistence in the garden during the year had been a source of joy for her. Her son told me that there had always been a robin in their garden, however in the days after she died, it vanished. He wasn’t sure what to make of this and neither was I, but I didn’t dismiss it.
I find it comforting to concede that the natural world is not indifferent to us in our grief. Whether these moments are synchronicity, the result of a mind suddenly open and alert to symbolism and meaning, or something altogether beyond explanation, they matter. They offer what grief often struggles to find: a sense that love does not simply end, that the person we’ve lost has not entirely gone.
As a funeral celebrant, one of the things I love most is helping families find the symbols that belong to their person: the tree, the flower, the bird, the wild creature that somehow captures something true. These become threads we can weave into a ceremony, and into life beyond it.
If you have experienced a moment in nature that felt like more than coincidence, I would gently encourage you to trust it. Grief deserves gentleness, and if a hare in a field or a ginkgo leaf on a pavement brings you a moment of peace, that peace is real, whatever its source.
If you’d like to talk about If you’d like to talk about creating a ceremony that honours who your loved one truly was, I’d love to hear from you.
