Flowers. Full of flowers. I only saw that. There were some pink, yellow, purple, but mostly white ones. These are the ones that have remained etched in my memory. While all the people invited to attend the funeral were silently sitting one the pews of the church, I was, along with the rest of his family, standing waiting in the narthex that the people working for the funeral enter the Gothic building. When the large and heavy wooden doors of the church opened, letting four men enter into the cold of the church, carrying on their shoulders a black edony coffin, my gaze that had remained on the stone walls of the building immediately attached to the object in the air. I did not detail the coffin. I did not measure how long he was. I did not comment on its brillance or the little details on it. My eyes only looked at the floral arrangement made of white roses.

I remember the whiteness of the flowers. How much they were discordant with the black coffin. How much they had burned my retina and how their image continues to hurt my eyes. I remember that I thought they were too pure, too perfect for such a day. I remember hating this arrangement. All my heart had felt a deept disgust at their sight. That day, they did not deserve to rest on a piece of wood. Thay day, they represented neither peace nor the loss of a child. That day, they had stolen my attention.

I have not lost sight of those flowers throughout the ceremony. That it is the heavy and silent march behind the coffin from the narthex to our places. During the words of the priest or when no one had the courage to stand up to say a last goodbye. Not a single second I look away from those flowers.

Today, I still do not know the reason for the hate I felt for them. Was it because they had captured all my attention and that I had completely forgotten about the event unfolding around me? Was it because he would have hated them?

If there is one thing that makes me remember him was his disgust of the white color. While for many people it represents peace, for him it was synonumous with nightmares. White, in his mind, was like a blank page where everything could be created and written. A blank page where anyone could leave their mark without worrying about what was already engraved on it. He hated white, because it seemed wrong to him. Peace could not be found, eternity could not live, light could not be formed in this color. He hated white, surely, because it gave him too much opportunity. To be unsure of the future was certainly his biggest fear, and that color must have reminded him of that fear.

That day I had certainly hated those flowers more than all the others that accompanied them, because I saw them as the symbol of the fear he felt at the sight of the white color. I had certainly seen the peace he had never succeeded to have. The eternity he never had. The light that had not shone enough. That day, all what they were supposed to represent, they had failed to achieve it for him; and placed as a trophy on the enveloppe of eternity it was as if they were making fun of him.

The white that decorated the church that day had laughed in my face like a person making fun of the misfortune of others.

But white was not the only color that took part in this event. The color of the mourning was there too, covering the shoulders of everyone present at the funeral. Everyone was dressed in black, only the men's shirts were in color. Yet I had the impression to be the only one blot on the landscape in this disperate setting. Although my eyes stared at the white flowers on the coffin, I felt all the eyes on me. Like them, I wore the color of mourning, yet through their eyes it was as if I were dressed in a brightly colored dress. Maybe their discomfort was because of the color of the pendant he had given me for one of my birthdays.

It shone as brightly as a lighthouse in the middle of the night. It shone so brightly that his light reverberated everywhere. In the morose atmosphere of death, it was perhaps the life that continued to live in all of us. It may have been the only part of him that stayed alive...