Give Them Their Flowers: Honoring People While They Are Alive

By Rachel Y. Hill, DNP, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, AHN-BC, HWNC-BC

October 18, 2026

Say It While They Can Hear It

When I was a little girl, there was a song we sang at church called “Give Me My Flowers While I Can Smell Them.”

I sang along without really understanding it.

Flowers were flowers. What did it matter when you got them?

It makes so much sense to me now.

The song was never really about flowers. It was about love, honor, and gratitude, and the simple truth that they mean the most when the person can still receive them.

I have sat through enough funerals to notice something.

The most beautiful words about a person are almost always spoken when that person is no longer in the room.

We stand at podiums and tell stories about how someone showed up for us. We talk about their laugh, their cooking, the way they called just to check in.

We cry about how much they meant to us.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet question always rises up:

Did they know?

Did they ever hear it?

Not in a card once a year. Not in a rushed “love you” at the end of a phone call.

Did they ever sit in the middle of all that love and feel it, fully, while they were still here to receive it?

In my family, we decided a long time ago that we were not going to wait.

We celebrate our people while they are alive.

While they can hear us. While they can laugh at the toast, roll their eyes at the fuss, and secretly love every minute of it.

This is a little about how we got here, and a lot about why we keep doing it.

Where We Come From

We grew up with very humble means.

I say that without shame, and without wanting anyone’s pity.

It is simply the soil we were planted in, and a lot of good things grew there.

Celebrations in our house were not a material investment.

There were no party rentals, no catered spreads, no piles of wrapped boxes.

Most years there was not much money for any of that, and everybody knew it.

So we learned to celebrate with what we did have.

What we had was each other.

A birthday meant acknowledgement.

It meant someone looking you in the eye and telling you they were glad you were born.

It meant you didn’t have to do the dishes that night, because a brother or sister quietly did them for you.

Your other chores got handled too.

It cost nothing, and it meant everything.

It meant the birthday kid got the free toy in the cereal box.

If you grew up like we did, you know that was the best.

Nobody else was allowed to dig for it that morning.

It was yours, and you felt like royalty holding it.

And it meant homemade cards.

Folded paper, crayons or markers, a drawing that might not have looked like much to anyone else.

But those cards meant so much to us.

Somebody sat down and made something just for you, and you could feel it.

No store-bought card. No party.

Just family treating you special the entire day.

How could such simple things make you feel so rich?

Somehow, they always did.

Looking back, I can see now what we could not always see then.

We were being taught that love is not measured by what it costs.

It is measured by attention. By effort. By the simple, powerful act of making someone feel seen.

Those lessons did not come from a book.

They came from watching the people around us give what they could, every single time, even when what they could give did not look like much to the outside world.

To us, it looked like everything.

The Rain Check Birthday

Here is something people outside our family do not always understand.

When you grow up with limited means, a celebration does not always land on the date printed on the calendar.

Sometimes the money was not there on the actual birthday.

Bills came first. Needs came before wants.

So instead of letting the day pass with nothing, we learned to take a rain check.

“We’ll celebrate when we can” was not a brush-off in our house.

It was a promise, and it was kept.

That meant a birthday might be honored in pieces.

A kind word and a hug on the day itself.

A small treat the next week, when payday came.

A special dinner a few weeks later, once things settled.

The celebration stretched out because it had to, but something beautiful happened in the stretching.

The waiting did not shrink the joy. If anything, it grew it.

The person being celebrated got to feel remembered more than once.

They got reminded, again and again, that they had not been forgotten just because the timing was hard.

The love kept circling back around.

Without ever planning it, we were building a family tradition.

Our birthdays were not one-day events. They were seasons.

Grown, Graced, and Still Celebrating

We are all grown now.

We have different lives, different homes, different schedules, and different callings.

And by the grace that God has bestowed on us, many of us are in a different place than where we started.

The rain checks are not as necessary as they once were.

But here is the thing.

We never stopped celebrating the way we learned to.

We just stopped needing an excuse for it.

These days, a birthday in our family does not last a day.

It lasts the whole month.

From the first of the month until the last, the person being celebrated is reminded that they matter.

There might be a text out of nowhere with an old photo.

A lunch that someone insists on paying for.

A care package on the porch.

A phone call that is just to say, “Hey, it’s still your month. I love you.”

The heart of it has not changed one bit.

It is still mostly acts of kindness.

It is still acknowledgement.

It is still the simple, stubborn insistence that you deserve to be seen.

Now we just have a little more room to be generous with it.

What started as a necessity has become a joy.

The very thing that once came from not having enough has turned into a way of saying that, in our family, there is more than enough love to go around.

“A Whole Month? Really?”

We catch a lot of comments for this.

Some are playful.

Some come with a raised eyebrow.

A few carry a little judgment underneath.

“A whole month? Isn’t that a bit much?”

“Y’all are still celebrating? Her birthday was weeks ago.”

“Must be nice.”

We usually just smile.

Most people mean no harm, and honestly, we understand how it looks from the outside.

It can look like excess.

It can look like showing off.

It can look like we simply do not know when to stop.

But people do not know where we came from.

They did not see the years when a birthday cake had to wait for a paycheck.

They were not there for the rain checks, the handmade cards, or the meals stretched to make a day feel special.

They do not know that what looks like “too much” to them is, for us, the long-awaited fulfillment of a promise.

Every family carries a story that explains its traditions.

Ours just happens to be written in a currency of patience, gratitude, and catching up.

So when someone asks why we go so big, the truest answer is that we remember when we couldn’t.

Why We Celebrate

We celebrate for a lot of reasons.

If you want them laid out plainly, here they are.

We love one another.

That is the root of it all.

Not obligation, not appearances, not tradition for its own sake.

We genuinely love each other, and love that stays quiet too long starts to feel like it is not there at all.

We would rather say it too often than not enough.

We are making up for lost time.

There were years when we could not do what our hearts wanted to do for each other.

Now that we can, we are not about to hold back.

Every extra day of celebration is a small repayment on all the birthdays that had to wait.

It is our way of telling our younger selves, See? We kept the promise.

Life is short, and nobody is guaranteed tomorrow.

We have learned that the people we love will not always be a phone call away.

Gratitude spoken today is a gift.

Gratitude saved for a eulogy is a regret.

We want our people to hear every good thing we think about them, in their own ears, with their own hearts, while they are still here to answer back.

It is a way of honoring God’s grace.

We did not get here on our own.

Celebrating each other is one of the ways we say thank you for how far we have been carried, and for the people we were given to walk this road with.

And honestly? It is fun.

There is a special kind of joy in loving the hell out of someone you love.

In going overboard on purpose.

In watching someone you cherish try to act embarrassed while they are grinning from ear to ear.

Kindness is contagious, and celebration is one of the best ways to spread it.

A Reason to Celebrate Every Day

I love the fact that the calendar seems to have a holiday for everything.

National Sister’s Day.

National Donut Day.

Pi Day.

There is a day for coffee, a day for best friends, a day for just about anything you can think of.

Some people roll their eyes at all those “Hallmark holidays.”

I don’t.

I think they are wonderful little invitations.

Each one is an excuse to take a breath, indulge in something sweet, keep our spirits high, and share the love with someone.

Do we need a special day as an excuse to celebrate?

I don’t think so.

But it does prime the pump.

It gives us a nudge to do what we already love to do.

It hands us a reason to reach out, to say thank you, and to have something to look forward to when we wake up.

That is why I try to give myself a reason to celebrate every day I live.

Not to psych myself up or pretend everything is perfect.

I do it because I want to honor my human existence.

I want to live this life to the fullest, in body, mind, and spirit.

Gratitude is a practice, and celebration is how we put it into action.

When you start looking for reasons to celebrate, you find them everywhere.

A good cup of coffee.

A sunny afternoon.

A call from someone you love.

A day you made it through that you weren’t sure you would.

Every one of those is worth honoring.

Your Turn: Give Them Their Flowers

You do not need a big budget to do this.

We are living proof of that.

Some of the most meaningful celebrations of my life cost nothing at all.

You do not need a birthday, either.

You just need a person, and the willingness to tell them the truth about what they mean to you.

So here is my invitation.

Think of someone in your life who has made it better.

A parent, a sibling, a friend, a mentor, the neighbor who always waves.

Then do something about it this week:

• Call them and tell them one specific thing you are grateful for.
• Write it down in a card or a text they can keep and reread.
• Do one quiet act of kindness that makes their day a little lighter.
• Take your own rain check if you need to, and then keep the promise.

And if you feel like it, stretch it out.

Make it a week.

Make it a month.

Let people raise their eyebrows.

You will know why you are doing it.

Do not save your best words for a podium.

Say them now, while the people you love can hear them, hug you back, and tell you they love you too.

That is the whole point.

In our family, we will keep celebrating until the month is over, and then we will start again with the next one.

We hope you will join us.

--Dr. Rachel