Because it is a hybrid the stargazer lily appeared recently on this earth. In 1974 lily-breeder Leslie Woodriff named her oriental combination "stargazer" because of the way the new flower faced the sky. 

   The scent of the stargazer changes us. It shows how flowers – their sight, scent and touch – can perfume your soul providing crucial relief, especially if your work immerses you in blood.

   Only Beauty's strength, both hard and soft, can heal a heart scarred by caregiving.

   Caregivers, particularly male executives, sometimes ask me what Beauty has to do with medical care. I say that Beauty heals because it is Love's expression. They often shake their head, perhaps wondering how you heal a broken leg with a plant.

   You know better.

   For the first seven years of my career I was a trial lawyer – first handling auto accidents and worker's compensation claims and the last three years as a federal prosecutor. After that I worked eight more years as a part time night court judge while running a hospital. 

   Whether it is the setting for a divorce, a criminal prosecution or the resolution of a malpractice case courtrooms host ugliness. When I entered the caregiving world (the year after the first stargazer bloomed) I naively imagined a world populated with kind souls ministering to the sick and wounded. I had not thought enough about the blood, the torn bodies, the horror that inhabits hospitals. 

   Over the next thirty years I saw more violence in hospitals than I had ever seen in courtrooms. Some was unexpected – especially in my role as a CEO removed from direct caregiving.

   For example, on December 30, 1983, I was the third person on the scene (after the criminal and a doctor) to see the lifeless body of research technician Joyce McFadden lying on the floor of our hospital's research laboratory. She was bound up. Fourteen stab wounds had drained her life.

   In the next room her fellow technician Patricia Matix lay dead from the same kind of wounds. Her husband accused me of not protecting his wife (He turned out to be the murderer.) 

   I had promised to "take care of the caregivers." Two lay dead. There was no avoiding the heartbreak we all  felt at the violence that occurred amid a place dedicated to curing. 

   Abnormality is normal in hospitals. It takes a strong soul to invade a woman's body to deliver her newborn and later to be the one that may cut from that woman the ovaries that enabled conception.

   Heart surgeons splay open chests to replace blocked arteries.  To oncology nurses cleaning chemotherapy-caused vomit may look as ugly as the cancer.

   The brutality in caregiving begs for Beauty's hand.

   But, "You have to be tough," many caregivers instruct. They are right unless "tough" means building a hard shell that blocks the beauty our souls need. 

   The most frequent gift visitors bring to patients is flowers. You need them too. 

-Erie Chapman

Photograph – Stargazer 1 – copyright erie chapman 2013