Amanda Tisdale, owner of Wow Flowers on Picton Road in Wavertree, has described helping her community through grief as a "privilege" during her two decades in the trade. Running the shop alongside her sister Lorna since 2004, Amanda has been there for people's most difficult moments as they come to terms with the loss of loved ones.
Amanda first got into floristry as a teenager, working at a number of florists around Liverpool before she opened Wow Liverpool's Designer Florist when she was 29. The shop's unusual name was coined by her dad in reaction to her flower displays.
A 'privilege' to serve grieving families
While providing funeral flowers for a grieving family sounds daunting to most, for Amanda it is a "privilege". She told the ECHO: "Seeing people dealing with grief, you've got to have empathy, but also you've got to be strong as well. At their most difficult time, you've got to be able to advise people and help them through it."
She added: "At them difficult times, when people are grieving, your body sort of goes into overdrive, everything's just a blur. We always give customers our WhatsApp, they can call or message us at any time. We'll go through everything that we're doing. The day before we make the flowers, we always try and give them a call, a message, just to let them know what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, leave it in our hands."
Being there for the local community carries extra importance for Amanda. She said: "Most of our customers aren't just customers, they're friends, and they're friends that have become family, because I was actually born here. It's a privilege for me and Lorna to do these tributes for these families because the elderly ladies and gentlemen have watched us grow."
Emotional toll and personal loss
Commemorating the lives of people she has known since childhood has been difficult for Amanda to avoid the emotional toll. She said: "Friends of mine have lost their children, and plenty of times I've stood making flowers and I'll be open and honest, I've cried, because they're children that I've known and I've watched them grow, and then they've been taken away from their parents tragically. It's hard, but I just make sure that they get the best flowers and the best funeral tributes that can possibly be made."
Three years ago, her work life crossed paths with her personal life when she got a call in the early hours that her mum had tragically died. She said: "I knew that in the shop there were two funerals that had to be finished, and they had to go out. So, I made sure that my dad was okay, and I got family round, and then me and Lorna had to come into the shop."
She continued: "I was just looking at my little sister and knowing that she's just in shock, she just looked like the families that we've had to deal with. So, my feelings and my emotions at that point, they were at the back, you have to push it to the back of your mind, and you have to make sure that these families have got their final tributes for their loved ones because they're grieving just as much as you're grieving. Now that I can look back, I was obviously in shock myself, but you have to push that to the back of your mind because you're grieving, but so are the families, they're grieving too."
Finding comfort in the job
While the job can take its toll emotionally, Amanda has her own way of processing it. She said: "I'm spiritual, so I just think that this is my path. The comfort that I get out of it is that I get to comfort all of these families. When I drive past the shop now, I pinch myself because my shop is on Picton Road, and I just think years ago, when I was a child, I never thought I'd be doing this."
