Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness.

Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say them before they go. The flowers you mean to send, use to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them.

If my friends have alabaster boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered when I need them.

Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand Post-mortem kindnesses do not cheer the burdened spirit. Flowers cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.
- George W. Childs
Leaves of Gold