So I suddenly got the urge to find out why the heck Ego kept calling Meredith his “river lily” and associated the woman so much with it (because I’m hellbent on the fact that he would probably never pay so much attention to someone else’s needs that he would remember her favorite flower – he would probably rather remember his own and associate it with her).
And the one thing I came up with is looking up the meaning of the lily itself, and ho boy, that actually fits quite a bit:
(Several meanings following, I picked those most common apparently)
“…Greek lore associates lily meaning with birth and it is a symbol for motherhood…”
“…As the flowers most often associated with funerals, lilies symbolize that the soul of the departed has received restored innocence after death….”
“…If there’s one flower that’s bursting with symbolism, it’s the lily. Amiability, purity, love, fertility, femininity, unity and transience; it represents all of them….”
That describes literally Meredith’s role in these movies.
For one, we see her as Peter’s mother, the one person he loved the most. That’s her biggest role – and on one side, it’s filled with love (for Peter and from Peter) and on the other side, it has this twisted meaning because Ego literally used her to create an offspring that would carry his light and help him with the expansion. So her biggest title is that of a mother.
And the second one is her dying, moving on, and only her soul (the soul of the departed) is what stays with Peter. We don’t see her after that in the movie, apart from flashbacks. Furthermore, her “innocence” was literally taken away from her by Ego in more than one way (metaphorically if she still was a virgin before meeting him and literally because he made her indirectly a pawn in his world-domination plans).
Her second title is that of a soul whose innocence only was restored after death.
Okay, whatever the real meaning of river lily would have been – I rather like this coincidence already.