We took out a 120-foot tree from our backyard yesterday. Eight workers delicately balanced the arduous work of sawing and hoisting its parts into the jaws of a crane and into the rainy air with tightrope precision.
Huge limbs and trunk pieces poked over the top of our two-story house. Each piece of car-sized tree wood was hooked to clanging metal jaws as it swung slightly, moving slowly till reaching the top of the roof and then delicately tiptoeing its way towards the street side where a truck on wooden risers awaited its freshly-hewn cargo. The warm moist spring air carried the forest scent of fresh wood across the cul-de-sac where neighbors crouched in front of their living room windows to watch this feat of experience and daring.
Six hours later, we had a sad stump and a gaping hole in the foliage where it stood. The tree and the lifetime it had lived had vanished. Like death itself, it had not been easy, but it had been necessary.
How did we know the tree was ready to be removed? Spring came and no leaves matched those of its siblings next to it. Naked, it reached to the sky unafraid to admit its usefulness was over. Unafraid to acknowledge the end had come. We all worried that disease might have hollowed out the sturdy red oak wood holding up arching and mighty branches, But the sawing revealed no such rot. The wood was strong and even, with potential to be cut into floor planks or into cords for burning in a chilly winter fireplace. There is usefulness for the wood when branches don't leaf out.
We knew the tree had to go because the warming skies and the soggy earth coupled with high winds is a ripe recipe for a tree to lose all or part of itself on top of our two-story home.
My 96-year-old mother-in-law is no longer leafing out in the warming spring. She forgets who some of us are and cannot always remember that underclothes are worn under her clothes. She is no longer leafing out and so we suspect there is disease working its way inside her skull, hollowing it out and shrinking her very core. Physicians agree this is probably the case. But there is no way to determine whether this is the case because we do not remove humans’ piece by piece over the roof with a crane.
So instead, we create a structure, a kind of cage or support system to allow her to live protected from the winds of life and decisions of living. No demands are made except to eat, sleep, shower and dress. The leaves are all there, but we doubt the integrity of the core. The structure is not foolproof, and things happen, small branches breaking off and creating dents and nicks in the fabric of her life and, by extension, in the fabric of ours.
“Your friend is here,” she tells my husband when he walks into her little apartment after we had been looking all over for her in the facility in which she lives. I am the friend she is referring to, and my husband and I have been married for more than 50 years. “You should marry her,” she chides.
We speak to her on Alexa, and she tells us “The children are over” but will not speak to her, they only smile. “I offered them something to eat, but they won’t answer,” she says.
Soon after, we hid the offending photo of my daughter and her children in the closet.
Kindly neighbors in her facility occasionally check in on her to see if she is remembering to go to the dining room for dinner, or if she is getting ready for bed. She has an aide in the morning, but evenings have become more problematic as the sundown syndrome hijacks her brain and plays tricks on her memory. Some evenings she never leaves the couch, just getting up at various times to walk the facility’s halls and sit in front of the closed dining room doors until the gentle night guard shakes her awake and encourages her to walk her walker back to her apartment.
Morning or night, the time of day is irrelevant. Making a call at 4:30 a.m., she assures the person she called that day or night, it does not matter.
Summer is on its way now, days are longer, and the warm sun tries to pry its way into her living room where the blinds are drawn against its brightness. But its warmth seeps in anyway and creates a sleepy cocoon of heat since she does not like air conditioning. The television plays on without ceasing since she had long ago forgotten how to turn it off or change a station. The modern reality of streaming and internet television has long left her behind in its complexity.
There is no tomorrow and there is barely a today, but her heart and mind are filled with the thoughts and memories of better days gone by. The years have spun out passing her by and losing her in a nest of memories playing out like half-dreamt dreams in a mind that sleeps fitfully, not soundly, through the long night.
And our tree is now gone, its strong red brown trunk chopped into plank-sized logs ready for a new life as a chair, a desk, or a floor. Our neighbor claimed some to burn in his backyard fire pit. So much of this wood can be reborn to live a longer life than it could in our backyard. And where it used to stand, sun streams onto the ground creating a place to grow and harvest flowers, herbs, or vegetables. Today and yesterday are gone and we look forward to tomorrow and all the ways we can make use of the space left by the things that we no longer have use for. Things that must be removed to avoid a catastrophe. The space left behind is fertile with promise for new life and rebirth perhaps.
But for my mother-in-law, there seems to be no such tomorrow. Her grand babies have grown and brought forth great grandchildren. And those sweet faces turn up to her and know instinctively they are connected, like branches, no, like roots traveling underground and erupting in unexpected ways in various places. Which is what trees do. This is also what humans do. We leave to make space for what comes next. And that is how my mother-in-law will mark her final days and make tomorrow count. It is the way of nature and the only way human beings really can make tomorrow a part of today.
Thanks Sandi.. much appreciated and welcome to my Substack.
Jackie
Beautiful, fitting analogy. God bless your mother-in-law.