Nature as Witness to Our Growth and Grief

If we don't deny the inevitable end to our story, we will write it more beautiful while we are alive"

-Andrea Gibson

These trees live in one of my favorite places, one of the favorite places of people I’ve loved who are no longer here. When I visit, smells and sounds and even how the breeze feels reminds me of so many people who used to be there with me. Dinners at the picnic table, eating salty chips with lake water hands, admonishments about getting sandy feet in the beds.

Many of the memories are neither good nor bad nor nostalgic, they just are. Snapshots in a photo album of mainly unremarkable summer days. And still I miss some of the people in the snapshots with my whole heart, even so many years later.

Grief can’t be avoided, or overcome, or strong-armed into submission. It can only be experienced. We can try all of those other things, but they never work. Grief’s presence wins out in the end, resilient as a trumpet vine you try to evict from your garden. You can cut every visible piece away but then you look and there is again. Grief (and trumpet vines!) will come back and come back the more we try to avoid it. It’s just like death; we can pretend it’s not out there but we all know it keeps its promise. Death comes for us all in the end. What if we live our lives like we know the ending? What more would we do?

I learned a lot from the people who used to inhabit my favorite place with me. I learned from their lives and their deaths, and from some of them, who they became in the in-betweens.

I wonder if these trees remember them, saw them, wondered at their mighty moments and their fragility. I hope the trees see me, and I hope they marvel at how I’ve grown since we met. Maybe the breeze through their needles and leaves are the familial whispers of my dreams: “we see you. We are holding you. We love you. Keep going you’re doing amazing.” They bear witness to my changes and ages year after year, and I hope they know how much I am trying to write it more beautiful while I’m alive. If you, too, are trying, I see you, I love you, keep going, you’re doing amazing.