After she died in 2000 I was carrying a rock sack full of grief as my husband Frank and I built our new house in Shutesbury, Ma, and moved in with our boys Teryn who was eight and Dante who had just turned two. Sometimes it was all I could do to get through the day. I would pack husband and boys off to work and school, then lay on the plywood floor of the studio office playroom and cry great, big, terrifying spasms of sobs. An acupressurist and counselor, I recognized depression when I no longer found joy even in the things I loved the most. My mom’s words bubbled up from deep inside me “you’re a mother now Kar, you’ve got to pull yourself together” so I found myself a grief counselor who listened and who helped me develop coping tools like meditation. When it hurt too much to think, I gave my thoughts to a tree. When Frank had cleared the land to build our house, we brought the birch and maple logs to the mill in Leverett and turned them into the flooring of the main living areas . We selectively cut trees to maximize winter sun and summer shade but left the giant hemlock we called “the mama tree” in spite of the forester’s warning that the tree was, like all hemlocks of the northeast, doomed to die from the boring insect called the Wooly Adelgid. The mama tree offered solace as the symbol of nature’s majesty and mystery.
When my dad died of old age in 2010; painlessly, loving family gathered around him, winding down like a clock as he had hoped, I was wrong thinking I could bypass the grief. Mortality is a buzzkill. Grief touches past griefs and has a life of its own in each situation and person. I imagine just as we have valves that regulate the flow of the food we digest, that humans have a grief sphincter which opens to allow the amount that can be handled in that moment; too much can drown a person and squeezing too tight can cause an explosion. Denial has its place in allowing a grieving person to get out of bed, eat breakfast and take a shower.
Now the hemlocks are dying. Every one of them. I see them dying along the roads I drive and step over them when I'm walking in the forest. The mama tree is dying. I didn't believe it until I saw it happening. Frank and I attended a presentation by the Harvard Forest at the Athol Public Library called “Hemlock Hospice”, a collaboration of art and science addressing the coming end of the stately icon of the northeast. Like many of the people there, we were hoping to learn from the experts what we can do to save our trees. We should have known from the title and from our experience that hospice is for the living left behind not the dying who cannot be saved. As I watch the hemlocks lose their needles and then their life, uprooted, dropping one by one, I am reminded of every person I have known and loved who has died and remember to live.
I’m glad we chose to let the mama tree live even though it means watching it slowly die.
All summer long I hear the chainsaw of my neighbor to the west and I think of Angelina Jolie's breasts. Like Angelina, Jim made the decision to cut preemptively. The trees, unlike Angelina's breasts, will be milled into sheds sold by the man in the parking lot across from the Stop and Shop in Greenfield. When I am tending my garden and I hear the chainsaw go silent, I wait for the resounding crack, whoosh and thud that reverberates in my roots along with all the trees in the forest as another giant falls. Sometimes I have to go in the house and lay down with the covers over my head.
I would prefer not be an expert at grief, but grief is love and intimacy and part of being alive. Channeling grief into something meaningful, even beautiful, is the best I can do. One foot in front of the other until one day there is some new joy taking up the real estate where sad had dwelled so long.
If it's true the goddess is returning then I see her in what is left behind, revealed. When the hemlocks are gone there will be more light in the forest, more sunshine in winter and a view to the east where I came from.
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Boston Globe December 11, 2017 Renée Loth
Hemlock Hospice is an Elegy for the dying New England Hemlock Forest
http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/files/media/121117-BostonGlobe-HemlockHospiceElegy.pdf
“It’s a cultural touchstone for New England; Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost wrote some of their most famous poems about the familiar woodland sentry. And the hemlock is a marker for climate change — the canary in the forest. The adelgid can’t survive if temperatures reach about 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; Petersham, near the Quabbin Reservoir, used to see those temperatures in winter, but Ellison says it hasn’t been that cold for at least 10 years. “We speak of invasive species as if they have agency,” he says
Borden, who has a degree from Harvard in landscape architecture, the Hemlock Hospice is a way to build awareness of forest ecology, even if he can’t stop the ravaging. “It’s end-of life care not just for the thing that’s dying, but for the living,” he said. The idea is to “not be overwhelmed by fear and to learn something from the loss"
