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<\/p>\nThe morning sunlight of early spring beams through the window blinds and onto the table next to where I\u2019m sitting, spraying dapples onto my coffee cup and the oddly shaped little potted plant next to it.\u00a0 I\u2019m uncertain how long I\u2019ve been sitting there, staring at the plant, my book ignored in my lap.\u00a0 One unenthusiastic sip reveals the coffee has grown cold, too long untouched.\u00a0 There are a lot of things I\u2019m not finishing these days, and just as many I\u2019m unable to even start.<\/p>\n
The strange little plant, about 18 inches tall and bowed over in a curve like an inverted fishhook, first came into the household in early Dec.\u00a0 His narrow young evergreen limbs were pinned close to his baby trunk by a wide red ribbon wrapped candy-cane style from base to tip, and a single red ball hung from the ribbon\u2019s highest point.\u00a0\u00a0 The combined weight of the ribbon and ball was enough to bend him forward like Charlie Brown\u2019s Christmas tree.\u00a0 In a mad pre-holiday dash through Trader Joe’s, I raced past the shelf where he stood (or rather, leaned) , laughed at the shelf tag that labeled it \u201cThe Grump Tree\u201d and tossed one into my basket.<\/p>\n
Anything for a laugh was the order of the day for Christmas 2021, a heartbreaker in my family.\u00a0 My 90-year-old mother\u2019s declining health took a sharp turn for the worse around Thanksgiving, and as Christmas approached, we knew her time left with us would be measured in days.\u00a0 She always loved Christmas, but even a scaled-down version of the usual rituals that gave her such joy felt somehow insincere, maybe even disrespectful, as her time drew to an end. Bowed forward and down by unnatural weight, The Grump Tree was the only holiday decoration in the house that seemed appropriate for the season.\u00a0 Thinking about and praying for my mother, I wondered if my anticipatory grief was obvious to the eye, pitching me in a forward droop from the weight of it.<\/p>\n
A friend who worked in palliative care once educated me on their term \u201cgood death,\u201d which is not the oxymoron it might seem.\u00a0 Looking back at the blur of those final days, it feels okay to think that Mom\u2019s passing fits that term. She knew us until just a few days before she died, and as she prepared to leave us, we took turns by the bedside, talking to her, singing (hymns were all I could remember, extemporaneously, and I\u2019m sure there was a reason) and reading out loud.\u00a0 We did all we could to make sure she was as physically comfortable as possible as her body began its final separation from her soul.\u00a0 When she alighted with the angels two days after Christmas, we understood that it was truly her time to join them.<\/p>\n
I believe that the chance to share in a loved one\u2019s death, to affirm great love with presence, solidarity, and words of comfort, is one of that love\u2019s most profound privileges.\u00a0 Still, anticipating and sharing in a good and peaceful death does not abbreviate the depth and breadth of the loss.\u00a0 Wandering the house aimlessly during those first few weeks after the funeral, wishing I could make myself eat and sleep and trying to remember not to call Mom and remind her that the basketball game was on, I piddled at repacking my few Christmas decorations.\u00a0 It was time to unbind the Grump Tree and do with it I wasn’t sure what.\u00a0 I wondered idly if he could survive his holiday obligations and maybe take up a new life in the woods just beyond my back windows.\u00a0 It was dark and foreboding back there as winter waned and days melted into each other.<\/p>\n
The instructions included in his little pot made it sound easy (don\u2019t they always?).\u00a0 With the ribbon removed, and light and a little water, the bright little tag promised that Grump would straighten up, stand tall and grow into a cypress tree 30 feet tall.\u00a0 Sure\u2014why not?\u00a0 Grump came into our house at the worst possible time, and something felt distantly unjust about tossing him aside with the renewed promise of spring approaching.<\/p>\n
By the time we were soaking in the morning sunlight together with my unread book and cold coffee, about eight weeks after Mom died, Grump wasn\u2019t looking too great.\u00a0 Still bowed over, he was shedding tiny brown needles, declining to rouse himself and follow the promise on the card still stuck in the dirt at his feet.\u00a0 What to do?\u00a0 I was too exhausted to think about it at that moment.\u00a0 Outside the window, the bright sun teased the possibility of an early spring, but the woods beyond remained colorless, dreary, and unchanged.<\/p>\n
Another few weeks crawled slowly by, and as my concentration began to slowly return, a few good days mixed in with the worst ones, I moved Grump to a better window with even more sunlight.\u00a0 Within Grump\u2019s view, shoots of grass began appearing on the bare ground just in front of the woods, and the smallest, newest, most carefree wild sprouts made their spring debut under the high canopy.\u00a0 A lone flowering tree, small and solitary, popped out in a few pink blossoms, above the low clusters of the brave young greens and way below the highest points of the overhead canopy. \u00a0The oldest and tallest forest occupants held their ground but continued waiting, taking their time in drawing strength up from the dark surface deep below to those highest reaches, a cycle affirmed over steadfast decades of slow, faithful progress.<\/p>\n
Now Easter is nearly here, and it is almost time to liberate all the potted plants for the season, migrating them outside to the porch, sidewalk, and various perches.\u00a0 Mom loved this annual process, along with every part of tending to the well-being of green things.\u00a0 If I inherited any portion of her green thumb, my garden and porch will be the envy of the neighborhood. That thought is surprisingly comforting, so I began to inspect the indoor green population, pruning here and there, checking for growth, and thinking ahead to the summer that so rapidly follows the short spring in our part of the world.<\/p>\n
Sadly, I realized just the other day, looking more closely in the ever-brighter spring light, that Grump looks worse than ever.\u00a0 One whole side of him is brown, and a touch on that side yields a sprinkling of tiny dead needles that clink down to the table surface just like the ones from Charlie Brown\u2019s tree in the holiday classic. Did I fail him from lack of attention in the darkest, of those hazy, painful first days and weeks?\u00a0 What else did I forget, or overlook, when bowed down by grief, a journey without an identifiable end point? Would it feel better, like another slow step forward, to finally pitch him and leave behind the terrible winter that he represents?<\/p>\n
Leaning toward that last option, I stop for just a moment to look closer and prod a little deeper, and a surprise awaits.\u00a0 Deeper inside Grump\u2019s brittle and brown outer layer, tiny infantile shoots show strength and flexibility when bent.\u00a0 I can see he has grown up in two main branches, and one of them remains, defiantly, a bright green. While we wait for the trees outside to draw upward all they require to return to summer glory, completing the green mosaic from ground to sky, Grump deserves more time.\u00a0 And a little pruning of the brown side, and some plant food, and a bigger pot.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s too late to save him from all that bowed him down.\u00a0 But maybe it isn\u2019t. \u00a0Maybe he won\u2019t ever be what he might have been, after everything, but maybe he will grow into something else.<\/p>\n
Stay with me, Grump.\u00a0 It\u2019s getting a little warmer and brighter every day.\u00a0 If you can stand up for spring, maybe I can do the same.\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty sure Mom is rooting for us.<\/p>\n
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The morning sunlight of early spring beams through the window blinds and onto the table next to where I\u2019m sitting, spraying dapples onto my coffee cup and the oddly shaped little potted plant next to it.\u00a0 I\u2019m uncertain how long I\u2019ve been sitting there, staring at the plant, my book ignored in my lap.\u00a0 One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[220,222,223,221],"class_list":["post-2408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aging-parents","category-mid-life-adventures","tag-death-of-a-parent","tag-grump-tree","tag-painful-christmas","tag-spring-coming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}