When Michael first died I sought out any local grief support and eventually came across an in-person hospice" loss of a partner" group in Austin, TX. When I entered the room for the first meeting, 21, and only a few months out from my loss, I saw a table of men and women all over the age of 60 who had lost their spouses to cancer, AIDS and other long-drawn-out illnesses where they saw and experienced more than I could imagine.
Each week we'd go around sharing our struggles/feelings/fears, and I viscerally recall one woman responding to me with, "At least you're young! You have your whole life still in front of you to find someone else." I silently said in my head "At least you had your whole life with them!", and I didn't go back the next week or the next.
After those missed sessions, I received a call one night from one of the members asking where I had been. With the beautiful honesty that grief has a way of unearthing, I said, "If each week I'm just going to be told how lucky I am, instead of having my pain or loss validated, I would rather just stay here on my couch." Brief silence...then he responded with, "Come back next week and say that to the group."
"Fuck it..." I thought and attended the following week.
Stating that feeling aloud to them, and them receiving it with love and acknowledgment, made me bold enough to ask them more questions in the weeks to come.
The question that I remember most was, "If you had the choice between losing your spouse suddenly, with them full of life and fervor, but you never got the chance to say goodbye.....or watching them whittle away, flesh and spirit, seeing the spark from their eyes fade, BUT you got to say goodbye....which would you choose?".
The sterile, fluorescent-lit room of 20 beautiful souls all had the same answer..... watch them die slowly (and in most of their cases, painfully.... but be able to have the chance to say goodbye.
I took it in....their truth.
A truth that I honestly would have liked to say was my own but didn't get the chance to experience at that point.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I was weed-eating around the 100-year-old Post oaks on the property, when I noticed a dark sap-like fluid leaking down one of their trunks.
I'm very attached to all of the trees on the land and find them an extension of me, so I and immediately took photos to Google search for what was happening.
Hypoxylon canker. It's a fungus that leads to the death of oaks....untreatable and imminent death... most likely in less than a year.
"FUUUUCCKk," was my initial thought after getting off the phone with an arborist to confirm.
"You might want to cut it down sooner than later," he said.
My brain was conversating with itself as he spoke: But it looked so alive. Green leaves still on it. Shade is still being provided. Birds hopping branch to branch and a squirrel can be seen chasing its friend on it each morning!
"Can I leave it up a bit longer?" I asked.
"It's your tree. You can do whatever you want."
I knew what I wanted...
I wanted to care for it as its leaves browned and eventually would fall...as its branches twisted and dried. I wanted to sit under its still green canopy and feel the comfort of its so freely given shade. I wanted to photograph and witness each stage of what was eventual but now quickened. I wanted to seal its wounds, even though it wouldn't heal its internal infection. I wanted to feel its bark and see the whitetail deer nibble on the grass by its trunk one more season...
But more than anything...
I wanted the chance to say
goodbye.
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.“ — Chinese proverb
Contemplations
Prompts for the journal, heart, and mind:
-What does a “goodbye” mean to me?
-How can I say goodbye with grace to the parts of me that I no longer need to carry?
-Is there a goodbye I wish I could have had? If so, how can I still give my heart closure if I wasn’t physically given the chance to do so?