the death of a tree

“You be careful now!”

    This is something people here in the Ozarks say instead of goodbye or see you later. I’ve never been very careful. When someone says that, I remember body surfing full-moon waves in Kauai while tripping on LSD, the drunken drives in the hills of Vermont, the thin cold air on Mt. Everest, the electric eels in Amazonia, the cocaine, the Camel straights, the dangerous place New York City was when I moved there years ago. I am also thinking of the emotional risks I have run, like having a child and falling in love.

    I had to take down a hundred-year-old maple the other day, and it made me very sad. I loved that tree, and I thought it would outlive me. I realized that my outsized grief was because these days friends are starting to fall like trees. It doesn’t seem to matter how careful or how careless they have been. And my landscape is more barren without them.

    “I’m scared shitless,” one of my best friends told me the other day. He has brain cancer and has to think about what they call end-of-life issues. “What should I do?”

     “Spend as much time with the people you love as you can. Hold their hands,” I told him. “It’s ok to cry. Put your financial affairs in order. And indulge yourself in small pleasures.”

     I don’t know whether this was good advice—I’m no death doula. I started thinking about that last bit. What would the indulgences be as physical abilities are eroded? Watching favorite movies, rereading books, listening to music, talking story, enjoying the sun on your skin. (I mean, at this point why worry about skin cancer?) Eating good food, drinking good booze, massages, strippers, patting your dog. Looking at your favorite tree. I hear psychedelics can be good for the dying, too. And, oh yeah, you could take up smoking again!

    Talk about risks: He’s survived the fall of Baghdad, the retaking of Kuwait, snipers in Bosnia, prison in the Dominican Republic, the Mob in New York City, tropical disease in Africa, a broken spine from a run-in with a tank. One of his bullet-riddled armored cars ended up in a museum. But after living through all those risks, it’s cancer that’s going to get him. In the pandemic years we have all been making risk assessments every day. But something is going to get every one of us. Life itself is a risk.

     So now my friend is fearfully awaiting the latest MRI results. He says he is on the verge of tears often. He can’t walk very well or get up the stairs to his shower. To add insult to injury, despite all the isolation and masking, Covid landed him in the hospital yet again. He and his family are investigating assisted living places. The one he’s seen so far, he says, is like a cross between a hospital and a Marriott. Which, given that he’s spent half of his life in hotels as a war correspondent, is not necessarily a bad thing. He would have a whole new audience for his war stories. He could have his dog there, too. His dog that has also lived past his sell-by date.

     Ordinarily, dogs die before people, and people die before trees. Life isn’t always so orderly. I made my tree’s three-foot trunk into two beautiful tables that stand in my yard near where the tree once did. One holds the grill and the other some elephant ears a friend gave me. The tree is having an afterlife. And as for the risk I took in loving it when it was dying, it was worth it.

     So don’t be too careful, now!

 

This photograph is by Chien-Chi Chang, taken of a friend at the country house of the man in question, with, Chien-Chi thinks, the dog of the man in question. It so perfectly hits the notes.