Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Connecting the Present with the Past | Page 17

sweet auburn | 2019 volume i
Nevertheless, I held onto my childish hopes. I wished
fervently that this beloved tree, with the help of its diligent
caretakers, would stay well. That it might even get better, if
that was arboreally possible. And please, oh please, I wished
for it to not disappear on me, not anytime soon.  
Despite my wishes, the “Come say your goodbyes” email
arrived in my inbox long before I expected to find it there. As
with a family member nearing the end of a good long life, I
rationally understood that the end was nigh. And yet—first
came the unhappy shock, and then came the heartache.
Because, really, are any of us ever ready to say goodbye to a
beloved elder?  
I paid my last visit on a particularly warm January
afternoon. The sun was still bright as the 5 o’clock hour
approached, and as the beech’s elegant shadows extending
toward Story Chapel. I was relieved for the landscape’s winter
bareness, which rendered the tree’s impending demise less
obvious. I snapped a few photos of the very tips of the beech’s
lowest branches, each one seeking out the sun, offering up
tight crimson buds, so optimistic, so promising, so full of the
expectation that there would be another change of seasons to
behold.
I returned a week later, just after the arborists had carefully
and painstakingly felled the immense trunk and massive
branches. The remaining stump, not yet ground down, was
awash in sunshine. I couldn’t help but step up onto the spot
where the tree had stood for well over a century, to fully
appreciate its girth, easily 9 feet across, perhaps a good 15
feet from where the emerging roots on one side disappeared
into the earth on the other side. I turned away from the newly
wide-open view to Bigelow Chapel, and with the sun at my
back, spied my insignificant shadow, right there, where the
beech tree’s ought to have been.  
A beloved grandmother-in-law of mine often said, “Don’t
be sad when something ends. Be happy that you had it for
as long as you did.” I didn’t know this tree in its youth, back
when it was an understudy to a row of grand American Elms
that have been gone for decades. I didn’t know this beech tree
in its prime, when I was busy coming of age. The truth is, I
didn’t fully appreciate this glorious creature, big enough to be
its own ecosystem, deserving of its own zip code, until it was
already busy dying.  
But boy, am I ever grateful that I made its acquaintance.
I still have two of the beech’s budded branches. They’re at
home, in a vase, in a bright spot. I’m crossing my fingers for
a little bit of magic, hoping that I might coax out one more
bloom of new birth, one last springtime harbinger of a season
to come. 
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