The tree is dying.
The one smack dab in the center of my front yard.
The one I’ve looked out the window at for approximately 3650 dinners.
The one I took a picture of every day the first fall we moved back to Michigan, like an enamored tourist.

Even then, I noticed a root had encircled the stump.
Maybe because the weed barrier and metal edging gagged it.
What was meant to protect might have smothered the tree.
Or maybe not.

Each year the leafing becomes thinner, like the hairline of an old woman.
Some branches are bare, already naked, like Job’s proclamation.
Last year, the leaves noticeably sagged.
He said, “it’s 20% dead”. This year, I expect he’d say more, but how do you measure? How is he so sure?
And when is it just plain dead?
Is it more than 50%?
Or, do we wait until only the ashen trunk protrudes from the ground to call it, like an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt.
Maybe it has to topple over in a thunderstorm to make the final pronouncement.

I wonder, could the tree be saved?
I don’t know and neither does anyone I’ve asked advice from.
What if there’s hope and I’m just projecting the worst case scenario?
If we were in Sunday School and the question was, “Who can save the tree?” We’d all answer “Jesus”, but I’d bet dessert for a year that if we sit around waiting for Jesus to heal this tree, it’s going to die all the same.

Maybe we should just cut it down.
Take it out of its suffering–it’s slow, suffocating strangulation.
Grind the stump then reseed the yard with Kentucky bluegrass in its place.
Maybe we shouldn’t.
And maybe it’s not actually a moral dilemma.

After all, even trees have a life cycle.
There is planting and waiting and growing.
There is pruning and flourishing.
Pruning and flourishing.
Pruning and flourishing.
There are storms and injury, then resilience.
Storms and injury, then resilience.
Storms and injury, then resilience.
There are storms and injury.
There is disease.
And finally, there is death.

But even then, when its 30 feet horizontal, it won’t actually be gone.
I’ll see it in my mind’s eye every time I look out my window and remember its glory days.
Every single picnic we ate under the shade of its branches.
Its wood, repurposed, may provide warm, cozy fires on frigid Pure Michigan winter nights or cook marshmallows to perfection in a campfire encircled by people who live and love and laugh together.
The mulch might nourish the flowers in my perennial garden or decompose, giving back to the earth its life giving organs to nourish a new tree.
And, maybe I’ll plant a weeping willow in its memory.

(Interwoven into this reflection are both my musings on my work of hospital chaplaincy and my own processing of personal losses.)