Decaying Tree: Grief and Resilience

This essay is an excerpt from my latest book, Paddlin’ with Thoreau…

Just as we reached and soared to new heights in January, we now reach deep within and find the resilience that will bring us joy.

Decaying Tree: Grief and Resilience

“The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands

sun, wind and rain no less than the green one.

It secretes sap and performs the functions of health.

If we choose, we may study the alburnum only.

The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”

-Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Sunday

Thoreau penned this quote while on a river trip with his brother, John. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, is the recollection of this journey. About two and a half years after their trip, Henry’s brother, John, died in his arms, suffering a painful death from lockjaw. His brother’s passing was one of the most tragic losses of Henry’s life and his book seemed veiled in a shroud of incomprehensible grief.

I, too, have been shrouded in grief at sorrowful intervals in my life. So, I suppose it is appropriate for me to write about a decaying tree, its death, its resilience and ultimately its hope for rebirth.

Many times, on my paddling journeys, I see a partially submerged tree in the water, untethered from its roots on land. No longer a channel of nourishment for its leaves and branches, it lies limp along the shoreline. Rotting, moldy and decomposing. The gift of resilience trapped inside.

I have felt lifeless like this at times in my life, haven’t you? Certain events or circumstances leave me feeling drooping, sagging and wilting my way through a day or longer. A waning interval of time exists between what was before and what is to come. A renewed sense of resilience is on its way, but how long do I have to wait?

I must admit, I have a deep interest in the journey of grief. I have experienced periods of time in my life where the anguish seemed unbearable. Grief, as I define it, is an unwelcome and unpredictable companion, with a complicated texture. I have watched loved ones struggle with this agonizing challenge, wanting to bring comfort and shorten their painful, but necessary, path.

If we experience the incredible joy of profound love, we also know the unbearable ache of deep loss. Our landscape changes and there is no map to guide us.

Grief’s itinerary is as individual as the loss itself. Unprocessed grief, I have come to believe, can be the most heart-wrenching of all. Let me share a story.

From 2012-2019 I founded and facilitated the Red Kayak Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission was to help people facing challenges receive the healing benefits of kayaking. On one of our half-day retreats a woman came off the water after paddling for two hours in silence. During the sharing of what surfaced for her she began to sob and talk about the loss of her father. Her grief seemed acute as though his passing was recent, but she said he had been gone for 22 years. She cried uncontrollably. Her broken heart, trapped within a 22-year encasement of unprocessed grief, was splitting open.  Heartbreaking to witness. Listening to her story tugged at my own memories of loss, uniting our hearts.

From my own travels with grief, I know on the other side, as I weave the grief into the tapestry of my life, healing and rebirth join the pain of loss and they move forward together. I begin a new journey, profoundly changed. The focus and the direction of my life shifts.

Just as we are intimate with individual grief, we also endure a broader, collective grief. All of us experience this in a different way as we witness and live through unsettling world events.

Thoreau wrote in his journal, on October 18, 1855, at age 38, “How much beauty in decay!” He was encouraging us to look deeply under the surface of our grief, to find the joy patiently waiting at the bottom of our sorrowful sea.

Within the slowly decaying remains of the decaying trees and stumps I have seen from my little red kayak, life is teeming. New growth is sprouting and the decaying tree becomes an elaborate floating terrarium. Resilience is blossoming.

A landscaper, I think, would see the above photo as a beautifully arranged composition. The taller, green reeds provide the backdrop for lower groundcover, or “log cover” as it would be. The addition of the lily pads floating in front of this waterscape add to the expansion of its beauty. Along the backdrop of the bushy growth on the shoreline, this aquatic display makes me smile, and gives me hope. The natural rise of new plants spontaneously signals new life.

In our world today, we need hope more than ever. This decaying tree, this lesson of nature, shows us that within any seemingly unsettling occurrence, there is new birth. There is life. There is growth and there is color and joy and promise for the future. It comes to each of us in its own time, and collectively, we raise each other up.

“The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth,” Henry noted in A Week. “At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.”

We all need to find resilience, one of the greatest healers of grief. We spiral up, down, around and through the many cycles of grief, but somehow we remain steadfast. We maintain a buoyancy of spirit.

Let us embrace the decaying trees in our lives, and lean on them with the expectation of everything good and the optimism for faith in a brighter future.

Degeneration. Regeneration. Resilience. Hope.

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Name a time when you felt like the decaying tree?

How did this interval of time make you feel?

What meaning did you find as this decaying tree began to sprout new life? And how have you carried this forward?