“Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by Indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.” —Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
My mother and I used to get coffee and donuts along Poughkeepsie’s Route 9, then park alongside an abandoned warehouse. We went there to admire a crabapple tree—(Malus ‘Snowdrift’, I believe)—that was densely coated in white blooms each spring. Mature and healthy, with beautiful branch structure, it seemed to me a sublime expression of crabapple possibility. I wondered who’d had the foresight to plant a ‘Snowdrift’ there, presumably for both its beauty and its adaptability, at the southeast corner of the building. What was its story?
A hip fracture in 2019 had changed Mom’s mobility, narrowing our options for exploring our world together. Since then, she uses a walker and gets tired more easily than she used to. We still go to art galleries and for walks, but sometimes getting a coffee and donut is the big excitement of the week.
The warehouse crabapple provided a feeling of coziness, privacy, and connectedness to nature not far from Poughkeepsie’s busiest road. From our parking spot, we could watch hilariously busy House Sparrow flocks; hear Carolina Wrens singing in their bell-clear tone and Eastern Bluebirds issue their beautiful, sad-warble of a call; and see Turkey Vultures, with their awesome six-foot-wide wingspans, take off and soar gracefully. No one cared that we were there. The crabapple’s dense cloud of spring white blooms or lush summer foliage harbored us, however briefly, against the storms of the pandemic, political extremism, and the relentless cascade of losses that aging was and is imposing on my mother and her peers.
The warehouse didn’t stay abandoned, and unfortunately, the new owners removed the crabapple and all other vegetation around the building. The tree was there, and then it wasn’t. Now there is just brick, gravel, asphalt, very large and bright-red “No Trespassing” signs, security cameras, and patrolling vehicles.
Why was it necessary to remove the crabapple? It did not pose a sight hazard. It was not impinging on building or sidewalk. It seemed a senseless sacrifice. Mom and I lost an oasis; we mourned “our” tree.
Within a mile of me there’s a cemetery with a confluence of habitats to meet almost any bird’s needs—swamp, scrub, forest corridors, open lawn, and a spectacular, mature, and diverse evergreen pinetum shading the oldest graves. As such, my husband I have spent many hours there with our binoculars hoisted to the trees. Old sugar maple (Acer saccharum) trees there provide cavities for Eastern Bluebirds, Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, White-breasted Nuthatches, Wood Ducks, and several species of woodpeckers, including Pileated. Great Horned Owls and Barred Owls hunt there. Crows make stick nests at the top of massive pines and Eastern Kingbirds build cup nests in the tall spruces.
One day last spring, when my husband and I arrived at the cemetery, we immediately registered the absence of one of those towering trees. We made our way over to the place where a 100-foot-plus white pine (Pinus strobus) had been—and got a gut punch. We looked at the logs on the ground, and with each of us having a background in arboriculture, we wondered why this tree had been taken down. We hoped it was an anomaly, but a heavy and foreboding feeling weighed down our visit.
More tree removals eventually followed, including trees with the most value to wildlife: mature evergreens, and the largest sugar maple. The latter was still sturdy, cavities and all—responsible arboriculture no longer equates cavities alone with a safety hazard—and the tree had excellent perching branches. Once I watched a Redshouldered Hawk perch there and groom itself for nearly a half-hour; that was a fantastic experience.
In the past, we had had friendly interactions with the cemetery manager. One morning after the first tree came down, I stopped in for a chat. I expressed how special the place is on so many levels and how much my husband and I appreciate the care the staff put into it. I poured a big jar of honey over my concerns and expressed them as curiosity, asking questions as gently as possible. The manager was, in the moment at least, unmoved. There was little leverage available to us because as it turns out, this cemetery is private (despite bearing the name of the town)—and my husband and I aren’t customers.
Someone had convinced the cemetery board that the trees were a pressing liability that would cause their insurance premiums to soar. A tree’s hazard potential is assessed in terms of tree condition, yes—but equally assessed in terms of the likelihood of a target should the tree fall. In our estimation, these trees had compartmentalized their decay well and didn’t pose a threat to the infrequent presence of people.
“But the gravestones are expensive to replace,” the manager said. I asked if there’d been trees that broke gravestones upon falling. (It looked to us like time, weather, woodchucks, egg-laying snapping turtles, and soil subsidence were the greater threats to the stones.) “Not many, but we can’t afford the insurance to go up.” (This seemed like a disingenuous argument given the cost of tree removal. On the conservative side, the cemetery board would have spent at least $25K on removals by the end of the spring.) At this point his cell phone rang and he walked away from our conversation.
Myself having worked as a professional gardener, and my husband having worked as a grounds manager, we can imagine what might have been an incentive for the takedowns: wanting fewer branches and cones to clean up in the wake of every wind and rainstorm. This is no small thing. We get it. It’s tedious work. Raking debris is harder on the body than mowing grass, especially as we age. It’s not laziness; it can come down to people coping with aging bodies and just simply having less capacity for physical labor—something we are personally familiar with.
I could find no further remedy with regard to the cemetery manager’s stance. However, I noticed a few weeks later that a row of old sugar maples—ones we often find owl pellets beneath, and ones the manager said wouldn’t remain much longer—had been limbed up, rather than removed. I’ll never know if our conversation had any effect on him, I can only wonder.
Though there are still mature trees—and lots of birds—at the cemetery, I continue to feel grief on our increasingly infrequent visits there, or even when just driving by.
I imagine many readers of these stories will have experienced a similar jolt—perhaps many jolts—of loss. A cherished tree succumbs to disease, lightning, or erratic high winds. The land around us that we took for granted is cleared for yet more development. The town makes a difficult decision to take down healthy trees to make room for a rail trail. The more you pay attention to trees and habitats, the more the feelings of loss and grief can accumulate.
After the trees at the cemetery were taken down, I felt a despair that was hard to shake, one that my husband didn’t process in the same way I did. So it was serendipity when, right around that time, a beloved facilitator of one of my writing groups encouraged me to take her newly developed Eco-Grief writing course.
I don’t want to outline the course in her stead, but broadly I can tell you that for me it proved very therapeutic to have a space in which to express my deepest fears about the state of the natural world. To read, uncensored, what I’d written aloud and know that the group members could handle it (and each of whom could take a break when needed). To find that I was not alone in the intensity of my feelings.
The outcome was that we all felt more centered and could decide where we were going to put our energies. What could we do to care for the natural world, at a scale that we can manage—and stick with? Enacting care can relieve grief and create bonds with others. In our troubled world, in a world that’s always been troubled, grief is often present, but it can open our hearts as well, in helpful and deeply connecting ways.
Michelle Sutton is a horticulturist, writer, and editor.
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