My Father's Cherry Tree
By Gordon Wilson
Palacios, Texas
Reprinted with permission of Bereavement Publishing, Inc. 1-888-604-HOPE (4673).
I don't suppose I ever really understood my father -- at least not until after his death. Good or bad, blessing or sad, it is probably the way my family has dealt with its fathers for generations. Only after death can the last lesson be taught to strong-willed sons. A man should strive quietly to be a part of life and know his place in his own heart.
Two days after Christmas, my stepmother, Helene, called to tell us our dad had died. The news would again make a family out of that once-tight, intimate group of diversity, now scattered to their own. I called my oldest brother, John, with the sad news, and in an instant, the many years of silence (the silence of old friends who are easy with it) melted into our shared focus of loss.
The next day, we flew together out of Houston and talked around the loss of our father and of our memories. We landed in Benton City, Washington, during an early evening snow flurry. Some of my father's friends picked us up at the airport, and all the way home we shared funny stories about him.
The house lay small and yellow on its half acre, declaring that out-of-doors people lived there. To the left, three spruce trees, around five or six feet tall, stood freshly snow-frocked. The light from a window shone brightly between the spruce and a cherry tree, now nude and unimportant with winter. Even though the front window was covered with plastic, I noticed that the scraped and unpainted sill was waiting, like the cherry tree, for spring.
Inside the door, my father's boots with socks tucked into the necks, stood watch behind his chair. The chair was positioned so he could see both the kitchen and the TV. To the right of the kitchen door stood the Christmas tree, still happily blinking away with the season. The house smelled of Christmas. The aroma of Dad's homemade bread mixed sweetly with the chocolate of his fudges and candies and Mom's seasonal baking and cooking.
John was hugging Mom, and I hugged my sister, Laurie, and our younger brother, Michael. After a little dancing on the cramped floor, everyone eventually hugged everyone else. Tomorrow, Dennis would be in from the Persian Gulf, and the circle would be complete.
Over coffee, we all sat and talked about Dad until the night grew weary of words. Then, after everyone else had bedded down, I bundled up and slipped out the back door. The fresh snow crunched beneath my boots on my way to my father's strawberry patch. To my left was Dad's picnic table where he used to sit and drink iced tea in the shade of the cherry tree after working in his garden. Later, my mother would tell me, "When he was lucky, he would sit there for hours, just looking at his garden."
Standing there in the blue moonlight of a snow-covered earth, with the cold, dry air urging my nose to run, I finally cried -- and said goodbye to my old friend.
The following April, Helene called to say she had been to the funeral home and the next day she was going to bury my father's ashes under the cherry tree.
Had I known in December that the tree would come to be his headstone, I would have examined it more closely, felt the bark for its texture and looked up at the sky through its limbs. But in the winter, it had been dormant, and my heart had been filled with death.
Addendum by Sherry Sharon: The scriptures teach us in Ecclesiastes 3:1-4, "To every thing there is a season, a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance..."
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