June 2, 2014.
It was the beginning of the end. I just didn’t know it at the time.
Looking back now, it was the defining moment — the one that revealed how deep my husband’s pain reached into his gentle, tortured soul. I just didn’t know it.
My husband was a brilliant creative. Loving. Generous. Restless. Haunted. He was mourning his own childhood trauma, first triggered when our daughter turned eight, then again two weeks after my mother died. He was in what Carl Jung calls mortification — active mourning:
“We mourn, manifesting a wide range of reactions in outer life: waves of forgetfulness, sadness, loneliness, regret, magical thinking… inconsolability, emotional lability, surprising responses to life situations, the upsurge of old memories we thought we had let go of long ago, even concern that we might be losing our minds.”
He struggled with sobriety, but at that time he was in a long stretch of it and seeing a dual-diagnosis therapist. He was building and restoring furniture again, creating extraordinary pieces of art, swimming in the ocean, and finding joy in his work as a project manager on several big jobs in the greater Boston area. He loved big. And more than anything, he loved our little family of three.
“More than anything,” he would say — through tears, through laughter, through difficult conversations. It was our little family that held his fragile sense of self together.
Without question, he loved us. And we loved him.
I thought we were on the other side of what had been a shattered jigsaw puzzle — broken glass scattered everywhere two weeks after my mother passed away. My husband and my mother had been close and her death pulled at what may have been the last threads of what was holding him together. Two weeks after my mother’s death he had a psychotic break that led to a brief stay in a facility specializing in dual diagnosis. For him this meant the first real time he was able to understand the impact of his childhood trauma and his drinking, his family dysfunction that began when he was 8 and seemed to never end. Coming to understand how his childhood trauma and his drinking were linked brought him a little bit of peace. When he returned home, he seemed lighter, not shrouded in the shame he had carried for most of his life.
But I was wrong.
We were heading into the last four months of his life. But I just didn’t know it.Four months of tremendous joy and resolution. Family vacations. Heartbreak. And the growing realization that I would have to make changes for the sake of our family.For my daughter. I would have to come to terms with the truth that decades together and unconditional love would not be enough to save someone.
So on that June day, my husband and daughter took off on an adventure — a theme park somewhere.This trip was going to launch the first steps in repairing their relationship.He was insistent on the trip, and she was thrilled. I was hopeful they might begin rebuilding what they once had.
Saturdays had once belonged to them. Up early. Coffee for him. Chocolate milk for her. A doughnut or two. Then off into the wild yonder — yard sales, flea markets, contractor supply stores — anywhere requiring the keen eye of a father and daughter on an adventure. They both loved trying new foods, music, and the open road.
But that June was different.
Our daughter was twelve now, preparing for seventh grade. Old enough to recognize the wounds of a father struggling with childhood trauma and addiction — yet still young enough to find comfort in his efforts toward sobriety. Toward healing. Toward holding on.
If their relationship was going to repair and grow, they needed time together. They needed to find each other again. Reclaim their rhythm.
They loaded the truck and left for the weekend.
Hope was the thread to mend what needed mending.
I was counting on hope. On the small, delicate stitches that hold together a well-worn piece of clothing. On the healing properties of sunshine and time, fresh air and togetherness.
The pictures that came from that weekend were thrilling — roller coasters, junk food, hotel swimming pools, more junk food, more rides, more bonding.
True to form, I expected the back of his truck to return filled with treasures collected along the way: pieces of chairs he would redesign into something new, tools, a bike, a rusted sign that said Humbled, a faded orange metal sign that read Surge Milker. A giant metal X and a giant metal O. Discarded relics that caught his eye and would find new life under his hands.
But on that return trip, there were no relics.
There were trees.
One dozen arborvitaes, begging to be released from the twine that bound them together. He’d gotten them on sale. Each looked road-weary, a tag dangling from a brittle branch:
Water me quick. I am thirsty.
Some were already half-dead. Half-alive. They seemed to be begging for solid ground — for a foothold — for whatever chance remained to send roots into the soil and grow taller. Stronger.
I think back on that moment. I think back on it often.
The trees were unloaded and placed where they would eventually be planted. They were watered thoroughly. Soaked for days. Given every opportunity to revive — while still confined to their plastic containers, tags dangling, twine intact.
One week passed.
Then two.
Then four.
More dead branches. More leaves surrendering to the ground. More evidence that no amount of watering could substitute for being planted. For forming roots.
Half-dead. Half-alive.
After offering many times to help plant them — after the trees became a running joke among friends pulling into the driveway — something shifted.
The trees became an issue. A defiant, dare-I-say death-defying issue.
Over the years we had planted many trees on our property. Trees in honor of loved ones who had passed. Trees for anniversaries. Trees for privacy. Those trees were grounded and green, budding and blooming.
The arborvitaes were not.
I could not understand why he refused to plant them. Why he refused to let anyone else help. What he found so compelling about staring at half-dead trees every time he pulled in or out of the driveway.
A month went by. All but six were clearly gone. The rest were fading fast.
Then one August morning, very early, I looked out the window and saw him frantically planting them.
All of them.
Even the dead ones.
He was wearing his favorite straw cowboy hat, already sweating in the early sun. There was something frantic in his movements. Something desperate.
I went outside.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why now? Why after all this time? Why are you planting dead trees?”
He looked at me. It was clear he had been crying. It was clear something far bigger than trees had torn him open.
“What are you doing?” I repeated.
He threw down the shovel.
Through tears he said,
“I can hope, can’t I?”
He stormed off.
And I let it be.
A month later to the day, he was dead.
He took his own life on a day that was achingly beautiful. A New England “best day ever,” he would say when the sky was impossibly blue and the air crisp.
Best day ever.
And yet the worst day in the lives of my daughter and me.
A year after his death, four of the trees remained.
They had new growth. They were living.
Just as my daughter and I have done for the last eleven years.
Recently, my daughter drove past the house where we once lived as a family of three — where my husband planted dead trees. The four that survived are tall, lush, evergreen, unbound by twine and time.
I moved into a new house where I could grow gardens, plant trees, and watch as seasons change and new growth unfolds. I needed to be surrounded by nature. I needed to nurture.
Life moves on.
I remain among the living — rooted in what was once a deep love, and saddened by the knowing that love was not enough to help my husband grow and remain in the living.