There's a tree right outside my room in our family home. A Narra, grown from one of the seeds that fell from the old trees that used to stand like sentinels by our gate; the ones that were eventually cut down to be made into chairs and other furniture. I never paid much attention to it. Not when Papa was alive, anyway. We never got much time to visit home, so there was always so much to catch up on during the rare times we did.
That's one of my many regrets. Not coming home as much as I should have (a different story for another day).
Today, May 5th, 2026, marks one year, one month, and two days since Papa died.
I've been sitting with that sentence for a while now, not quite sure how to follow it. Some things earn their weight in silence before they earn their words. I think this is one of them.
What I didn't notice until after he was gone: on the day he died, this tree had bare branches. Not seasonally bare. Bare bare. Dry, skeletal, with no visible sign of life, as though Papa had reached out and taken its hand on his way out, and it had chosen to go with him.
I didn't expect it to come back.
But it did. Slowly, the way grief moves in reverse-- imperceptibly at first, then all at once. Today, more than a year later, it has grown a full canopy again. Green, unhurried, and completely indifferent to how much it would come to mean to me.
Papa loved plants. He loved wood. He loved things that lasted. The Narra is famously one of the hardest woods in the country, and yet here was this young tree, stripped bare by grief or weather or some strange sympathy, and here it is again: alive. Of all the things to remind me of my father, this tree, the one I'd looked past a hundred times, the one I couldn't have named or dated if you'd asked me -- this is the one that got through.
I've caught myself wishing, more than once, that people worked this way. That we could go bare and dry, and seemingly lifeless for a season. And then, given enough time, simply come back.
I still wish that, if I'm honest.
But I think, in our own way, we do. Not in the literal sense or the way I want on the harder days. But there is something that keeps coming back to people who have loved, lost and chosen, despite everything, to stay. Something that grows back, slower than we'd like. Less dramatic than a canopy of green, but real. Stronger, maybe. Or at least, more deliberate.
I didn't know what I had in that tree until I almost lost it. I didn't know what I had in Papa until the same.
The tree is still there. I'm still here. And right now, that feels like enough.