Tree Rings

My good friend Hank left his wife last week. She’s been asking him to move out for years, but he’s resisted, trying to hold on for the kids and whatever remains of the dream. But he finally realized that there’s nothing left but a contract, and that doesn’t make much of a marriage, so now he’s in a hotel, alone with his thoughts and the Golf Channel. What does a spirit do with all of those memories after the container that was holding them is shattered in pieces on the ground?

My parents weren’t married long enough for many memories to be made. Maybe there’s some grace in it because I don’t have to try to make sense of good times that live in the shadow of bad times. Hank and Sarah have so many good times to try to hold on to while they tear up this contract, and I suppose it will be hard every day.

If we are like trees and each year is a tree-ring, we certainly can’t just erase the rings that don’t seem to fit anymore. For Hank and Sarah they’d have to cut out two and a half decades of lumber from their trees, each one containing volumes of stories - of spring storms and harsh winters, birth stories and death stories, and there’d be nothing left of the tree to hold it up. I suppose she’ll always have his twenties and he’ll always have her thirties and there’s nothing to do about it. The problem will be that now, as they try to move forward, the new people they invite into their lives won’t have any idea how those rings were formed. They won’t understand the thin years, where there was very little nutrients in the soil, or the knots that bulge and shape the next ring and the next and the next.

Alice is in the same situation, sort of. She lost her husband to cancer a few years ago and is dating again. He was loving and their marriage was healthy, and the man she is with now is kind and understanding and he’s thankful for the tree rings that don’t include him because they’ve made Alice who she is; the memories don’t have an asterisk. This isn’t easier than what Hank is going through, but it’s cleaner. Alice doesn’t have the tension of trying to make sense of good memories that now live in the shadow of ugly ones, hers are just shadowed by grief.

My friend Tasha was married to Jon for fourteen years before she realized he was cheating. It would never have gotten out except Jon got sloppy and pursued a fourteen-year old girl and the cops caught him in a sting operation like the ones you watch on TV crime dramas. All of this was revealed to Tasha when the police came to her door one evening and took Jon into custody. Fourteen affairs in fourteen years, and all without Tasha suspecting a thing. What does she do with her tree rings? They seemed happy, healthy even, but now they are stained with all of the lies and the scandal. How does a person process all of this? What file folder do these memories go in?

Just last night Tasha and I talked for two hours and even after years of therapy she says she "still doesn’t know how to be.” I told her that this is what trauma does - it keeps us from being able to know what’s real and what isn’t. In all of her work with counselors and doctors none of them had told Tasha that she might have PTSD, and I told her how sad I was that she’d been trying to make sense of this on her own. She cried and I cried and when we got off the phone she messaged me to see if I was ok. I assured her that I was, and that my emotions were a completely appropriate response to hearing a story like hers and that she needn’t worry. Part of the problem was that nobody ever validated just how intense this kind of thing is, and that led her to a place where she thought she needed to take care of me.

Adam is an ER doctor and surgeon. Every few weeks he and I get together and process what he’s seen and what he’s been through, and most times it connects us to earlier experiences and emotions, and we look at those too. Adam has over two decades of tree rings that he’s just beginning to look closely at, and at the same time he’s in the middle of other people’s trauma on a daily basis, and it can all get pretty heavy for him. A few weeks ago he lost a patient in the ER and had to inform the family of what happened. Adam watched as they collapsed and wailed in distress, and as he walked me through the story, he said that he wondered if anyone would react this way if anything ever happened to him. Adam feels invisible, and it’s tied to decades of be overlooked. His tree rings have been starved of empathy and we’re working through it, but it takes a while. Most sessions we end up crying as we go back and wake up little-Adam and re-parent him and really see him for how exceptional he is. When we leave I tell Adam that he’s a good kid and he says it back.

I spend a lot of time sipping coffee with people talking about their tree rings, trying to give some language and meaning to the feelings that come up as I listen to all of the stories that are contained in the rings - each one filled with 365 days’ worth of experiences, each one unique and special. Sometimes I find a drawing of a tree that has as many rings as they are old and I print it out for them and they color in the rings with blue or red ink depending on whether it was a happy year or a sad year, and sometimes the years have both. When we get to something that is important we stop and look at it, we pay attention and give it the time it deserves. Because, even though time moves forward and new tree rings are formed, the happy and the sad from the inner rings is still there, still alive, and still very much worth talking about.

Dennis was at base camp on Mount Everest sleeping on a hammock in a hostel, getting acclimated to an altitude of fifteen-thousand feet, when his wife called him in the middle of the night to tell him that Kaitlin, their eighteen-year-old daughter, had died in a tragic accident. It was a miracle that Dennis was able to get a helicopter ride down off the mountain the following day but it still took him forty-eight hours to get back to the States. We talk about those forty-eight hours about once a month because they created a knot in the wood that will always be there for Dennis and he knows he needs to stay present to his pain to be healthy. Talking about it - pulling out the file and rehearsing what happened, helps him stay awake and alive, and the more we talk the easier it gets. There’s no closure with stuff like this, there’s just sadness and joy and they both come from the same faucet, and as they flow out of us and wash over us we ask for peace and sometimes it comes (as a gift).

A few years ago I heard Steve Inskeep interview the mother of one of the passengers aboard the Malaysian Airways flight that mysteriously disappeared over the ocean. The whole thing was national news for quite a while, with all sorts of theories going around about what might have happened - maybe pilot error, maybe a hijacking. Some even thought that the plane was on a secret runway in Russia somewhere and a ransom would be demanded, but months after the disappearance, the plane was still missing and Anderson Cooper had to move on to other things. Eventually though, a few small pieces of one of the wings washed up on a remote beach and it was clear that the flight had gone down in the ocean and that the passengers were gone. Steve Inskeep respectfully asked if the mother might have some closure now about her son’s death, and she responded by saying, “No, there’s no closure, and that’s not the point. The best I can hope for is some peace as I continue to move forward with the loss."

My friend Maryanne lost her son Thomas in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-one. They were best friends, and at first, Maryanne didn’t want to be alive if Thomas wasn’t with her. For a long time, she couldn’t swallow food because she didn’t feel right eating if Thomas couldn’t eat either.

Sometimes the body processes trauma like this and it’s pretty normal, healthy even - extreme things should bring on extreme responses. Maryanne and I talk twice a month about Thomas and the loss and how she will move forward now that so much has changed. She doesn’t want closure because that would mean moving on without him and she never wants to forget, so we work through the tree rings and the memories and we learn how to carry those things inside, close to the center, as new rings are formed and new relationships color them in. The rings where tragedy happens will always be sad, and some new ones, happy ones, will form later, and that’s how it’s meant to be.

Sometimes, like with my friend Cass, it’s not enough to just carry the story on the inside, in private, so when Cass’ son died, she got his name tattooed on her body to make sure the inside story can be remembered on the outside, like initials etched into the bark of the tree. This happens a lot with important stuff. Brian’s wife Allyson has six birds tattooed on her arm, one for each of their five kids, and one for the baby they lost a few years back. Soldiers do it too, to remember the importance of their time with their brothers in battle, and if you pay attention and ask questions you find out that with all of these folks, the tree rings are still alive inside, just under the surface, informing and sustaining the whole tree. It’s beautiful really, but it’s hard, and those two things can be true at once.

We were on tour in Arkansas when Cass’ son fell ill so we flew to the west coast between shows to play music at the memorial. We’d just been with Cass and her husband, Trent, a few months earlier when he won the Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens, and a lot of those coaches and players had made their way to California to grieve with the family. They are a kind and generous family, and Trent is a good teammate, and their friends wanted to be there because they’d become part of their own tree rings and they felt their pain with them. That’s the way it works when one of the trees in the forest gets struck by lightning - the rest of them feel it too.

Cass didn’t speak at the funeral, but Trent stood up and shared and cried and remembered Trevon as his best buddy. Jennifer was pregnant with Hutch at the time and I didn’t understand yet how a five-year-old could be a man’s best friend, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. I remember leaning over Hutch‘s crib when he was a baby and wondering how strange it is that someone so young and small could know me the way he knew me, and I understand why someone would want to hold onto those feelings and memories as long as they possibly can.

Trent was keeping a journal during all of this and later on he sent me a few of the pages to see if any of it could be made into lyrics and turned into a song. There’s a track on one of our albums called Cover Me that came from those journal entries but I am positive now that there’s no way we could’ve captured in four and a half minutes the depths of Trent’s pain.

When I’m with someone working through their tree rings and they tell me stories of the years and events that light up the brightest red, the ones with the most pain, we stay there for a while and we give it the attention it deserves, and we see how it might connect to other dots and other rings. The process is so simple that anyone can do it, even kids, but most good things are simple like that. And over time we turn the faucet back on that the feelings come from, and the painful ones flow out, but so do the happiest ones, and the person realizes that they might be able to feel joy again, and peace.