There is a particular grief that lives in a growing tree, I have found, a grief and a comfort tangled together in the same branches.

Every spring that dogwood blooms without him.

Every year it stretches a little higher, a little broader, marking the passage of a time he is not here to pass through, and the sight of it can catch in my throat if I am not ready for it.

But it comforts me too, more than it wounds me, because a tree that goes on growing is a living thing that carries him forward, that keeps a piece of him rooted and reaching in the very place he was happiest.

He sat beneath it when it was small and he was dying, and gave his last strength to the children who played in its shade.