Illustration by Rustic - Getty Images
Axe in stump and wood pile
I finally burned Dad’s wood. When my mother and father moved from northern Minnesota to southern Wisconsin years ago, they hauled it along and stacked it in their new home’s basement. Several months before Dad died, he told me for the umpteenth time to “burn it in your fireplace.” He always harbored a “waste not” attitude.
It took me years to get around to the task. As firewood goes, this stuff was akin to finely aged wine. A mix of hard and soft woods cut from freshly fallen timber, it long slumbered in the cool, dusty repository of my parent’s basement. It clearly displayed the cuts from my father’s axe, saw and splitting wedge. It was his wood. Selected by his eyes, cut and carried by his hands, baptized with his sweat.
Were it not for his frugality, carved into his psyche by the Great Depression, it would never have made it to Wisconsin or my fireplace. I can imagine him in the midst of all the frantic packing before their move south, eyeing the pile of timber next to the cabin and musing to himself, “You can’t leave good wood.” But what he labored to bring, I hesitated to take. Each time I visited the basement, instead of carting the wood off, I found myself gazing at it, studying the cuts, smelling it and running my fingers across its contours.
It took me a while to realize my reluctance was more than simple procrastination. It was the desire to leave undisturbed the objects that, having been labored over and touched by this kind and industrious man, represented his essential nature. He was salt of the Earth, pragmatic and a believer in the value of honest work. He knew how to handle axes, saws, horses, plows, engines, milking cows, stacking hay and growing corn, to name a few tools and endeavors. So, whatever he touched, including that wood, retained a trace of who he was.
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Complete the Circle
Finally, when a big snowstorm hit just before Christmas, it seemed time to complete the circle. After all, he and Mom married the day before a blizzard in the ‘30s and spent their honeymoon snowed in. So, on that evening, the smoke from Dad’s wood rose skyward from my fireplace and finally mingled with winter’s tempestuous winds and swirling snows, much as his body had returned to the soil he so loved.
When we lose someone close, we develop a special bond with the meaningful objects they leave behind. Often, this connection takes on some of the characteristics of the relationship we had with that person in life. Within these left-behind things, we perceive qualities of the lost loved one. We may even touch such objects in hopes of again feeling contact with them. Keeping some portion of a lost person’s material legacy is a way to symbolically keep them. However, when we give away or destroy these objects, we sometimes release portions of our grief.
As I solemnly placed each piece of Dad’s wood into the flames, I freed small remnants of the bereavement that still lives in me over his passing. However, like the burning wood, the essence of a departed loved one is never lost, merely transformed. Like all else around us, we mortals are energy, which cannot be destroyed. Changed, yes. Obliterated, no. So, we never entirely relinquish the spiritual vestiges of those we love who pass before us, even when we let go of those things that embody their spirit.
Like Dad’s wood, things that are imbued with some essential part of us are more than objects. They are subjects. They are not “it.” They become “thou.” And should be honored as such.
