Because I Don't Like Apples

You looked beautiful that day, while you gazed at the September sky and talked about everything and nothing. The clouds delighted you, and I laughed with you while thoughts and observations slipped past your smiling lips and your gaze flitted between the clouds and my face. I got to watch your eyes crinkle when we laughed together, and while you laid in my lap I got to feel the way you relaxed and leaned into my hand as I ran my fingers through your hair. I was so in love with you, eight weeks in, and so were you, and neither of us was scared of it.

“That one looks like a pear,” you said, pointing at the sky. This time I followed and found you were right, though I didn’t care if you were right or not, I was just happy to be there with you, on a blanket in the grass with our picnic basket largely forgotten.

“It even has a stem and a leaf,” I replied.

You sighed contentedly and lowered your hand, draping your arms over your tummy like a self hug and closed your eyes for a moment. I watched the smile fade from your face, intrigued by how serene and contemplative you looked. And then when you opened them again, you met mine without even having to search and smiled at me with them.

“When I die, I want you to bury me under a pear tree,” you said. There was something whimsical about the statement. “In one of those burial pods.”

“Why a pear tree?” I said, drawing my index finger over your brow. I wasn’t afraid, I’d said something similar a week earlier, about having me cremated and then turned into a diamond. Your words comforted me then, because I already had a ring in my pocket, and asking that of me reassured me that you believed we’d still be in each other’s lives by the time we’d ever have to consider what to do when we passed away.

“Because I don’t like apples,” you replied, without even the slighted hesitation, and then after a quiet moment, you added: “And my grandmother makes a delicious pear pie.”

You didn’t know your words would be a premonition. Neither did I.

I couldn’t conceptualize living without out since I’d begun sharing my life with you.

I asked you to marry me a month later when I took you on an ironic apple-picking date, and you hugged me so hard we fell into a mud puddle and almost lost the ring.

Five years in, your grandmother passed away, she was ninety-eight. I’d almost forgotten our conversation by then, but it all came back to me when you brought home a metal cookie tin full of recipe cards from your grandmother’s estate and presented me with both the recipe and grocery list of ingredients we would need to make the pear pie for the funeral reception. I memorized that recipe without even trying.

She was buried under a crape myrtle tree, and her husband joined her four months later. Not your blood grandfather, but the love of your grandmother’s life and the man who raised you after your parents passed away when you were ten. You visited often.

You were excited and comforted that burial orchards had become common practice, that the generations ahead of us were already filling the plots. We had conquered the climate crisis after all, found a new appreciation for nature, and even in death, we would be contributing to the livelihood of future generations.

I always believed I’d be the first to go, that it would be you turning me into a diamond to wear around your neck, and since I thought you’d have so much life left after I was gone, it even made me smile to think of your tucking me away into a jewelry box.

We lived, we grew, and without you, I doubt I would’ve ever found myself. You made me curious and adventurous, you made me never want to stop learning.

I buried you under a pear tree.

I don’t think I took our time for granted, I loved you every step of the way, I don’t have any regrets. But you left too soon, my love. We had more adventures ahead of us.

A week before it happened, we joked over coffee about what we would do in retirement. It felt like a far-away concept, ten years at least. You wanted to travel more, visit places that had been ecologically restored. You were excited about the progress being made in reintroducing an animal into its natural habitat, both of which had been on the brink of extinction when you were graduating high school.

If we’d seen it coming would it have hurt less or just differently?

It was beautiful, sweetheart, the thirty years I spent with you.

For six months I wondered if I’d loved you enough since your passing didn’t kill me. I don’t think you would’ve liked that. But that’s also when our daughter told me she was pregnant, and I wept for the first time since you left.

I took up those hobbies I mentioned, remembering how you’d encourage me no matter how silly they were. I don’t know how many origami lucky stars I folded, I never counted, but I used wildflower paper and sprinkled some around your tree, sweetheart, and the flowers are still there today, even though I haven’t folded one since our granddaughter was born.

Do you remember how we used to joke that our daughter was my twin? You are reflected in our grandchild in every way I can think of.

Fate kept me here so I could watch her grow up.

The first pear she ever tasted from your tree, which fruited for the first time when she was six months old.

Your tree was only a little shorter than me when I buried you. It felt like I blinked and suddenly your tree was six feet taller, but the years weren’t flying by the same way they used to. Pear trees can grow two feet per year in optimal climates, and only start producing full crops of fruit after five years. Which makes those first few pears you gave us quite the gift. Your tree stopped growing at about twenty-four feet tall, in time for our granddaughter’s fifteenth birthday.

I found a house near the orchard to take walks among the trees. The names on nearby grave plaques became like neighbours to me, because I always took my time getting to you, knowing you wouldn’t want me to rush and miss the beauty around me. I wouldn’t have looked if you hadn’t mentioned it back then. I’m glad you did. I’m glad you slowed me down. You were my world, the only view I ever needed, but you made me see the vastness of yours.

Every year on my birthday, no matter what book I was reading, and no matter what page I was on, you let me read to you. I still read to you. Every year on your birthday you asked me to cut your hair— I was so scared the first time, thinking I’d ruin it, but you trusted me. I’ve pruned your branches every year on your birthday. You picked a dessert from your grandmother’s recipe cards to make together every year on our anniversary. We didn’t make it through half of them. I haven’t had the heart to make anything but pear pie on our anniversary since you died. Thank you for giving me the fruit to make it.

You never liked commemorating deaths. You always retreated inward, got all quiet and thoughtful. I didn’t realize that’s how you grieved until a year after your grandmother passed, and I realized then that I didn’t know how I grieved. I was estranged from my parents. My mother passed the same year we married, and my father passed ten years later, none of my siblings called to inform me and I never looked.

I have laid on a blanket next to you every year, staring up at your branches, talking to you as you talked to me that day. About everything and nothing. Until my throat hurt.

My youngest brother reached out before my seventieth birthday. The last time I saw him he was eleven, and that was a year before I met you. He admitted he was happy I wasn’t dead. He hasn’t spoken to our other siblings since he was fifteen. Since retiring he visits me once or twice a month. He went silver before me, at the age of forty-five. My hair didn’t start to turn until I was sixty. Would your hair have turned white, my love, like your grandmother’s was? Would you have dyed it or would you have embraced it? You would have looked so beautiful.

Our child is ten years older than I was when I became a grandparent. Our grandchild is the same age her mother was when she lost you. I’m going to be a great-grandparent soon.

I’ve been alive without you as long as I was alive with you, sweetheart. I didn’t think I could do it, but I’ve had the privilege of experiencing so much more life, directly linked to yours, blossom and grow every year since you left. I wish you could have known them, I wish we could have had the adventures we spoke about, but you gave me the perspective to make my own.

Our daughter told me recently that when the time comes, she wants to be buried under a linden tree, and that it had been on her mind since she got the news she’ll be a grandmother. Her tree will be forty feet away from you, my love.

She asked if my end-of-life preferences had changed, reassuring me that she wanted to take care of me, no matter what my plans were. I told her I would let her know soon.

The question scared me. I haven’t felt like a young man since before you died. You might’ve thought I was young enough to restart, remarry, make another family, but it was only ever you that I wanted. Spending my life with you was all I ever wanted.

And I got thirty beautiful years with you.

And thirty more without you. Thirty years of our daughter’s life, thirty years of our granddaughter’s life. In tandem.

I haven’t wanted to be turned into a diamond since the day you died, because that rock was only ever intended for your neck, as a keepsake as you continued to live.

Science hasn’t advanced enough to keep me going another thirty years, but knowing your grandmother made it to ninety-eight gives me an odd kind of hope.

Thirty years ago I thought I knew exactly where I’d end up.

I’ve known what I wanted in death from the moment you were buried.

Our plot on the orchard has enough room to take several generations of trees, I’ve already invited my brother, done the paperwork. He wants a poplar tree. I’ve indulged a pestering curiosity and read through several catalogues of species and their meanings, but nothing inspires me.

You inspired me so much.

We were on the cusp of twenty when we met, and I can’t plan it, of course, but wouldn’t it be special if I followed you into the earth by our great grandchild’s twentieth year?

My life wasn’t meant to end soon after yours.

I don’t know when I’ll die, my love, but eventually, I will join you.

I will join you under the pear tree.

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— Rooney