The Tree of Life

We planted a pear tree when our son died.

I dug the hole myself, shovelling dirt and lifting rubble until the pit swallowed me up to the waist. Then we scattered the ashes there, holding each other in silence. That grey powder, so bright against the black earth, was all that remained of our boy.

Then we placed the pear tree’s roots into the hole. My husband held its slender sapling trunk, keeping it straight, while I shovelled the soil back into the hole, filling the grave.

The pear tree was a tombstone that grew year by year. We had hoped that it would become a tall and mighty thing: thick-trunked with a wide canopy, nourished by the remains of our beloved child. It was a sickly thing, though, its leaves dusty with mildew, its branches nothing more than twigs that were prone to breaking.

It bore no fruit for three years. No matter what we did, what fertilisers and supplements we gave it, the tree remained sickly, an arboreal version of our son. The plant refused to flower and its leaves would wither and die long before summer was over. It was always a surprise when it produced new shoots in the spring.

Then, one year, the tree flowered. A handful of petals, tiny bundles of pink and white, appeared on a low branch. From those sparse blossoms, a single pear was pollinated. We watched it grow, day by day, the delicate branch sagging under its weight.

The seasons changed, the tree’s leaves grew red, then brown, preparing to fall. Still the pear grew. At last, it was ready: a perfect, plumb, golden piece of fruit.

But we did not eat the pear.

We thought about it, of course. That’s what fruit is for, after all. Besides, what is more satisfying than eating something grown from your own garden?

This pear was different. This pear was special. It was the reincarnation of our son. Eating it, my husband said, would be like second-hand cannibalism. Worse, even. It was like something from a myth; Saturn devouring his son; Atreus throwing a Thyestean feast.

So what did we do instead?

We carved up the pear, separating flesh from seed. The fruit was composted and returned to the earth, spreading our son ever further into the chain of life. The seeds were taken, one-by-one, and planted in tiny little plastic pots, eleven of them in total.

Every day, we watched the pots. We watered them when the soil turned dry, moved them when the sun grew too bright. Above all else, we waited, anxious to know if the magic of germination was occurring down in the darkness.

Of the eleven seeds, ten sprouted. Those ten soon outgrew their pots and were replanted. One of them, for apparently no reason other than the whims of a sapling, wilted and withered away, leaving us with nine.

Nine tiny pear trees, each one containing some of the same atoms that had once made up our precious son. What was once stardust that had coalesced in the early days of the universe, defying logic to become life – his life – a life which was then, against all fairness and justice, ended early, had now been born again.

Our garden is only a small space, but we squeezed two of the saplings into it, planting them little more than the bare minimum away from the first. That left us with seven.

Four of those were gifted to close friends and family, all of whom knew the saplings’ significance. Our son made his way to different corners of the country, his pear trees growing in chalk, clay and peat.

The final three were planted in places special to our son. One now sits in the hills overlooking our town, another in the grounds of his university. The final one was harder. Our son had always wanted to visit Italy, but never got the chance, so we drove the final sapling there, all the way from our home in South London.

It took twenty-three hours. We crossed the English Channel, traversed France and Switzerland, and finally stopped driving in the hills above Sienna. There, we laid the final piece of our son to rest.