My Willow's Tree

It began in a dream. Or what I thought was a dream at the time, anyway. Later, looking back, I would come to see that it was different than other dreams. It was more… I don’t know. Real? Perhaps. More something. It was different. It was vivid and beautiful, sad and honest. It shimmered with electricity somehow. The fact is that it was a gift. How it was given, how it got delivered, how any of it actually happened… I will never truly know.

I had just lost the love of my life. We were together for six years. We met, we fell madly in love, we got married and then after two years of marriage, she was hit crossing the street by a drunk driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. She went painlessly and instantly they tell me. Didn’t even see it coming. No fear, no sadness, no pain. At the time it all felt so unfair. Now, as horrible as it sounds to say aloud, I’m almost grateful. Perhaps I’ve become jaded but I think about how hard losing someone can be, how hard it is, no matter the circumstances, about how hard it must be to slowly and painfully lose one’s grasp on life to a battle with illness or age. The truth is, Willow, my wife, had it easy. Of course I was destroyed, but I found that there was a silver lining to my pain.

My whole life I had used sleep as a coping mechanism when things got hard. I would get stressed and I would sleep. I would get sick and I would sleep. I would get sad, or anxious, or overworked, I would sleep. And then I would wake up, feeling refreshed and happy. It was a glorious little reset button. But for the last few years leading up to Willow’s death that hadn’t worked. Work, bills, marriage, life. There was no time for sleep. I was 32 years old, I was too busy for my own good, literally, and I was steadily inching closer and closer to living the life of a full blown insomniac. But then along comes the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and suddenly -snap- I slept like a baby each night. Back to my old ways. But this time, with my re-found ability to pass my burdens off to the sandman came the most beautiful silver lining yet. I dreamt of Willow. Every night. Wonderful, happy dreams. In some we were on dates, in others we were in bed, making love. One night walking down a beach at sunset, the next night sitting in a hot spring watching shooting stars. Every night was different, and every dream was graced with the happiest version of our relationship. It was pure magic. Magnificent healing. A holy catharsis. I could not have found myself again any other way. These dreams literally saved my life. And no matter how difficult waking up was, coming back to the reality that she was not by my side, not curled up next to me against the morning chill, I still found enough joy to make it through the day, always looking froward to my next sleep. They kept me going, kept me breathing. Sleep, in the words of a famous Shakespearean insomniac, became a destination "devoutly to be wish’d."

Then one night these dreams changed. I went to sleep at ten o’clock as usual. Brushed my teeth, drank a glass of water, and climbed into bed. I was asleep in mere moments. This night, however, a different Willow greeted me. She sat on a bench in the small park that’s across the street from our little house. The park we’ve picnicked in a hundred times, made love in at midnight in the summertime, played frisbee with our friends and their dog. The bench we’ve walked past and sat on a thousand times. She was wearing the outfit she was buried in, my favorite shirt of hers - a yellow Pink Floyd t-shirt - underneath a blazer. She sat looking down at her feet. Like some carnival ride on a track I was pulled towards here, unable to stop, unable to change course, floating over the grass towards her park bench. As I approached she lifted her head. She was crying and I realized that she was looking down, not at her feet, but at a small black notebook. It was laying open in her lap. I realized at once that it was my notebook. Where I wrote my thoughts, my fears, my frustrations. I wrote poems and lyrics, drew pictures and doodled. Shared things that no-one was ever meant to read. I instantly felt betrayed, like she was breaching my privacy. In waking life I would give anything for her to be sitting on a park bench reading my secret journal. My little black notebook. But in this dream it was terrible. Cruel even. Just as I began to open my mouth to yell at her, berate her, scream myself hoarse, a tear rolled down her cheek and and landed at her feet, in the grass. From this tear grew an apple tree, and before my eyes it bloomed, fruited and then died, leaving a single apple where it had lived out it’s entire life in an instant before my eyes. Willow bent and picked up the apple, took a big, juicy bite and then tossed it to me, with a wry smile now on her face. I looked at the apple and without hesitating followed suit, taking a huge, juicy bite. Chewing, my mouth full, juice dripping from my lips, I looked back up at Willow and with the same wry grin she said, “Ya dig?” And then lifted her hand and snapped her fingers, and I instantly woke up.

The moment I became conscious I broke down. I started sobbing uncontrollably, rocking back and fourth like a child having a tantrum. My heart broke all over again, the weight of reality and my loss all crashing down onto me once more.

After a while I ran out of tears. My sobs calmed to deep breaths and those into yawns. I had worn myself out. It was time for sleep again, but I felt compelled to write this down. Whether it was seeing my journal in this vision, or just the weight of my world hanging over me, I knew that I needed to write for a few minutes before I would be able to sleep again. I walked to my office. From my drawer I took my small black notebook and a pen, opened the book to scribble down my thoughts, and froze. There in the middle of the next would-be empty page was a drawing and a single word. A small cartoon of an apple with a bite out of each side, and beneath it in capital letters, the word DIG, in Willow’s penmanship. Tears threatened to return as I struggled to understand what this was. How was this possible? What was this trick of my mind? I stared until my unblinking vision blurred out the world around me and all I saw was the word DIG.

Then, suddenly imbued with purpose, the overpowering need to do, to respond to this message, this insane and unlikely message, I stood up and marched out to the garage. I rifled around until I found what I was looking for and then continued straight out into the night. It was damp and cold, fallen leaves crunching underfoot as I rounded the side of our little once happy home and blindly crossed the street, garden spade in my hands. I started to jog and then full on run as my bare feet slipped and skidded beneath me. I ran until I reached the bench. Her bench. What would forever be her bench, and I fell to the ground, feeling around in the dark on my hands and knees until I felt it. There in the autumn earth, grew a tiny and unlikely sapling. A tree with but a pair of tiny leaves. It had to be the sapling of an apple tree.

I stood up, planting the tip of the spade firmly in the earth and with the arch of my cold bare foot I pushed as hard and as deep as I could. One good dig was all it took. The blade hit and scraped on an unseen, solid surface. Excavating around it as quickly and carefully as I could, I slowly uncovered from this shallow grave a small silver case. The box was inlaid with complex and beautiful carvings and looked as though it could have been there for decades. I lifted it carefully and set it next to the freshly dug sapling. Holding my breath I unclasped the latches and opened the box. I stared. Inside the box was money. Lots of money. The box was not that large, perhaps eight by ten and three inches deep. It was stacked with hundred dollar bills. Full of them. Overflowing with them. Once again emotion overcame me and hot tears dripped down my face, falling into the hole that once held a small tree and a small fortune. I knelt in the detritus of my muddy adventure - confused, happy, lost. I wept and wept. That’s all I remember.

The next thing I knew I woke up. There was a bright light in my face and I soon realized it was a warm ray of sunshine streaming in through my bedroom blinds onto my pillow. I could feel the warmth of it’s kiss on my cheek. I opened my eyes and stared at my ceiling, exhaling deeply and wondering what on earth had prompted such vivid and emotional dreams this night. Swinging my legs out of bed I sat and hung my head in my hands, rubbing my eyes and face. I stayed there for a few moments letting my brain adjust to waking life and then with my head still hanging, I opened my eyes.

I sat and stared at my feet, confused at first as to why they were covered in mud. Mud? My head snapped up and I gasped. There, leaning against the wall was the garden spade, still muddy, and next to it an ornate silver box, lid open, overflowing with cash.

Many months passed and I was never able to explain to anyone the strange and supernatural occurrence that led to my good fortune because I was never able to explain it to myself. I had had the hardest, most challenging and profoundly sad year of my life and somehow, for some reason it had led me to this hidden treasure. This rare gift. But the rarest gift of all was not the money. What came with it was what mattered. I suddenly and literally overnight had a renewed faith in the unlimited beauty and power of this life. A new found faith that despite my pain and loss, this life was still worth living. The understanding that the seed we plant doesn’t always grow into the tree we expected, but sometimes into something even better. This universe works in mysterious and truly magical ways, and my life would go on.

I donated most of the money to local charities and homeless shelters and with the little I kept for myself I bought a new bench for the park, and dedicated it to my beautiful wife, Willow, with a small inscribed plaque bearing her name and an apple with a bite out of each side. A few feet away I replanted what I had assumed was an apple tree sapling that I had dug out of the ground on that strange and eventful night.

Every year I go back on the anniversary of her death and sit with a small picnic beneath the gentle shade of what, as it turned out, was a weeping willow tree. My Willow tree. My Willow’s Tree.