The Uncle Jerry Tree

Claire Doll
MSMU Class of 2024

(4/2023) Trees are captivating, the way they move with the seasons. The way their rhythm falls in sync with the spring-to-summer change, the raining leaves of autumn, the slow fade to winter. Almost as if trees represent the motions of life, themselves.

When my sister and I were young—super young—we experienced our first death. My great-great uncle, who had lived far from us in West Virginia, died, and I had never met him. In fact, I had hardly known of his existence until my mother sat us at the kitchen table, placed her hands on ours, and said: "Your Uncle Jerry has died, girls."

I don’t recall much about my own reaction, but my sister broke out in tears. For days, she cried herself to bed, would look through old photographs of our great-great Uncle Jerry: a sweet-looking, old man with gray hair and etches of smile lines beneath his eyes. We didn’t know that he was nearly ninety, that he had passed away in his sleep, that his death meant peacefulness at the end of a long life. All we knew was the word "death," the cold, abstract hollow of the word, a vast abyss of confusion and unexplainable pain.

But I think my mother told us because children need to know about these experiences. When my sister learned of Uncle Jerry’s death, she asked my dad to plant a tree in the front yard. In the following weeks, my sister asked every member of our family to come to our house, write letters and cards, and bury them in the earth where my dad would plant a new tree. Then we would release the balloons, watch the sky swallow them up.

My great grandmother and great aunts and uncles drove from West Virginia—a two-hour trip—to join us in our front yard for the planting of what would be called "The Uncle Jerry Tree." Uncle Jerry had already had a funeral, though. This was for my sister and me, an innocent coping of death when it was still abstract to us.

That day, we wrote cards for Uncle Jerry on construction paper with markers. Even my adult family did as well. My father dug a hole in our front yard, deep enough to bury all the cards, and then he placed a small dogwood tree in the garden bed. I don’t have many memories of this day, but I do remember the shovel, dirt and mulch sprinkled around the little tree. I remember that it was spring, and there was a chill in the air that made you reminisce on warmer days. I remember the balloons floating into the sky, little spots of yellow and pink and blue that grew into small dots, and then nothing at all.

And I remember feeling complete, as if this tree were Uncle Jerry’s grave, as if I had known my great-great uncle all my life.

As I grew up, there was a birchwood tree in our yard and a maple tree and the Uncle Jerry Tree, the beautiful dogwood that had spiderlike, thin branches in the winter and oval, pink-rimmed petals with white centers. We never called it anything else. You knew it was spring when the buds began to blossom from nowhere, from nothing, and then all of a sudden, you walked outside and the Uncle Jerry Tree was bending in the wind, petals raining and flying around it.

When I think about the Uncle Jerry Tree, I don’t think about my great-great Uncle Jerry, because truthfully, it was never about him. On the surface it was—the cards, the balloons, the family gathering. But my sister and I demanded the tree should be planted because we didn’t know what death was. We didn’t know that people weren’t permanent. It’s a shattering feeling that breaks down the barriers we once thought we knew, and my sister and I decided to cope using nature.

We used a tree because to us, trees are more permanent than people, but they still reflect the changing conditions to each season. It’s something we can rely on. We depend on scarlet leaves to fall in autumn because we’ve never known anything else. We depend on the bare branches of winter because instinctively, we know. We depend on the growth in spring because we crave hope, we need it to survive.

Trees provide this.

Trees reflect the artwork of nature, the rhythmic movement of the seasons. We use them as metaphors for life and death, for hope and growth, because they are permanently rooted in the earth. Even when they die, too, their remnants are still here. Trees are found in the wood of our desks, the pages of our books. They are signs and sources of life, everywhere.

I didn’t know what Arbor Day was until I had to write this article. We celebrate it a week after Earth Day. Arbor Day is for the trees, for the planting of the trees, for caring for our planet’s natural resources in these specific ways.

I will always look up to my dad for planting the Uncle Jerry Tree, and for all the family members that came to our celebration. In their hearts, they knew that the memorial was not for an uncle we’ve never met, but rather to appeal to the sweet, lighthearted, childish insight that nature can be representative and even healing of death. Nature is how we make sense of these human tragedies so that in the end, we can grow closer to the patterns and quality of trees, for example. We can intimately recognize the capacity for beauty that each season holds.

Sometimes I still think about the cards and letters for Uncle Jerry, buried beneath the tree, roots growing into the paper, the fibers of its existence decaying into earth. We’ve since moved from my brick townhouse, into another home, and the tree belongs to someone else now. In fact, it’s just a dogwood tree. One that sways to the rhythms of the season. One that rains pink petals in the spring, grows bare limbs in the winter.

Read other articles by Claire Doll