The Things We Cannot Keep

Letting go. Control. Loss. Whew. Huge concepts. Huge words. And lately, I’ve been thinking about all three.

The two in that photo are both gone now.

It breaks my heart to even write that. It breaks my heart to look at the photo and realize, all over again, that they are both gone.

The tree we lost in a storm one night. If you’ve spent any time on Plants ’n Planets, you’ve probably already seen it. It is the iconic tree that appears all over this website. I can’t count the number of photographs I took of it over the years. And now, of course, I wish I had taken more.

It was spectacular in every season and from every angle. Covered in green. Bare against a winter sky. Surrounded by snow. Lit by the strange gold of late afternoon. You couldn’t help but look at it. You were drawn to it. It was just special. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. It just was.

A couple of days before we lost it, one of our dogs actually managed to run up the trunk and into the tree. Yes. Into the tree. I don’t know who was more astonished, her or me.

There she was, suddenly standing partway up this enormous tree, apparently having discovered halfway through her adventure that dogs are not generally supposed to be in trees.

And then, just a couple of days later, the storm came. The trunk broke in half. Right across the driveway. And that was it. This enormous presence that had been part of the landscape of our lives was suddenly gone.

And then there is the other one in the photograph. My dog.

He was my heart. His is a story I can’t bear to tell right now. I think I still need more time before I can tell it. He was such a sweet, amazing boy, and his loss was profound.

Sometimes looking at that photograph and seeing the two of them together, knowing that neither one is here anymore, opens a wound so deep it can still feel hard to breathe.

And maybe that is where control comes in. Maybe that is why some of us try so hard to control things. Because we know, somewhere inside ourselves, that this kind of pain exists. Loss exists.

And if we can just stay one step ahead of it… If we worry enough. Plan enough. Prepare enough. Think through every possible outcome. Anticipate every worst-case scenario. Maybe we can stop it. Maybe we can keep everyone safe. Maybe we can keep what we love.

Except it doesn’t work, does it?

I have spent a lifetime trying. A lifetime of anxiety and worry. A lifetime preparing for worst-case scenarios that hadn’t happened yet. And I’m beginning to realize how much time I have spent trying to save myself from loss instead of simply living.

Because the loss and the pain came anyway. My worrying didn’t stop my mom’s cancer. It couldn’t prevent my children from experiencing pain or illness.

It didn’t save my dog. It couldn’t keep that tree standing.

None of my worrying changed those things. And that is a difficult thing to admit, because somewhere along the way I think I convinced myself that worrying was doing something. That if I was worrying, I was paying attention. If I was preparing, I was protecting. If I imagined every possible thing that could go wrong, maybe I would be ready when one of them did.

Maybe control was the price I had to pay for safety. But life never agreed to that bargain.

Care Is Not Control

I don’t think the lesson is that we shouldn’t prepare. Preparation can be wonderful. Some kinds of preparation are nourishing. Fulfilling, even.

We prepare the garden. We amend the soil. We start seeds. We stake the tomatoes before they become enormous and flop over onto everything nearby. We watch the weather and haul plants inside when the temperature drops. We water. We prune. We fertilize. We inspect leaves for tiny creatures that apparently consider our carefully tended plants an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We care. And caring matters. But care and control are not the same thing.

I think that may be the distinction I’ve been missing.

One of those questions gives us something useful to do. The other gives us an impossible job.

Because gardening, maybe more than almost anything else, teaches us that we can do everything we know how to do and still not get to decide what happens. We can prepare the soil perfectly and a seed may never germinate. We can nurture a plant for months and lose it to pests. We can watch a tomato slowly ripen and discover that some creature found it approximately twelve hours before we planned to pick it.

We can love a tree. And the storm can still come. Gardening asks us to participate without ever really being in charge. Maybe life does too.

What Is Mine to Tend?

So perhaps letting go isn’t learning not to care what happens. Maybe it is learning to care deeply without believing that caring gives me control.

I could not keep that tree standing forever. I could not keep my sweet boy with me forever. I could not worry hard enough to protect my children from every painful thing that might find them. I could not worry my mother well. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing I could do.

I could love them. I could be there. I could pay attention. I could take the photographs. I could stand beneath that ridiculous, beautiful tree in every season and notice it. I could laugh when my dog somehow ran straight up its trunk and then looked back at me, apparently just as surprised as I was to discover herself in a tree.

I could have been there for more of my own life instead of standing guard against its endings. That one is hard to sit with. Because I can see now how often fear has disguised itself as responsibility in my life. How easily preparing can become worrying. How easily caring can become trying to control. And I don’t want to do that anymore.

I’m sure I will. I’ve been doing it for a lifetime. I doubt one realization is going to magically make me stop. But maybe I can start noticing. Maybe when I find myself planning and preparing and running through all the terrible things that might happen, I can stop and ask myself:

Is there something useful I can actually do?

Or am I trying to make a deal with life that life cannot keep?

Maybe that is where letting go begins. Not with giving up. Not with caring less. But with understanding what is mine to tend and what was never mine to control.

Prepare when preparation is useful. Tend what is mine to tend. Pay attention. Love enormously. Take the photographs. Notice what is here while it is here. Because there will always be things we cannot keep. But while they are ours to love, we can be here for them.

And maybe that is enough.