Family Tree
Though less rooted than he was, I'm still my father's
daughter
By Deborah Copaken Kogan
Forty years ago, on the first warm
day of spring, my father and his friend, both named Richard, took my little
sister and me into the woods near our new tract house in Maryland and dug up a
maple sapling no higher than my 5-year-old knee. We planted it in our yard, fed it some water,
and gave it a few words of encouragement: "Dear tree, please
grow."
"Just think," Dad said
with his trademark enthusiasm, "one day you'll come back here with your
own children, and this tree will be taller than that house!"
"Or at least taller than
me," joked the other Richard, who stood at over six fee.
I looked around at the moonscape of
dirt lots and half-framed homes, trying to imagine any tree actually taking
root here. But my father was already
certain he would live out his days in the shade of this not-yet-tree.
His prediction proved
prescient. The maple grew. We grew.
When its lowest branches had risen too high for us to climb, my sisters
and I were busy scaling other heights -- career ladders, mountains both real
and metaphoric -- in the hopes that we, too, might squirrel away enough acorns
to plant solid roots.
But somehow, by the time my kids
were old enough to be hoisted, I was no closer to giving them a sense of a permanent
home than I'd been when the tree and I were saplings. I knew I'd been born into the first
generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents. In fact, of my father's four daughters, only
one, the orthopedic surgeon, owns her own house, and it's underwater. That tree, long a symbols in my mind of hope,
growth, and shared history, transformed into a symbol of rebuke.
Just as I entered my 40s, my father
died, too young, of pancreatic cancer. I
woke up the next morning in my childhood bedroom and stared out at the snow
falling on that majestic tree, grateful for is permanence. Yes, Dad was gone, but traces of him would
live on in its stretching branches long after we were gone, too.
Or so I
assumed until my mother called me last winter to tell me the tree had to be
taken down. It was splitting down the
middle, she said, threatening to fall on the home she now occupied alone. The next morning, the 50-foot behemoth was
chopped and its stump uprooted, swiftly and without ceremony.
Then, during a recent trip to Cape
Cod, I took my family to visit the other Richard, whom I hadn't seen since
Dad's funeral. He'd rented a house
around the corner from the tiny bungalows where our families used to spend two
weeks every August. For the first time
since Dad's death, I felt my father be revived.
His presence, as we laughed and traded stories, was palpable. "Remember that maple we planted in your
front yard?" said Richard.
"Whatever happened to it?"
"It's gone," I said,
without a trace of the earlier sadness.
It had been just a hunk of wood, after all. What had stayed with me was the slant of
spring light, the smell of earthy dew, the love of a father teaching his
daughters everything we needed to know about life in that moment. I finally understood: We are not the objects
we buy or plant. We are not even the places
we live. We are only the love,
friendship, and memories we cultivate in the minuscule time we're
allotted.
I was hurt when my mom sold the house I basically grew up in. There are a lot of memories in that house and the outside of the house, just like this article. I remember planting the big maple tree in the front yard. I remember stringing lights in it one Christmas and a few years later having to cut the lights out of the tree because it'd grown around them. I remember the big Chinese Maple in the backyard that my dad brought home from his parents house. I remember him repeatedly cutting it down the middle so it'd grow in two basically. I remember the other tree he planted in the backyard never being able to grow because he kept running it over with his truck.
And I remember, less than 24 hours after he died, standing on the back porch crying for my dad and having the leaves in one of those trees rustle and answer from my dad of, "You'll be fine without me."
I am not the things I own. And to my child I am not the things I buy him. And it doesn't matter where we live, it matters how we take care of each other. And my dad isn't that tree or that house, he's the things he taught me and the love he gave me. That makes it a lot easier to let go of that place.
February 2002
July 2003
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