Past the Absent Apple Tree

A meditation on gratitude and ghosts . . .

A friend told me once that her brother quit speaking to her as an adult. He died while they were still estranged, years after she’d last heard his voice. He’d been addicted to drugs, she explained, on and off, and had a generally angry disposition. This, I remember, broke my heart to hear. What’s ominous and uncanny—that conversation took place mere months before the same thing would happen to me with one of my brothers. Eleven years has passed since then.

He is the twin of my sister who sustained a traumatic brain injury at age sixteen in a near fatal car accident as a new driver; one that left her severely and progressively disabled, requiring full time care. The domino effect of that emotional, psychological, and as a friend of mine calls it, “particularly nasty kind of heartbreak,” has cascaded through my entire family and has never ceased. Her twin’s choice to leave our family was, by and large, one of many byproducts of this collateral damage.

Recently, I was back with my mom helping her again in her ongoing time of need. Back among the ghosts of my childhood memories, the place where I was raised with my siblings, the quiet lakeside town in suburbia Ohio. One late morning, sore from sleeping on the couch and feeling stir crazy, I tied my shoes and set out running, as if my body could stitch together what my mind could not.

The streets of my hometown were familiar in the way a dream is familiar—close enough to touch, but warped, destabilizing. I passed my childhood house, the garage door closed over someone else’s car, someone else’s life. Behind that door was once the site of so much: my father’s fall from a ladder that nearly ended him, my parents dividing forty years of marriage with trembling hands, my brother and I charging the neighbor kids fifty cents for the thrill of sliding down a cardboard coaster off the roof. The garage had been our circus, our battleground, our undoing. And now it was not ours at all.

I kept running. Past the field behind the house, now colonized by strangers who seemed like trespassers across the landscape of my memory. Past the absent apple tree that once fed me and held me alongside my imaginary friend, Andy. That neither Andy nor that tree now exist nearly stopped me, stabbed my ribs with grief. Where did they go? What kind of world swallows both a child’s best friend and the tree that kept her secrets? What kind of world leaves me running through ghosts, trying to remember which one of us is real?

Next I passed the squat house where I bought my first saxophone, as if music itself could be traced to such an unremarkable address. How big it seemed then, how full of promise. Further, to the main road, where water glittered in the sun in a way that once made me feel immortal, though beneath the shimmer I sensed the same malevolence I sometimes find in my nightmares—something dark, unnamed, woven through the marrow of my childhood. I ran until the breath hurt and my legs quivered, until memory and body merged in exhaustion.

Then I turned back, back to my mother. She was at home now, after the hospital, after the surgery. Fragile as glass yet getting stronger. Moving slowly, each transfer lit with the kind of pain that makes you wince just to watch. I sat with her, held her hand as if my grip might steady her pulse.

The paradoxes pressed in on me from all sides. I grieved the house that was no longer ours, the apple tree cut down, the childhood that lived only in me. The brother alive somewhere but gone to me, her son gone to her. I grieved the bodies both my sister and my mother had once carried with grace, now bent beneath the weight of suffering. And yet — alongside the grief—there was a gratitude so fierce it startled me. Gratitude to still have them both here to touch, to hold, to still feel their carbon and oxygen mixing with mine, their breath rise and fall against my palms. Gratitude to return to a place that wounded me and still, in its own way, welcomed me back.

Sarah LaBrie writes about this kind of paradox in No One Gets to Fall Apart. She knows that life refuses the neatness of binaries: beauty or pain, belonging or exile, wholeness or brokenness. This memoir, like my own memories, insists on both at once — the sweetness and the ruin, the joy and the collapse. Reading her work, I felt less alone in my inability to reconcile these contradictions. She reminded me that the task is not to solve them but to endure them, to live inside the paradox and let it change you.

What I learned in those weeks back home with my mom, and paying short visits also to my sister, was that love is not gentle. It is often brutal, demanding that we bear witness to suffering without flinching. It asks us to cradle what is breaking, to stand beside what is crumbling, to walk through darkness with only the dimmest light. And yet within that brutality is a beauty that cannot be found anywhere else.

Holding my mother’s hand, embracing my sister, I realized this is what women have always done for one another: carried the weight, stayed when it was hard, leaned into the mess instead of looking away. It is not weakness but maturity, not fragility but a kind of strength that can only come from vulnerability. To be present in another’s pain is to enter the most human part of existence.

I think of the garage again, the site of our disasters and inventions. It held both laughter and sorrow, danger and delight. To erase one would be to erase the other. My mother’s suffering was like that too: grief braided with gratitude, light threaded through shadow.

The truth is, I do not know what it all means — the jog with my ghosts, the long hospital nights, the weight of my mother’s hand in mine. But I do know that it has changed me. It has taught me how to live without resolution, to accept that pain and beauty are not opposites but partners in the same story. It has shown me that to walk beside someone in their darkness is an act of love, and maybe even resistance.

This is what I carry now: that the world is dark and wildly beautiful, and that by leaning into its paradoxes we become more human, more whole. My mother’s pain, my childhood lost, my gratitude — they are threads in the same braid. And by holding them all together, I believe, we help weave a world where women walk beside women, hand in hand, through both the terror and the light.