Our son’s memorial tree
Because of the crowd-size limits during the pandemic, we have yet to convene any sort of memorial service for our son who died on May 13. We hope that COVID-19 will have loosened its grip by May 2021 so we can do a memorial service in our yard.
One of our neighborhood friends gifted us with a beautiful wind chime, with Tom’s name on it, and we knew that the wind chime needed its tree. So we bought a horse chestnut tree for our backyard, to join the other 46 trees on our property, and we dubbed it the “Tom Tree.” We planted it, and followed up as soon as the rains let up by placing some of Tom’s ashes and ashes of Tom’s deceased feline companions. (We would have placed the ashes of Tom’s dog Jack there, but Jack’s ashes were placed elsewhere in the yard back in November 2019.)
Here are some photos telling this story. The stick you see our grandson Andrew placing into the tree soil for his Uncle Tom is actually a hollow stick that contains some of Tom’s ashes. We learned that some people who visit Israel return home with a similar stick, containing soil from Israel. Some have used that concept to provide for the strategic burial of human ashes, as we did. The Israel part fits our family well. Tom’s maternal grandfather was Jewish, so how nice to start a tradition respecting that heritage.
