I was in my thirties before I learned that in order to maintain a plant’s health, sometimes we need to cut parts of it down. As a sheltered city girl, I didn’t have a lot of experience with growing things. My grandparents had a summer vegetable garden in our yard, and in retrospect, we may have had to prune our fig or lilac tree. If that was done, though, it was done by my mother, grandmother, or grandfather and I had no knowledge of it. 

I was once told that in order to keep a basil plant from dying I had to pinch off the flowers when they started to grow. I did that for a while, but having (what’s the opposite of a green thumb? Purple is opposite on the color wheel, so maybe . . ) a purple thumb, the plant died anyway. And I felt terrible for killing the flowers. 

It wasn’t until my husband and I planted crepe myrtles in our backyard that I saw the benefits of pruning. The year we didn’t prune the tree, the branches grew so high that we couldn’t see the flowers that blossomed in the summer. Our gardener told us that if we cut the trees back every winter, (we live in Florida, so “winter” means January) the growth would be such that we would keep the plant healthy, and also make sure the flowers were always at eye level.

The summer after pruning, the flowers seemed more beautiful and abundant. We resolved to prune the tree every year around January or February. We just pruned ours again last month. 

As we cut down the bare but otherwise healthy branches, I thought about the way in which it has seemed that lately my life is being pruned–and not by me. 

In January of 2022, my Sunday dinner table had seven branches—our family of four, my father-in-law, my mother, and her partner of over 30 years. Sometimes we’d have other guests, but those seven were the core. We would have dinner together every Sunday—something I started during the pandemic so we would always be together at least one night every week. Every time I would set the table, my mother’s partner would say, “How many people? Seven! It’s a party!” And in many ways, it was. My oldest daughter would sing for us. My younger daughter would do comedy without even trying. My father-in-law would complain about his hearing aids. My mother and I would talk politics and everyone else would leave the table. During the pandemic-induced worst of times, Sunday dinners were the best of times. 

Then, in August of 2022 my oldest daughter went away to college. She was a very involved high school student, and as her school was 45 minutes away that meant a lot of driving for me. Sometimes I’d drive her and her sister to their school in the morning, go home, go back to pick up her sister, go home, and then drive again to pick her up from a late rehearsal or event. That branch was very thick, and very beautiful, and took a lot of energy from the trunk of my tree. Losing it really did feel like losing a limb. 

That’s when I went back to teaching, though. So in a way, that limb being pruned allowed for new growth in my professional life. My daughter is also thriving in college, so maybe it was less a pruning than a transplanting–taking a piece of our family and planting her elsewhere, where she can grow and bring beauty to others.

Nevertheless, a month after my eldest left for college, in September of 2022, my father-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly. Granted, he was 91, so most people would wonder how that could be unexpected, but he was not sick. Up until the day before he died, he was walking around living his best life. The last thing he said to my husband was how much he loved living in Florida, what great friends and a great life he’d had here, and how much he loved spending time with my husband and our family. If good-bye had to come, we could not have asked for better. 

Despite the beauty of his parting words, losing him was a devastation for our family. We had been incredibly close. For years he would snowbird with us. Then he moved to Florida full-time, to a house ten doors down from ours. This made running over to his house to deal with any medical issues a breeze. And he had quite a few—gall bladder, heart rhythm, and a lot of falls toward the end. My husband, a doctor, would just get a call and march down there to take care of him. 

So losing my father-in-law pruned a huge branch off of our collective tree, and again, it was like losing a limb. However, his passing allowed my husband to achieve the financial security he needed to go into semi-, if not full, retirement. It is not the way we would have wanted it to happen. My husband would have probably retired in about two years anyway, and we would have much preferred to spend time with my father-in-law. But we didn’t have a choice. The unseen hand pruned that branch from my tree, and what grew was a newfound freedom for my husband. 

This past week, my mother’s partner passed away. He was 93. He was a huge branch of our tree, as well. He had been in our lives since I started dating my husband, over 30 years ago. He helped my husband find his job on the West Coast of Florida, where we have now lived for 25 years. He and my mother were partners in every sense of the word—they planned a life together where they shared expenses equally, but shared their love abundantly. His mind began to fail him over the years, but my mother was his 24/7 caregiver, and we were told that he easily lived ten years longer than he might have because of her incredibly attentive care. 

Did her care for him, in some ways, limit the things she could do outside the home? Of course. Did that matter to her? Of course not. She knew that their days together would one day come to an end, and in all things he was her priority. Nevertheless, now she can come with us to see my daughter perform at college. She can eat dinners with us she normally wouldn’t because he didn’t like certain kinds of food. I’m sitting in her house now, writing this, whereas normally I’d be in my own home letting them have their private time together. 

My mother and I have always been close. As an only child, I was the Gilmore Girls Rory to my mother’s Lorelai. Time separated us for a bit, but not much, and not for long. Now I imagine we’ll spend many more days together. So that’s a flower than can now grow abundantly. 

Being able to look at the potential for new growth, however, doesn’t change the magnitude of these losses. At my table, we are now four. In the fall, my younger daughter goes off to college with her sister. We will be three. 

Everyone tells me that over time, more branches will sprout. There will be many around my dinner table again. My daughters will come home, maybe with friends, maybe with spouses. Maybe there will be grandchildren. Maybe my dear friends, also becoming empty nesters, will come over to socialize. 

But those are all maybes. They’re not definite, and they’re not guaranteed. And so right now I can’t help but feel like a pruned crepe myrtle, waiting for the day my life might blossom again. It’s cold, and I’m tired, and I don’t know what the future will bring. All I can do is keep the memories of my blossoming years in my heart, and wait for a return of summer.