I carried them with me for so long without knowing how.

The dead were stones
stacked in the hollow cage of my chest.

It was hard to breathe.

A year and a half into the pandemic, long after the cardboard thank-you signs by the hospital had melted in the rain, I was exhausted and weighed down with ghosts. I’d made it through those first adrenaline-charged months when my body buzzed with fear and duty, when, in the closed Covid rooms of the ICU, I became less physical therapist and more nurse’s helper. When it felt like death was everywhere. I’d survived. But for what? I wondered. People kept dying—of Covid, of other things. No one cared anymore.

I was terrified of forgetting, and terrified that I’d never forget.

There was the woman who worked at a nursing home, her arms still muscled from patient care. The RV Queen, a woman in her sixties beloved by thousands of YouTube followers. The stoic man who worked at an ice cream factory and made us dream of double scoops in waffle cones. The nineteen-year-old worried about his mom worrying about him. The man a few years older than me who grimaced around the breathing tube and wrote in shaky handwriting, “I’m scared. Am I going to die?” The man in his eighties who told me about the bathroom he was remodeling while I changed his fever-damp gown. The young woman with a three-week-old son. The man with my exact birthday, same month, day, year.

All of them—and so many more—gone, rooms scrubbed clean and turned over to the next patient with no sign of who came before.

(They are not my dead, I reminded myself, or they are only mine in the loosest sense.)

One day a white tent appeared outside an entrance to the hospital, a temporary morgue. It was an unsettling sight I swore I would never get used to, but as the weeks passed, I did. Sort of. Then one day it too was gone, cars driving through the space where it had stood as if it had never existed.

I’d experienced patient loss before, but never anything like this. I didn’t know what to do with it, where to put it. How could I hold all these small griefs I’d collected over the last eighteen months? None of them felt small. None of their lives were small, only my presence in their lives was. I entered their stories in the last days, one more masked being on the blurred edge of their perception (if they perceived me at all). Were they really mine to grieve?

Either way, I grieved. Every shift I worked added to the weight of it.

I tried talking to coworkers who had also lost patients, who knew how it felt in those sealed rooms, cut off from the world outside. No one wanted to talk about it. Each of them was dealing with it in their own way, mostly through dark humor or deciding it was just part of the job, no big deal. (I dabbled in both; I felt worse.) I tried talking to friends and family who didn’t work in healthcare, but my grief made them uncomfortable. They wanted to cheer me up and change the subject. I felt the distance between my pandemic experience and theirs open like a chasm between us. 

Grief is a sacred ritual. I remembered hearing that somewhere, maybe from the hospital chaplain. But I didn’t know where to start. I had no guide, no deity to whom I could pray for my patients’ peace. I didn’t know how to pray, how to share the weight of the dead. Raised without religion or spiritual practice in a family that rarely mentioned death, I was lost. 

I struggled to fall asleep at night. When I finally drifted off, I slept a fitful, haunted sleep that left me even more depleted. 

Then one day I woke up thinking of trees.

On a walk that morning, I headed for the woods near my house. Guided more by instinct than any conscious plan, I wandered onto narrow trails that I rarely traveled, placing my hand on one tree after another, pausing by streams, staring up thick trunks of Douglas firs, studying crumbling tree stumps with fresh huckleberry sprigs sprouting from their middles. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I sensed I’d know when I found it. 

As I reached the end of a trail, ready to give up and head home, I found myself at the base of two entwined cedar trees. Later, I would realize that somehow the two trunks emerged from the same base, with the same roots, the larger trunk wrapped around the smaller one, pulling it close. Though smaller than many in the woods, the tree was still tall enough that I couldn’t see the top, only imagine it. I’d probably walked past it hundreds of times before without pausing. Branches reached haphazardly in all directions, while roots stretched across the earth like curious tentacles, crisscrossing, creating a mostly unseen net below me. I put my hand tentatively on the trunk, the reddish-brown ridges soft against my palm, and felt a connection.

Maybe this tree could hold my grief, sadness, and fear in a way that my human friends and family couldn’t. I held a small rock in my hand, one I’d felt compelled to pick up as I entered the woods, though I wasn’t sure why. I’d carried it throughout my walk, squeezing it and remembering a patient with whom I’d worked closely for over a month as his lungs deteriorated until he had died the week before. I thought of him learning to play piano in his eighties or sitting with his wife in a gazebo he’d built himself. The rock was blue-gray, cold and hard in my hand. I squeezed it again and whispered his name. Or I think I did. It may have just been in my mind, but it felt like the tree heard it. I placed the rock gently in a little hollow where two roots came together and walked home. 

The next day I returned with a pale green tangle of lichen known as old man’s beard, in memory of another patient who had just died, a man who wasn’t old at all, barely older than me, with an impressive beard he’d been growing since the pandemic began. I nestled the lichen near the rock from the day before, thinking the two men probably would have enjoyed each other. 

I want to say I felt better immediately, but what I felt was much subtler, an almost imperceptible shift somewhere. Maybe the weight of one small stone lifted from a mountain. Almost nothing, but it was enough. 

As the days grew shorter and then imperceptibly longer again, through Christmas and the Covid surge that followed, I visited the tree almost every day. As the last wave of Covid cases eased and the forest bloomed with new life, I found myself visiting less often. Sometimes just knowing the tree is there is enough. Some weeks, I come again and again. I bring offerings of rocks, sticks, burls, leaves, flowers. Anything I find that reminds me of the people I’ve lost, the people I knew once, however briefly. I lay my offerings at the altar of roots. I say their names to the tree, a prayer, and let the sound of my voice disappear into the branches. 

This tree does for me what it does for the world—it helps me breathe easier. Here I feel no judgment, only acceptance. And generosity. There are gifts, so many gifts. Tiny holes in the trunk from sapsuckers and other woodpeckers. Songbirds I’ve found on the branches. The light making its way through tangled branches to touch the forest floor. The way my offerings sometimes stay in one place for months and other times vanish in a day.

I think of my son many years ago, about six years old, so small and full of wonder as he gazed up at an immense tree reaching into the distant sky above him. Almost to himself, he murmured, “I know there are so many nests up there even though I can’t see them.”

On days I forget how to carry the dead, the tree reminds me. I carry them to the nests I know are there, even if I can’t see them. I worry less about whether they are mine to grieve.

They belong to all of us.