They’ve come to cut her down, my beloved Japanese Maple, rooted strong and proud in our front yard. We tried for years to save her, but her roots are decaying and her upper branches stopped pushing out those beautiful star-shaped leaves for too many consecutive springs. She tried so hard to make it, awkwardly shooting out bushels of baby leaves up and down her trunk to catch as much sunshine as she could to stay alive, because she knew her roots were dying. It was all she could do – but it was not enough.

There comes a point when your everything is not enough, and it’s clear it’s time to call it. So today, they are here to cut her down. Today, I am choking, struggling to say goodbye because – I love her. Call me crazy, but my Maple gave me so much joy. She was magnificently beautiful, especially in the fall when her green turned golden red like bright fire. It was pure magic when her fiery dress, like a twenties flapper’s, shimmered in the breeze. Fall was her season, and mine.

We had talked about planting another tree to take her place. “A new beginning,” he said, as if it would comfort me. It didn’t. How could I replace her?

I watch through my window as they take their loud electric tools of death to her limbs and trunk, and I cry. I turn my gaze to the suitcases sitting next to our door, holding two weeks’ worth of clothes and toiletries we will take across the country tomorrow to see the specialists.

Because the cancer is back, again.

I’m sobbing now, because I feel like my beloved Maple is me – trying so hard all these years to stay alive, losing hair and body and mind to try to catch as much luck as I could. I stare out at her stump, then suitcase; stump, suitcase. And I wonder if my time to go is around the corner, too. These feels so much like an end – but. I will choose to believe.

This is the beginning.