I once had a plaque for a swimming award I won when I was 5 or 6. I was so proud that I hung it on the wall next to my bed and showed it to everyone I could. About a year later, when my family and I moved into a new house, it went missing, off to wherever it’s been for the past 8 years. After the first time I saw Tangled, my parents got me a stuffed Pascal the chameleon that you could change the color of using special markers. It sat on my bed every day, until one day it didn’t. On a road trip up north, my dad bought my siblings and me mini compass key chains so we could feel like explorers. I loved mine so much that I kept it in my hand the whole trip. Inevitably, it got left behind at a rest stop somewhere in New York. It feels like every day coins slip in between couch cushions or a pen that you drop seems to fall straight through the floor, but you would never assume that anything truly just evaporated, never to be seen by a soul again. Those things you lose still exist, just not with you anymore.

 

A question I heard someone ask that I think about a lot is “what happens when you forget something that happens when you’re alone?” Memories aren’t tangible, like coins and compasses. If an event is forgotten by the only person who knew about it, where is it now? On a timeline of the history of the world, did it even happen? Do the records of everything that has ever happened always live somewhere deep in places we just can’t see, or can things really be lost to the fabric of time forever? Is it only possible for that to happen to things that truly don’t matter?

 

My great-grandparents passed away last year. My Grandma first, and my Grandpa about six months later. I had gone 14 years of my life without losing anyone, they were the first. I didn’t know what it felt like when someone you care about died. My Grandma was a Christian. She believed that when she died, it was only her body that we would be without, that she would still be out there in the universe somewhere, just not with us anymore. My Grandpa was an atheist though. He believed that once he was gone, he was gone forever. Maybe if I had been raised one way or the other, I would know where to believe they were, but I wasn’t, and I don’t know. Because they were the first two deaths I’ve experienced, they’re the only ones I have to compare. Are they just lost coins that belong to some lucky other soul now, or are they lost to everyone forever like forgotten memories? If the family that bought their property bulldozed the house to build their own, did they ever live there? Is it still my grandmother’s sunny yard where my siblings and I made memories every summer, or is it some other family’s that we happened to cross paths with in the past?

 

My great-grandparents’ favorite book was The Giving Tree. They read it to their kids, who read it to theirs, who read it to me and my siblings and cousins. They offered up every book in that house when they passed, for anyone to just take, but not The Giving Tree. They left their copy to my Grandma, their oldest child. We all talked about that book when we were at the house one last time after the second funeral, and the funny thing is that no one could ever decide whether it’s a happy or sad book. Sure, it’s sweet that a tree is giving his friend everything he needs and wants without a second thought, but on every page, the tree loses something until there’s nothing left. Should you smile about the great things the tree was, or mourn the fact that it’s gone? 

 

When we walked across the yard to say our goodbyes to the swing our great-grandpa had carved all our names into, we found the branch it hung from lying on the ground. After countless summers of laughing about how the swing looked like it would fall if we swung on it just one more time, it had finally fallen, on the exact day we were about to leave it behind. Everyone cried. Not because our giving tree had lost a branch, but because it had given us something amazing to keep.