The forest that helped me survive my mother’s death
When her mother passed after battling Alzheimer’s, Suzanne Simard turned to the forest and her research into how trees support one another to help process her grief.
In May of 2021, I took my mum to the Ministry of Forests in Castlegar to protest the clearcutting of British Columbia’s old-growth forests. Nurses, forestry workers, grandparents, mothers, and children walked alongside one another, carrying signs with slogans broadcasting their concern for the future. “Save our old growth! Save our old growth!” Mum chanted, savoring every minute. Around her neck she wore a sign that her son-in-law Bill had made for her, reading, “Old people for old growth.”
Mum had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years earlier, and I was grateful to have her still with us. While I knew that aging and death were natural parts of any life cycle, I dreaded the thought of losing her. She was our family’s matriarch and her roots were spread deeply throughout our lives.
I had spent decades studying the kinship between old and young as it played out in the inland forests of my home province of British Columbia. One of my key findings was that the biggest, oldest trees—the mother trees—are the energetic keystones of the forest, the hubs of an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with tree roots and trade vital nutrients gathered from the soil in exchange for photosynthetic carbon from the trees. These mycorrhizal networks can connect the trees and seedlings together in an extensive subterranean web and serve as pathways for shuttling carbon, nutrients and water through the forest. My research had shown that the mother trees lead the regeneration of the forest by seeding in genes for the next generations, sheltering the tender seedlings, and nurturing the rivers and the salmon. These ancient trees hold in their genes the legacy of climates past—knowledge we need to deal with today’s climate crisis. As they age and decline, the old trees become part of the food web, enabling new generations of seedlings to grow and mature into elder trees themselves. As the young trees mature, they learn, adapt and grow with their evolving circumstances, and pass their wisdom to the next generations, ensuring the forest is enduring, regenerative and resilient.
(Why all life on Earth depends on trees)
Our own lives are inextricably bound by the same rules and destiny that govern the forest: Birth, growth, death, decay, rebirth. As Mum neared her final days, I found myself leaning harder on all that the forest had taught me about living and dying, survival and adaptability, and nature’s cycles of renewal.
Mum had always been the backbone of our family, listening to our triumphs and our tragedies, giving us sage advice and encouraging us to do our best. I’d always been proud of her guts and tenacity. She’d been the first in our family to earn her master’s degree, the first to teach school, and one of the first women in our community to get a divorce in the ‘70s, when it was far from commonplace. She’d learned to windsurf in her fifties and skied into her eighties. Even after her diagnosis, she still voted and wrote letters to elected officials, still insisted on attending local protests to oppose the provincial government’s feeble policy on the forests she loved.
Though I’d hoped for a miracle that would keep Mum with us, by the summer of 2022, she couldn’t hang on any longer. Her energy was fading fast, and she could no longer do the things that gave her life purpose and joy. She had tended her garden, raised her children, and cared for her grandchildren. Her job was done.
All living systems, including humans, revolve through stages of growth, conservation, reorganization, release, and back to growth, ad infinitum. The energy and wisdom of the old are paid forward into the new. Mum was at the release stage, preparing to pass her final words of wisdom to the young. One August afternoon we all gathered round to say our last words as she slipped away from us. I felt like I was in a dream. Could this really be happening? I read her favorite poem by Joyce Kilmer: I think that I shall never see/a poem as lovely as a tree. Mum’s eyes fluttered shut for the last time. Her spirit free, she was off to infinity.
Three days later, my daughter Nava and I hiked to the Silver Spray Cabin in the Selkirk Mountains near Nelson. Exhausted from the emotional strain and sleepless nights of caring for Mum over the previous months, I needed some respite from the sadness, to breathe mountain air again.
As Nava and I climbed higher, the heat drew streams of sweat from my tired body. The summer once again had broken maximum temperature and drought records, spawning lightning storms that ignited fires through the mountain ranges. The soil was so dry that dust kicked up and mingled with the smoke, and I gasped in the thick sultry mixture. My pack was heavier than I ever remembered a pack being, and I had to stop frequently to rest. This must be how Mum had felt her last few months, I thought, her pace having slowed day by day as she neared the end.
(Why forests are our best chance for survival in a warming world)
Nava took some of my gear to lighten my pack and helped me refocus by pointing out the expanse of white pearly everlasting and magenta fireweed bursting from the burned, blackened soil.
“Look how resilient the forest is, even after that wildfire,” she said.
I felt relief that the forests were coming back after so much stress. Though climate change was creating new conditions unlike anything we had seen before, the forests had evolved for healing and recovery. Plants, fungi and animals interact and collaborate, and disrupted forests work to seed new communities that are changed, transformed, and resilient in the shifting landscape. Generations of trees and plants are deeply integrated in this system of interactions and feedbacks, and these relationships are crucial in the regenerative capacity of the forest. I was reminded yet again that death was the catalyst for a rich process of regenerative cycles, from mushrooms and soil animals breaking down logs, to bacteria and fungi transforming organic sources and creating “dead” matter that is full of life, to aging trees passing on their genetic knowledge to their young. If the forest can bounce back, so can I.
Nava and I trudged forward, one slow step at a time, and made it to the alpine hut as darkness fell. We ate dinner overlooking the valley. The wine I’d brought tasted terrible, but Nava and I made a toast anyway.
It eased my mind to imagine Mum in an infinite cycle of passing from one life to the next, elder to child to adult and back, with some quantum energy transformation in between. She was with the ancestors now, and their energy too was cycling through me for eternity. This was the way I understood the forest—not linear, but cyclical. Even in the sudden death from wildfire, new life would build around old life. The ecosystems would reorganize around the legacies left behind. The burned groves would spawn new forests, I would grieve my losses, and together we would recover.
