The Christmas Tree

One day, hope emerged from a withered warrior.

If I were to tell you that a dead tree would one day inspire me to go on living, you might reply with something tender and heartfelt, like: “Sure thing, Lar. Let’s touch base after the crystal meth wears off.”

However, a dead tree did just that.

It happened on an overcast Christmas Day, a holiday that, given my religious background, I’d never celebrated.

A chilly breeze sighed through the gently swaying Ponderosa pines, cottonwoods and alligator junipers as I skirted Miller Creek on the Thumb Butte Trail, a three-mile loop nestled in the hills near my home in Prescott, Arizona. I’d just stopped to take a sip from my water bottle when I felt an odd urge to turn and look back toward the creek I’d just crossed.

And there it was.

An initial glance at the tree – or, more accurately, the dead, dried-out husk of what had been a tree – told the story of a devastating accident and the years-long pitched battle that followed, a battle between life and death.

This is the actual tree. 12/25/23

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I know a thing or two about battles. Only mine aren’t physical. Rather, they seem to originate in my head, trickle down into my heart, and ultimately hijack my soul.

I like to call major clinical depression The Beast, a label that often brings to mind the Tasmanian Devil, of Warner Bros. fame, that spinning and slobbering, whimsically rageful, charmingly confused varmint I grew to love as a child. But major depression is no colorful cartoon. No, it’s a black void, a 200-ton cloak that cannot be removed, one that lifts and dissipates only when it’s good and ready.

On some days, I don’t need an alarm to wake up and face the day. I stare upward in bed, two sleep-crusted eyes trying to focus on a ceiling that remains hidden in the pre-dawn darkness. I turn onto my left side and look at the bedside clock. 4:31. If I can at least make it to 6:30, maybe I can deal with The Beast.

But, to my chagrin, it has already emerged. Let the battle begin.

Muttering a barely audible curse, I flip onto my other side, close my eyes and try to will myself back to sleep. Rather than slipping back into unconsciousness, however, I find myself engaged in an all-too-familiar dialogue, a briefly terse exchange between Larry and Larry that goes something like this:

Get up, Loser.
And do what, exactly?
Doesn’t matter. Get your miserable carcass out of bed.

My only retort: curl into a fetal position and begin moaning. After several minutes, I find myself rocking back and forth, an always-futile attempt to lull away the pain.

After what seems like an hour, I notice that I’m now sweating through my pajamas. But at least I’m that much closer to dawn, a new beginning that might infuse me with something wholly unfamiliar: hope.

I again look at the clock: 4:42.

After all that hell … just eleven minutes has gone by.

I now have two options, neither of which is pretty:

1. Swing my legs out of bed and stagger, muttering to myself, into the shower; force myself under the ice-cold stream; and try to conjure some will to live, some tiny pilot light of optimism, knowing full well that this orange flicker will snuff itself out long before I’m toweling off.

2. Lurch in the pre-dawn black to the medicine chest and swallow a handful of pure bliss. The Trazodone, Gabapentin and Seroquel – each one a powerful, wonderfully addictive creation of Big Pharma – are supposed to knock me out at bedtime.

The pills “work” quite well, thank you ... especially whenever I take a 4:42 a.m. quadruple dose of all three meds before passing out. When I eventually come to about 12 hours later, wobbling and fogged out of my cortex, I grab an early Subway or Pizza Hut dinner and fall back into that familiar hellhole I call bed.

This is just a single morning.

Now imagine going through this, on and off, for 30 years.

Look, I told you it wasn’t pretty.

---

I approached the broken tree, curious about what might’ve happened to this creature. It might’ve been a lightning strike, a focused millisecond of vicious energy from above that pulverized it, cracking it off-kilter 90 degrees.

But what actually happened doesn’t matter. What matters is that this rooted soul, stunned and badly damaged, didn’t give up.

It fought. And it survived.

As I slowly rubbed my right palm on the section of the tree that, incredibly, had grown parallel to the ground, fighting sideways for many years against the pull of gravity, I thought: Looks like you had quite a struggle, my friend. But I’m glad the Cosmos let you live.

But maybe the Cosmos had nothing to do with it. Maybe this tree chose to live.

No, you weren’t just a survivor, I add. You were a warrior.

As my hand gently caressed the dead bark, I found myself glad that – at least on this gloomy, overcast Christmas morning – I’d had a three-egg omelet and two cups of caffeinated “liquid hope,” and not a goddamned fistful of Big Pharma.

And then it dawned on me: I didn’t “find myself” getting out of bed, showering and dressing for the hike. I didn’t “have” the eggs and coffee. My Toyota didn’t magically “wind up” at the trailhead.

No … I’d fought hard to get out of bed. I’d chosen breakfast. I’d demanded life.

As I leaned my forehead lightly against the tree, my eyes began to glow with tears and I said, aloud to myself, “Maybe you are a warrior.”

---

Not every morning is this difficult. Some days my eyes open to a room filled with sunlight, muted by venetian blinds, that silently streams through the east-facing window. I look up at the ceiling – decorated in a massive string-art design, a colorful symbol of creative productivity – and pop out of bed. The ice-cold shower is torturously divine, the breakfast delectable, the notion of the day ahead enticing.

I check my to-do list, pick a single task (a good mantra: “What does now require?”) and get on with my life. And on this day, that life is bearable. It might even be okay.

Will any given day be a good one or an awful one? Each dawn represents its own mental-health roulette wheel. Once the spinning slows, will the ball land on Red or Black? Content or Miserable? Focused or Hopeless? Will the roulette ball come to rest on “Life-Changing Winner,” or will the wheel itself gyrate out of control, self-destructing into fragments of a life forever shattered into an endless void?

I have no idea.

But this I do know: When my soul emerges from its slumber – into a bleak purgatory or a bright gift known as “today” – I must spin that roulette wheel as if my life depends on it.

Because it does.

---

I slowly swept my index finger across the tree’s horizontal trunk, tracing a soft line, left to right, toward a point where, slowly, over the course of perhaps decades, it had managed to pivot back to its vertical growth. Tilting my head back, I looked upward and took in the tips of the now-dead branches, frozen in time as they reached toward the nourishing sun, just like it had been created to do.

Wiping away my tears, I stepped back several feet, framed the now-fallen warrior in my iPhone, and pixelated our shared moment into permanence. Then I turned and, sighing and taking in the green expanse ahead, moved on up the Thumb Butte Trail. The morning chill caressed my face as a hopeful energy – one that had been absent just a few minutes earlier – softly expanded within my soul.

The trail immediately turned uphill. As I felt my heart rate jacking up with greater exertion, I realized that progress needn’t always be vertical. While we like to be grateful for “happier,” “stronger” or “more productive,” real growth – not just surviving, but thriving – can be ponderously slow or invisible.

Real growth can even be sideways.

Once again, something compelled me to turn around. When I did, I discovered that I had a message for the tree.

“Thank you. And I love you.”

Postscript: Today, those meds are gone. The darkest mornings are less black, and far, far less frequent. And I keep spinning that roulette wheel. Sometimes – how, I honestly don’t know – spinning it is even kind of fun.

If you connect with this story in a way that says “Pay attention,” please know that people care about you, that you’re not alone. And keep spinning that wheel.

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Many thanks to the fine folks in our writing community, Write Hearted (where we always “root” for each other!) for their encouraging feedback: Rick Lewis, Neha Patel, Dana Allen, Linda Kaun, Genie Joseph, Kathy Ayers and Alden Cox. Y’all rock!