restintrees.org
I want to be
a tree.
I’ve been saying it for years. It makes no sense that we come out of our mother’s womb and end up in a wooden box, inside a concrete hole sealed with plaster.
What makes no sense
It makes no sense to choose the colour of the wood for a coffin forty-eight hours after losing your sister, when what you need is not a catalogue. It is a therapist.
It makes no sense to set up a shop window in a place called a funeral home, so that people feel obliged to turn up, say “I’m sorry for your loss”, and go back home.
It makes no sense to keep paying for a burial niche when my grandfather died years ago. Nor that the price goes up. Nor that if one day you stop paying, they empty it.
It makes no sense that a system already growing rich on your life should grow rich on your death as well — and that it should do so at the exact moment you are least able to say no.
It makes no sense that we have turned death into just another product: with a catalogue, with extras, and with fine print.
It never did, it doesn’t, and it never will.
A note
My father left my mother a signed note. It said he did not want a mass.
He didn’t write it for himself. He wrote it so that his family would see that this was what he wanted.
There was no mass.
My sister Sheila died suddenly. She was healthy, she had never been admitted to hospital, and she was forty-one.
The autopsy said sudden cardiac death. No warning at all, or so we thought. Maybe there was one, in the shape of things we have normalised so thoroughly that we no longer see them: stress, tobacco, alcohol, the mental health nobody talks about either. Maybe now it is up to me to see them. Or to you.
There was no time for her to say anything, and no reason she should have. There was a mass, and the whole village came.
They died eighty-three days apart. The same family, the same year. What he left in writing was respected. What she never got to say, others decided.
They planted a tree for Sheila at the school where she had been a pupil, and where for years she had been the English teacher on the vocational training courses. It is still there, growing among her students.
The dark hole
My first death was my grandmother Rosa’s, in 1993. I was barely three.
For a long time I had the same nightmare: I imagined death with my mind still awake. Shut inside a dark hole while time went by, and the years went by. I would wake up crying because I didn’t understand it, and because I didn’t want to understand it.
Today I think that what I didn’t understand wasn’t death. It was the hole. Someone decided that was the place, and nobody ever explained to me why.
As the years went by I started bringing death up at the dinner table. My other grandmother — my father’s mother, the one who is ninety-six — always cut me off the same way: “We shouldn’t talk about such things now. Now we talk about the here and now, about life.” My mother didn’t much like hearing it from me either. It was because of that same grandmother that my father, years later, left that note.
I wasn’t doing it to be contrary. I wanted to make it normal, because death is part of life, and even today we treat it as a taboo, as something bad. There is nothing bad about it: it is the other half of life, just as darkness isn’t bad, but part of the light.
Neither of them meant any harm. And that is how silence gets handed down — not through cruelty, but through love. Every generation hushes the next believing it is sparing them something, and what it really does is leave them with no tools for when their own turn comes.
The forest
Imagine that cemeteries, instead of holes in concrete, were trees.
They would stop being cemeteries. They would be forests. Beautiful places, with shade, that people would want to go to — instead of places you have to go to. You would go there to walk, to read, to meditate, to sit for a while and do nothing at all. That, I think, is where you would truly rest in peace.
And we would be closing the circle: giving back to the earth the life the earth once gave us.
There is room here for everyone, people of faith included. After all, Genesis already said it: “till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). To the ground. Not to a niche in a wall.
It isn’t a metaphor. It is literally what happens to everything else that dies on this planet. We are the only ones who insist on not decomposing.
The Garoé
On the island of El Hierro there was once a tree that gave the whole island its water.
It was a til tree. It caught the mist carried in by the trade winds on its leaves and distilled it into water, drop by drop. The Bimbache people cut basins into the rock to collect it, and the whole island drank from that through the droughts. It is thought to be one of the reasons they held out against the conquerors.
A hurricane brought it down. The one you can see today was replanted three hundred and thirty-nine years later.
- 1610a hurricane brings it down
- 1949it is replanted
A tree that gave life, died, and came back. Giving the earth back what the earth gave us is not a new idea, and it isn’t mine: a til tree on El Hierro was doing it six hundred years ago.
What this is
This is not a company. I am not selling anything and I don’t want to make money from it: that would be exactly the problem I am trying to point at.
It is a place to talk about death before it arrives. It has three parts.
- 01
The honest guide
What your options really are in Spain, what each one costs, what you are not obliged to pay for, and what they will try to sell you. Information nobody gives you, because nobody makes money giving it. Start with the five rights nobody explains to you.
- 02
The document
A single page you fill in while you are alive, saying what you want. So that when the day comes, nobody in your family has to choose the colour of a piece of wood with swollen eyes.
- 03
The archive
Testimonies. People telling their death and their grief out loud, without euphemisms. Because what you don’t share stays on a hard drive.
If you’ve made it this far
Maybe it’s because you have buried someone too, and something jarred. Tell me about it. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, or in any order.
I built this on my own. What is missing now is not something I can write: it is other people’s testimonies. If you want me to let you know when there is more, say so in the same email and I’ll add you.