What the woods know: What remains
There’s a certain kind of silence that comes when someone dies. Not the peaceful kind you find beside a lake at sunrise, or standing among the trees after a fresh snowfall. It’s a different silence. One that comes from knowing there’s a voice you’ll never hear again. A number in your phone you can no longer call.
Recently, my daughter and I lost our We’eh. In our Ojibwe tradition, a We’eh is a kind of a blend of spiritual advisor, “Godmother,” and overall support person. After my mother died, I had no one to call when I needed “mothering.” Our We’eh became the person I called. When I didn’t know what to do, I called her. When I knew exactly what to do and was so excited about it that I needed to tell someone, I called her then, too. When I was overwhelmed with tears, whether happy, sad, or mad tears, hers was the number I called.
She filled a space in my life that had been painfully empty since losing my mom. Sometimes people come into our lives who somehow know how to love us in the places where we’ve experienced loss.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. How we can lose someone we never imagined living without, eventually find our footing again, and then discover that the very person who helped us navigate life changes is someone we now have to grieve. There’s something terribly unfair about that.
And yet, when I spend time in the woods, I’m reminded that loss isn’t something separate from life. It’s woven into the very nature of it.
The forest is full of reminders that nothing remains unchanged. Trees lose their leaves, branches break beneath the weight of snow, and old tree trunks eventually fall. Even the paths we walk shift over time as rain, wind, and roots reshape the ground beneath them.
Walk through any healthy forest and you’ll find death everywhere. Fallen trees, broken branches, rotting stumps, leaves scattered across the ground. But beneath all that decay, life is continuing. Moss spreads across bark. Mushrooms rise from the soil. Seedlings take root in the dark, rich earth created by what came before them. What has died becomes nourishment for what remains.
The forest doesn’t treat death as a failure. It doesn’t resist the changing seasons or try to hold on to what has run its course. In autumn, the trees release what they can no longer carry. In winter, the woods become quiet and spare. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, life begins moving again.
The forest doesn’t hurry that process. It allows each season to be what it is. It simply makes room for what comes next. I wish we humans were better at that.
We spend so much of our lives trying to prevent loss, avoid pain, and hold tightly to the people and moments we love, the ones we think we need. We treat death as though it’s some terrible interruption of life rather than a fundamental part of it.
Of course, understanding that intellectually is one thing. Living it is something else entirely. It’s tough.
Because I still want to pick up the phone. I still want to tell her something wonderful that happened or ask her what she thinks I should do. And there will probably be moments for years to come when I’ll forget, just for a second, that I can’t.
My daughter and I attended her traditional Midewiwin funeral ceremony. There are parts of ceremony that aren’t mine to share, but what I can say is that it was beautiful. What stayed with me most was the way everyone came together. There was a shared understanding that grief wasn’t something any one person was expected to carry alone. People showed up, participated, supported one another, and honored a life that had touched so many others. I found something deeply comforting in that.
The woods have always taught me that no living thing exists alone. Trees share space through their roots and shade. Birds, insects, animals, fungi, and plants all depend on one another. Even a fallen tree becomes part of a larger community, offering shelter, moisture, and nourishment to countless forms of life.
The ceremony felt like that kind of belonging. And I was especially grateful that my daughter was there. She’s growing up immersed in ceremony and surrounded by teachings that connect her to her community, her ancestors, and the generations yet to come. She’s learning things that aren’t always taught in classrooms or explained in books. Things that have to be experienced to be understood.
I hope one of those lessons is that death doesn’t have to be something we hide from or pretend isn’t coming.
It’s tempting to want to keep death at a distance, separate it from everyday life. We speak about it in hushed tones, and often struggle to know what to say or do when someone is grieving.
But ceremony, gathering and experiencing collective grief, brings us together. It gives us a way to acknowledge loss, to honor the person who has passed, and to remind one another that we still belong to each other.
The forest offers a similar reminder. When we walk beneath its canopy, we are surrounded by evidence of generations that came before us. The trees standing now are growing in soil that was created by leaves, roots, and branches that have already returned to the earth.
Nothing is truly isolated from what came before. And perhaps that’s one of the most important things I hope my daughter will carry forward. Not simply the memory of saying “see you later,” but the memory of how people showed up for one another when there was a collective loss.
I’ve been thinking about my mother, too. About how much of her remains in the way I see the world, the choices I make, and the way I raise my children. And now I think about our We’eh in much the same way. She offered guidance, encouragement, laughter, and a kind of steady love that helped fill a space I thought would always be empty.
She didn’t replace my mother. Nobody could. But she reminded me that losing someone doesn’t mean we’ve lost our capacity to be loved in that way again. And now that she’s gone, I’m trying to hold on to that lesson.
Maybe that’s what healing really is. Not getting over someone or finding a way to forget the ache of their absence, but learning how to carry what they gave us into the rest of our lives.
I don’t believe the natural cycle of life makes grief any easier. And I don’t think accepting death means we have to be at peace with losing someone we love. We can understand that something is natural and still wish with everything in us that it weren’t happening. We can be grateful for the years we had and still feel cheated out of the years we won’t.
Those things can exist together, just as the forest can hold both new growth and decay, sunlight and shadow, quiet and movement.
As I watched my daughter participate in ceremony, I found myself thinking about all the people whose love and teachings have helped shape her life. Some are still here. Others have already made their journeys on.
But their influence doesn’t end simply because their lives have. It continues in the things we remember, the stories we tell, the responsibilities we take on, and the ways we care for one another.
It continues like the life of the forest continues beneath the surface– in roots, seeds, soil, and the unseen work that prepares the way for what will grow next.
I hope that someday, when my daughter experiences another loss, which is inevitable, she’ll remember this gathering. I hope she’ll know that grief is not something she has to navigate alone, and that there is strength in allowing people to surround her with love. I hope she’ll understand that being part of something larger than ourselves means we are never entirely disconnected from those who came before us.
And I hope she knows it’s all right to be sad, even when she understands that death is part of life. I think that’s where I’ve landed in my own grief, at least for now. I’m not ready to celebrate the idea that loss makes room for something new. I’m not ready to look for some greater purpose in the absence of someone I loved.
I just miss her.
But I can recognize that the love she gave us hasn’t disappeared. That the guidance I once reached for over the phone is now something I carry within me. That my daughter has been given experiences and teachings that will continue to shape her long after this moment of sadness has passed.
Maybe the woods don’t teach us how to avoid grief, or even how to overcome it. Maybe they teach us to notice what remains. The empty space where a tree once stood. The light reaching the forest floor. The young plants growing in soil enriched by what has fallen. The quiet evidence that an ending can alter a place without erasing what came before.
Maybe the woods simply remind us that loss and life have always existed together. That something can come to an end without everything it gave to the world ending with it.
I know that we will keep going, carrying her love and her teachings into whatever comes next. And someday, perhaps without even realizing it, my daughter will pass some of that love along to someone else. Not as a way of leaving grief behind, but as a way of carrying our We’eh with her. In the way she comforts someone, tells a story, keeps a teaching alive, or makes room for another person to feel held, my daughter will become part of the same long movement of love that shaped us.
That is how the generations remain connected. My mother’s love reached me, and through me it reached my daughter. Our We’eh’s love reached us, and through us it will continue beyond her life.
What the woods know about loss is that love does not end with a life. It moves through us, from one generation to the next, becoming part of who we are and what we give away. The forest does not preserve what has been lost by keeping it unchanged, it preserves it by making it part of what grows next, part of what remains.
