The Tulip Tree on the Hill

How Loss Transforms the Soil of Our Lives

Returning to the Farm

In December, we went back to the farm where I grew up to spread some of my dad’s ashes.

I hadn’t been back since he sold the house five years earlier.

The land felt both familiar and changed. Some areas had grown over with time, while other parts had been cleared or reshaped by the family who lives there now. The overall feeling of the place was still the same as when I’d last been there, but the sense of belonging had shifted. I was no longer returning home — I was visiting.

As we walked through the fields, something caught my attention.

My favorite tree was dead.

It was still standing there, but vines had taken over and its branches had broken back to short stumps. The life that once filled it was simply no longer there.

Recognizing What Had Ended

That tree had been part of the landscape of my childhood. It was a large tulip tree sitting on the hill below the corn fields and had always been one of my favorites. I loved its unique leaves, the flowers it produced in the spring, and its towering size. It was the kind of tree I often sat beneath to think and contemplate life.

Seeing it like that made something clear in a way words hadn’t before: the life that once existed there had come to an end.

The farm as it once was.
The version of my father who lived there then.
The version of me who once sat beneath that tree.

I began to understand that grief isn’t just about losing a person. Sometimes it’s about recognizing that an entire chapter of life has ended.

What Returns to the Soil

On his birthday earlier this month, I found myself thinking back to that moment, and something about it settled in more clearly.

Dead trees don’t really disappear. Over time they break down and return to the soil, feeding the land around them. The nutrients from what once lived become part of the foundation for what grows next.

In that way, the tree wasn’t really gone. It had simply changed form, becoming part of the ground that would nourish whatever came after it.

And that realization carried another meaning for me.

The version of me who lived on that farm is gone too. But the soil that version of me created — the lessons, the experiences, the resilience — is exactly what allowed the next version of me to grow.

The person I am now didn’t appear out of nowhere. She grew from that soil.

And in many ways, the work I feel called to build now is growing from those same roots as well.

Roots That Continue

Much of what I understand about resilience came from watching my dad. I saw it in the long hours he worked and in the way he kept moving forward through challenges that would have stopped most people. From him I learned persistence, responsibility, and what it means to keep showing up even when life is heavy.

Those lessons took root in me. The drive I feel to build Healers Unite didn’t come from nowhere — it grew from those roots.

Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t just the tree that had moved on. The land itself had moved on as well.

A new family lives there now, and young kids run through those same fields where we once did. New memories are being written across the same soil that once held ours.

Life continues like that, with one chapter quietly feeding the next.

We spread my dad’s ashes there that day, returning part of him to the land that shaped us.

Energy doesn’t disappear. It transforms.

And in many ways, the work I’m building now is simply another form of that same continuation — something new growing from the soil of everything that came before.

Growth always follows death, even if it takes time before we can see what is beginning to take shape.

Seasons of the Same Cycle

The past few months were shaped by grief as I processed my father’s life and what it meant to lose him. Loss changes the landscape of your life for a while. It slows everything down and forces you to sit with what was, what is, and what might come next.

But seasons eventually shift.

Lately, I can feel that shift beginning to happen. The season of grief and processing is slowly giving way to something else — the quiet beginning of regrowth.

Step by step, I’m starting to bring the purpose I feel called to into reality. Healers Unite is part of that next season, and I find myself feeling excited to see what might begin to bloom from the soil I’ve cultivated.

At the same time, I know this will not be the last winter I experience. Life moves in cycles, and there will be other losses, other endings, and other moments when something that once defined a chapter of life is no longer there.

The lesson, I think, is not to avoid those seasons but to honor them. Grief, change, and endings are part of the same cycle that eventually makes new growth possible — much like the fallen tree that slowly nourishes the soil for what grows next.

Those cycles continue.

And so do we.

One season closes, another begins, and life keeps moving forward.