At the end of the music video for Swimmer, an older woman (played by my mother) receives a magic flower and awakens from a spell that has kept her hunched and immobile, locked away in a tower. As her hand closes around the gold petals, she smiles, bursts into a glowing flower herself, and is gone—freed at last. This was a bit of an homage to King Theoden in The Lord of the Rings (a treasured trilogy in my family) and that scene when Gandalf frees him from Saruman’s hold, but it was also a kind of prayer for my Aunt Judy, who was then held captive under the spell of Alzheimer’s. If only I could find the magic cure—I would circle the world, Puck-like, in search of whatever bewitched artifact could animate her again. I wished her release, I wished her peace, and I imagined that when that day came when she was set free from her body, her bright mind and soul would blossom and fly.
I wasn’t there in the moment when it happened last week, on the eve of the Autumn Equinox, but I’m told it went something like that. It was earthy, organic, a transformation. She left like a leaf detaching from the branch. She left with the susurration of departing wings. She is an ancestor now, my cousin Diana told me. They carry us as much as we carry them.
It was a decade ago that the darkness of disease began to seep into her. It came like a frigate of bats, blacking out the sun. It came on wings and found a way into the cave of her and stayed. But still, there was a quiver of light in there, a resonant string inside her that seemed to vibrate whenever she heard music.
“I wanted to sing for you, so I’m gonna sing for you.
I hope you’re listening to me wherever you are.”
At the sound of a song, those creased, glassy eyelids would peel back, and out would beam a startling green. I was always astounded by that pond of pure color, the way something seemed to stir beneath the surface.
I called her the Swimmer because that’s the image I hold of her: Jude taking the lake like a scythe, her pale arms cutting the waves, white as a loon’s underwing. We remember and celebrate her as she was in the summer of her life, before the long decline. Judy Sabot, born Plunkett, beloved mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt—the prism of her selves a rainbowed light that filled our lives. I will remember the honeycomb rasp of her voice before she stopped speaking. The bready warmth of her embrace before she stopped moving. The way she knew and loved me before she stopped recognizing anyone at all.
She was silly and tender, all outstretched arms. She was a tree of a woman, graceful and grand. A shelter and a source of strength, with hair as red as a rowan. In British folklore, the rowan tree was thought to be a protector against dark magic, perhaps owing to the pentagram-like shape of the starry red berries. It was called the Tree of Life in Celtic mythology and was also known as the Traveller’s Tree, a landmark to help those who were lost. Jude was all of these things: protector, landmark, alive.
Ecologist Suzanne Simard tells us that in the forest, trees are linked together by a main hub, also known as a Mother Tree. These Mother Trees are crucial keystones for shelter and nutrients, helping their ecosystem to thrive. And because they’ve been around for so long, they hold the memory of the land—past rainfalls and droughts, the good times and the bad, etched there in the ripple of rings. They are our matriarchs and our archivists. I imagine Jude this way, the way she gathered us to her and bound us to each other. All those lost years, the memory hidden in her heartwood.
“Dying is a process,” Simard said in an interview, “and it takes a long, long time. It can take decades for a tree to die.” But the Mother Trees continue to send out nutrients to their offspring and community even in this process of decay. When they’re finally gone, the stored carbon in their cells floods the bodies of the trees nearby, so that the forest continues to grow from the love of the mother. They carry us, we carry them. The flow never stops.
So maybe it wasn’t a flower after all. Maybe it was a tree that my aunt became in that moment of release—a magical rowan with its crimson berries, her sinews twisting into coils of cellulose, her veins made into rivers of phloem. And then she rose up from her roots, pulled the red leaf of her lips into a smile, and was gone.
“Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light”
— Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods