The Wedding Tree

After a difficult divorce, Elizabeth Leon and her children sought a way to find closure and begin a new phase of their lives.

In times of mourning, rituals are necessary

Rituals are an important part of mourning. Our Catholic faith provides an abundance of ritual after the death of a loved one, but what about the death of a marriage?  

The structure and rituals of mourning a loved one bring comfort.  It is a mercy to have something to DO with your grief. There is a gravesite that declares this person lived and mattered. 

Divorce is lonely. Only my children and I endured the speech my ex-husband gave to explain the destruction of our family. I suffered alone the agony of shredding my motherhood into custody and visitation. I filed for divorce and received the final papers saying my marriage was over, alone. No ritual, no tradition. No “divorce celebration.”  I was in mourning. The family I had known and loved was dead.  

Creating our own ritual in a time of grief and change

My children and I did find one ritual, however, that was meaningful to me and even fun for them. We chopped down and burned the Wedding Tree, a scraggly New Jersey pine with a unique story.  

Prior to my first wedding, my mother created six pinecone wreaths to decorate the church for the ceremony. During her drives through the Pine Barrens to the Jersey Shore, she gathered pinecones from the abundant roadside supply. After the wedding, my mother-in-law took a wreath back to her Chicago home and hung it over the fireplace. The heat from the fireplace caused the pinecones to swell and drop seeds onto the mantel. My in-laws planted those seeds, and over time, they tended the seeds and sprouts — but only one grew into a vigorous sapling.   

When our family moved to what we hoped would be our forever home, my in-laws arrived for a visit with the baby tree in tow.  They surprised us with a unique gift, born from the joy of our wedding, to live and grow with our family. We quickly dubbed it The Wedding Tree and planted it in the corner of our backyard in our suburban Virginia home.   

Over the next ten years, the Wedding Tree grew from a scrappy sapling to a tall pine with pinecones of its own. Each Christmas, we draped its boughs with old-fashioned Christmas lights and gathered the pinecones in a basket. Our growth as a family kept pace with the Wedding Tree.   

Until it didn’t. 

There are many awful parts about the end of my marriage, but one was that beautiful, stupid tree. It wasn’t stupid, but when your happily-ever-afters don’t happen, it’s easy to feel foolish for all your hopes and dreams. 

After my ex-husband left, the Wedding Tree continued to grow when our family did not. I couldn’t bring myself to decorate it with lights. I watched it from the window seat in my bedroom when I was awake at night, each of us making a solitary vigil.   

When my husband Ralph and I got engaged, it was time to say goodbye to the Wedding Tree.  Shortly before the wedding, my children and I trooped into the backyard, saw in hand. We stood solemnly and told the story: how a pinecone the Jersey shore had celebrated a beautiful wedding in South Jersey before flying to Illinois and dropping a seed that grew to a sapling and came to live in Virginia.  I didn’t tell the rest — about a heart broken in two, a lost husband, the complexity of mourning a marriage and falling in love at the same time. But it felt good to have something to do. Something symbolic that said: this life that I loved is over. And there will be a new life that I will love. 

My 10-year-old son got to work cutting down the tree. I was happy to be the only one wiping tears from my eyes. They had been sad long enough. We each took a turn at the saw and yelled “Timber!” when the tree finally fell. We stuffed it into our minivan and drove it to our friends' house where the annual Easter bonfire would take place in a few weeks. 

Once the fire was roaring Easter night, my children and I said good-bye to the Wedding Tree. I said good-bye to a man I had loved and to the future I thought we would have. The kids dragged the dried-out pine to the edge of the fire, and we hurled it into the flames. Pine trees burn spectacularly, and the fire crackled and blazed, a huge flame shooting into the sky. The air was pungent with the Christmas scent of pine. 

A poignant ritual

It was a poignant ritual for the end of my marriage. The branches snapped and gleamed as they were consumed. I felt this fire in my body, the metaphorical burning of everything I had dreamed of when that first pinecone hung in the church.  Everything I thought my life would be. The love I had carried for a man I no longer knew. I watched them burn away while I basked in the warmth radiating from the fire, staying until the last embers glowed softly and the tree was gone. 

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Copyright 2024 Elizabeth Leon
Images: (top) Canva; all others copyright 2024 Elizabeth Leon, all rights reserved.