Honoring Joe

According to many different grief experts, there are five stages of grief…which are not in any order or in any way linear. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are those typical 5 emotions. However, many therapists and grief experts have added a 6th stage of grief: finding meaning. Grief will always be something you carry with you. Some people say it is like carrying a rock in your pocket. Others say it is like always holding hands with a ghost. Although you can’t move on from grief, you learn to live with it, and that takes time. Rich and I love our kids so much. It is hard to know what to do with that love for a kid that is no longer here to absorb it. Rich and I are always looking for ways to honor Joe in a way that Joe would be proud….and maybe even get a kick out of what his parents are doing out of a feeling of love for him.

One of the things that Rich and I have decided to do to honor Joe is to become volunteer firemen. We originally thought just Rich would do this, but they accepted me as well and with the biggest portion of their calls being medical, it just seemed right that I try to help out as well. The volunteer fire department is just shy of a mile from our house. We went to their annual open house when we were here in June. We told them when we got settled we wanted to join. I think they thought they would never see us again. Once we were done with our travels for the summer, we started attending the Thursday night trainings. Once you have come to three trainings, you can be put on probationary status. Last night was our third night and therefore we were fitted for bunker gear and given pagers and radios as well as getting us set up on their 911 app. Here are pictures of us trying on our gear. We went on our first call this morning…less than 12 hours later.

And here is my favorite sign….

When we got home this morning after that call, we had Joe on our minds. My high school friends from Hayfield High School in Alexandria, VA, had sent us a tree to plant in our yard in Omaha in honor of Joe. Well, that tree is in Omaha and we are here. We had been talking for months about getting a tree to plant in honor of Joe here at our house in Montana. We have a LOT of trees in our yard and most of them are 50 foot pine trees. We wanted something different. We had decided on a quaking aspen tree. They are so vibrant and well-known in Colorado, where Joe loved and eventually died. We went to a nearby nursery today and walked around with Jose, the owner (how fitting as Joe went by Jose in the first grade because it was shorter to write than Joseph…lol). We decided on a tree with a 3.5 inch diameter trunk. It was a larger tree but was on sale because there was a large scar on the trunk, which the tree received when it was a sapling. It is about 20 feet tall….so pretty well established. Jose said with the root ball it weighed anywhere from 1100 to 1400 pounds. It was loaded by forklift into our truck. The hole had to be dug 5 feet across and nearly 3 feet deep. Rich said it was the easier hole he ever dug. (thank you Joe) It was a several hour event….Rich digging and me hauling off the wagonloads of dirt to fill in the sides of our newly poured driveway, about 35 yards away. Rich and a muscled the tree from the front of Rich’s long bed truck to the end. We put his truck’s front wheels up on car ramps to tilt the bed in our favor. We had a tarp under the tree as well thinking we could slide it. Yeah…over half a ton. Right. Slide it. We hooked up a tow strap to the riding lawn mower and wrapped it around the root ball of the tree. The cub had its back tires spinning. Plan C….we had some ramps reinforced with 2×8 boards. We weren’t sure they would hold the weight. Our final plan (D) was to put a pile of dirt underneath the tailgate of the truck and then top that off with two bags of compost and just literally roll that tree off the end of the tailgate and let it fall into the pile of compost and dirt that would be going into the hole with it. We had a neighbor driving by and he backed up and helped Rich push off the tree onto the ground and then roll it to its new home in the ground. It was a labor of love, for sure. It was drizzling most of the day so we were both pretty muddy at the end of the day. We, of course, forgot to cut the binding that was around the top of the tree. It is much harder to do that once it is standing upright and 20 feet tall. Yes, if you would have recorded this whole fiasco and run it at double speed or faster, it would have been hysterical. In fact, it reminded me of the crazy things Joe and Zac used to do together to try and get things done. Anyhow….tree is in the ground…we are both sore and tired….but so pleased with the results.