ArcaMax

I waited to return her call until I had all the information I could get. Unfortunately, the ultimate why for the destruction of the trees was beyond my reach.

She left a message in a resigned panic. She couldn't stop those cutting down the old mesquite trees, even though she tried to reach out to the postmaster at two of the post offices in town. The workers couldn't tell her much and wouldn't stop. She had hoped the city might, which is how she ended up in my voicemail. I listened to her message, and as I scrolled online, another local thread lamented the cutting down of the old trees as well. I sent off emails to the city staff. Was this us?

Generations of residents will refer to both an old and a new location in the same breath. It's the old post office, but not the old, OLD post office, but maybe still on the city right of way? The comments feel similar: it's a shame, the cutting of the trees; it must be corruption; it must be lack of care; it must be the liberal city council and their kickbacks.

It wasn't on city property, just a decision made at a table the public wasn't invited to -- and sometimes that's how it goes, especially if it's federal property or private property.

She picked up my call at a grocery store, with what sounded like an older mother piping in. I let her talk and conveyed my understanding in encouraging murmurs. I told her I understood, that after 10 years at an apartment complex, I sat inside and cried when the new owner of the complex cut down the magnificent old tree outside one of our windows. Nothing to be done except snag a bit of the wood as a memory.

What I knew for sure at that moment was this: Our grief is not a competition. It never has been. The pain that comes with losing what you love -- whether it's old trees or a familiar rhythm of life -- isn't made smaller by someone else's sorrow. Nor is it made larger.

And yet, we sometimes get caught in a silent measuring game. It is as if being born into a different time period hurts you with a value higher or lower, more or less worthy.

I've heard younger people dismissed as too soft, too online, too anxious. And I've heard older folks brushed off as out of touch, stuck in the past, slow to adapt. Both sides quietly (or not so quietly) guarding their wounds. But maybe we're not as different as we think. Maybe it's just that the losses hit us in different places.

The 70-year-old mourning the trees? She had watched them her whole life, which is why she told me her age. Her life had a history with them in it.

And me? I'm mourning how fast everything moves now, how hard it is to make things stick, how little room there is for rootedness. We're both grieving, in our way, the erosion of something once solid.

When you stop trying to win the grief Olympics, you can start to see the shapes of other people's losses more clearly. You can nod at the 20-year-old overwhelmed by a world in ecological and political freefall and say, "Yeah, that is a lot." You can sit next to the elder who's watching their lifelong city change beyond recognition and say, "I get it."

Maybe that's where healing starts. Not in agreeing on whose pain is sharper but in honoring the fact that we're all trying to grow in difficult soil. We don't need to match losses like trading cards. We just need to sit under the same trees -- when we're lucky enough to still have them -- and listen.

========

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate Inc.