Field Guide to
What Really Matters:
Suffering

When I was a child growing up in Wyoming we spent part of every summer in Yellowstone National Park--camping, fishing, and hiking on trails through forests, meadows, and hot springs. It was my second home. But in the summer of 1988 a massive fire erupted in the park and ultimately destroyed nearly 800,000 acres of forest. I grieved deeply to watch the inferno as my childhood memories burned to the ground.

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I didn't know that within a few months my father would also be gone after taking his own life. I didn’t know that the Yellowstone fire would become part of a much more devastating grief journey that would change every aspect of my life.

However, after years of wrestling with the pain of loss, I learned something interesting about the Yellowstone fire that helped me with my grief. I found out that many of the trees that burned were Lodgepole pines, which produce certain cones that keep their seeds tightly protected under scales glued shut by thick resin. Only the heat of a forest fire is enough to melt the resin bond and free the seeds held inside. 

The fire is necessary for the seeds to release and begin new growth.

I began to see that my father's choice to end his life brought the fire that would reduce me to ash … but would eventually release something new in me. That was a powerful realization. I could face the devastation of loss and feel the suffering of it … but also hold the hope that the seeds I needed for the future would one day grow. 

Several decades later photographs of Yellowstone reveal the new growth that has occurred since the fire. Within 5 years grasses and wildflowers covered the ground and tiny pine sprouts were visible everywhere. Over the next two decades young Lodgepoles shot up everywhere creating new stands of trees. Now the burn scars are no longer visible and healthy young trees span hundreds of miles. 

In my own life I went on to work in hospice, write books, and start podcasts as new seeds sprouted through my grief. Once when I told this story of the fire during a workshop a woman shared that she had also been devastated by the Yellowstone fire so many years ago and had written a book of poems about it, which she inexplicably had brought with her that day. I marveled at the synchronicity--so many years later connecting with someone else who had also carried the grief of the fire along with a seed that became new growth.  

Suffering is universal—it is a necessary part of being human. And it is … truly … one of the reasons why we are here.