Sometimes when it seems you’re losing much—your trust in the surgeon to whom you submitted, allowing him to slit your throat and reorder your spine; your hope, five months out of surgery, that the procedure will improve your life, that you will ever again move freely, have anything resembling your pre-surgical life—you remember the autumnal trees, their foliage, and what such splendor teaches about loss. When you’re in a knot and on fire about all that was promised, about all that has gone, you look outside to try to see. To see how the trees teach that, so often, you only lose that which you don’t need. If the crimson and saffron leaves lustered skyward into winter they, of course, would damage the maples and oaks and other deciduous trees, eventually killing them come spring. So when grief is metastasizing, when it seems you’re losing all you do in fact need, that you cannot fathom going on without, it comforts you in some small way, this foliage and this falling, the beautiful science of it (that is so easy to forget). And so you’re thankful, thankful for the way in which the oaks and their golden giving bespeak a cornucopia or two that you just don’t discern yet. The trees, in letting go and in losing, assure you that there is a precise and vital system at work. A principle that you may not always see completely nor understand at all, but that dependably, eventually yields benediction.