Heartwood - A Thought Worth Sitting With

The story we tell ourselves is that life and death are opposites. That makes sense to me. Our minds like firm categories: black and white. Life on one side, death on the other, a crisp line separating the two. Very civilized.

A tree complicates our story.

The oak in your yard is alive, of course. But not simply so. Its leaves are busy. Its roots are reaching. Sapwood is carrying water upward. Phloem moves the sugars produced by photosynthesis. Just under the bark, the cambium—that narrow, industrious ribbon of growing cells—is adding new wood. There’s a lot going on near the surface.

At the core of the tree, however, is something older. Heartwood is made of wood whose cells have finished their living, water-carrying work. It no longer has the same function as the younger sapwood surrounding it, but the tree does not simply throw it away. The heartwood remains, adding strength and structure to the trunk.

A tree, in other words, carries its history within its life. That’s a thing to think about while walking in Oakwood Cemetery, and almost too perfectly suited to a cemetery arboretum. The oak is not trying to send us a message. Trees don’t work that way. But once you know about heartwood, the parallel is hard to ignore.

The people buried at Oakwood helped build the community still living around it. Some of them did that work in public view. Their names are in business histories, church records, school buildings, newspapers, courtrooms, and accounts of military and civic service.

Others shaped Waco in ways preserved mostly by the people who knew them. They raised families, kept promises and business appointments, taught and learned, helped neighbors in need, made homes and broke hearts. They started over when starting over was the only choice. Some of that work made the newspaper. Most of it did not. But it mattered enormously. Its influence lives on in families, institutions, neighborhoods, customs, expectations, and all the small ways one generation lays the foundation for the next.

The people buried at Oakwood did not simply live in Waco. They helped raise it. They are, in that sense, the city’s heartwood.

New wood forms around what came before, and a city develops in much the same way. We inherit homes and businesses, institutions and traditions, accomplishments and mistakes and unfinished work. Some of that history deserves preservation. Some of it requires correction, repair, or honest reconsideration. Even what we change remains part of the structure we inherited.

Oakwood offers us a place to see that structure. Its stones preserve names. Its records preserve places and dates. Family stories fill in details that neither granite nor a ledger can contain.

Year after year, an oak adds another layer. Leaves bud and fall. Branches grow toward better light. Drought, disease, wind, and lightning alter its shape, while new rings form around the older wood at its center.

Heartwood no longer carries water. It carries weight.

Maybe that’s why it feels so fitting at Oakwood. It says nothing and lectures no one. It simply remains inside the living tree, helping give the trunk its strength.

At Oakwood, we do not leave our past behind. We carry it with us.