ABSTRACT
Trees are a dominating image of family discourse; from the family trees, we make in primary school to the proliferation of proverbial branches as the family continues to grow. Trees are not eternal, though, and can be plagued with any number of environmental or medical illnesses. Borrowing from the family tree metaphor, then, what happens when the very foundation of our arboreal genealogy—the roots—are taken away? The author utilizes autoethnographic narrative and poetic inquiry to make sense of the fundamental and violent shifts in the family dynamic that happened after the deaths of my paternal grandparents, mere months apart. By tracing my own lived experiences with/in the paternal side of my own family tree, I look to the past to contextualize the present moment of loss while navigating a path forward that seems tenuous, at best.
